Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Map Solutions

A customer journey map is an incredibly useful tool that allows you to better understand the perspective of your customer throughout each stage of their experience with your business. They show a customer’s desires, frustration, concerns, and more. By creating and analyzing a customer journey map, you can better grasp what it’s like to be your customer and how that experience can be improved. This can lead to dramatic results that directly impact ROI including increased loyalty. See what happens when you put the customer at the core of your business. Learn more below.

Contribute to Journey Mapping Body of Knowledge

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Last year, Heart of the Customer and the CXPA partnered to discover the state of the art in journey mapping in our first “Journey Mapping Best Practices” survey. We’re now launching our second annual survey.

Whether you’re a practitioner, vendor or thought leader, we’d love to hear your experience in journey mapping. Please take our survey at:

Journey Mapping Results Survey

You can review the findings from last year – but please take the survey first!

Driving Change Through Journey Mapping

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Too much journey mapping is done in an intuitive manner. Which is why half of all journey maps fail to drive action. We surveyed over 100 practitioners and vendors to learn the best practices, and published them in this white paper. You can see a summary in the attached infographic. Look for this year’s journey mapping survey to go out next month!

Bringing the Voice of the Customer into CX Design – an Interview with Beth Berg

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I met Beth Berg—a customer experience researcher—at a journey mapping round table at this year’s CXPA Insight Exchange, and really enjoyed her approach. So, I invited her to get together and discuss her approach, and she agreed.

First, tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

My area of expertise is bringing the voice of the customer into customer experience design efforts. As part of the CX team within a company, I provide research support to our CX efforts. I work primarily via qualitative research, providing data the company can use, but I also work to bring in research conducted by other parts of the company that’s useful to our CX work, such as marketing research, analytics, and competitive intelligence.

It’s great that your company has a dedicated CX team—it sounds like they’re committed to using CX within the company. Where are you and your team brought into the CX process?

I’m fortunate to work for a company that has support for CX at the executive level. CX absolutely has a seat at the table through strategy development. We involve VPs and Senior VPs from across the company in CX design through workshops—all facilitated by a CX Architect and informed by research. Read more

Select the right type of map to drive the right kind of change

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Before you can start a successful journey mapping initiative, it’s critical to think through the specific journey you want to map. Participants in our Best Practices in Journey Mapping survey referred to this as “Select the right journey to map.”

This takes deliberate thought. If you go too broad, you may not have enough detail to move the needed parts. If you go too narrow, the impact may be too small.

Types of Maps

There are three types of maps to consider:

  1. An end-to-end Experience Map
  1. A specific Journey Map
  1. A limited Touch Point Map

Let’s talk about each of these in turn, then discuss how to decide.  Read more

The Best Way to Learn from Your Customers? Sit Down and Shut Up!

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We all like to talk. It’s part of being human. We like to share ideas and concepts. It’s natural.

It’s also a terrible way to learn from your customers.

This may seem obvious. But then why do so many do this wrong?

I was reminded of this in a journey mapping round table I recently led. About 15 to 20 practitioners and vendors participated, going over journey mapping practices, and sharing how we all went about the process. Unfortunately, not all methodologies are created equally.

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You can’t have a customer journey map without a customer

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At a CXPA event my good friend Lisa told me about a conversation she recently had. She was talking about the need to do some journey mapping, and mentioned how a good map takes 12-16 weeks. Her conversational partners’ response was, “What do you mean? I have the software – I can have that knocked out in a half-day.”

You can probably guess Lisa’s response, and it wasn’t positive. And Lisa’s not alone. In our survey of journey mapping best practices, CX practitioners agreed that involving customers was one of the top three requirements for a successful journey map (the other two were to involve a broad cross-functional team and to select the right journey to map). Yet, so many people seem to think it’s about the map itself.

Let’s set the record straight. Yes, the map is critical. The right map is a strategic tool in the hands of a CX leader. It helps her engage stakeholders and help them understand customers’ critical moments of truth – those points in the journey with a disproportionate impact on loyalty. And we spend a lot of time making sure that our maps clearly call out the customer needs.

But as powerful as a journey map can be, it’s the mapping itself that truly matters. Getting your teams to hear the literal voice of the customer is a critical driver of customer-focused improvements. Customers’ open-ended feedback on the journey offers a goldmine of information that can showcase where you’re building loyalty – and where you’re destroying it.

The right method of involving customers vary. I love a good digital ethnography, as reported in last week’s post. In-home (or in-office) interviews are also powerful, since they show the customer in his or her natural setting. Even a focus group can sometimes work wonders, although I’m not a huge fan of that methodology.

But the most critical component of any journey map is that it’s based on the raw voice of your customer. And that’s not going to happen in a half-day in your office.

YMCA Quirk’s Cover Story

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Journey mapping is worthless without the organizational focus to improve. This article shares how the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities used journey mapping to better retain their Millennial customers.

Customer Journey Maps: How to Guide Your Leads to Customers

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Bottom lines are important, and a good measure of how business is doing. But there’s something that might come before the bottom line, and might make more of an impact on the strength of your business: customer service.

We all know what negative customer service experiences—or poor customer journeys, as they are known—especially with the advent of social media, can do to your brand. Take a bad restaurant review, for example: Posted on a travel-specific site, an angry customer can turn off countless other customers that you might never even have known about.

So what can you do to understand and enhance the customer journey? This graphic can help.

Customer Journey Maps: How to Guide Your Leads to Customers

An experience designed for everybody helps nobody

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One unforeseen result from our journey mapping best practices survey was that a surprising number of practitioners – almost one-third – do not use segments or personas in their journey maps.

If you don’t use personas in your maps, then you probably don’t design around specific types of customers. And that’s a real risk.

Because customers are different. And if you’re not using personas to capture those differences to design your experiences, it’s likely that you’re missing some important nuances in your experience design.

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CXOs: Three Ways to Help Save Your CMO’s Job

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According to Forrester Research, 30% of CEOs indicated that they are going to fire their CMOs this year. The primary reason? Too many CMOs haven’t adjusted to the concept of the customer journey that fluidly moves across touch points.

According to Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk, “Businesses are in a ‘post-digital era’ in which customers don’t think of digital experiences as separate from physical ones. Amid political and institutional uncertainty, customers value trustworthiness and positivity from the entities with which they interact.”

Marketing hasn’t kept up with your customers. Rather than seeing digital as a separate entity, they see digital tools as just another way to interact.

As a CXO, you’re in the perfect position to help CMOs catch up, improving outcomes for both your company AND your customers. There are three primary ways you can make an impact:

  1. Help your CMO picture the overall journey, including its true promise: an improved experience. Marketing gets the customer journey concept. In fact, a large share of journey mapping initiatives originates in marketing. Unfortunately, marketing frequently concentrates on path-to-purchase and similar initiatives that focus on promotional opportunities. This leads to a belief that digital and analog touch points are simply portfolios of customer contact points.

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