Customer Journey Mapping Made Easy

I’m getting ready to speak at a conference next month on customer journey mapping.

Journey mapping is a topic I find myself spending a lot of time talking about. The biggest challenge with the topic is how it’s pretty much a wild west. While most customer experience folks know what I mean when I say “customer journey mapping,” it turns out that their internal definition is one of two very different things.

Two Approaches

1. A research-based map of how customers experience your journey, including the touch points and moments of truth. This is how Forrester uses the phrase. I wrote a popular post on the topic here. I do a lot of research-based customer journey maps for my clients.
2. An internal workshop to document your customer journey, also called a customer ecosystem map. This is how Oracle uses the term. While some involve customers in these workshops, in practice they’re often limited to employees. A number of my clients who do customer journey mapping use this method.

This was also the result when I hosted the CXPA journey mapping round table in December – while many companies do customer journey mapping, they typically do one or the other.

So, which one is correct? Of course, they both are. And I’ve found that combining the two, along with an initial hypothesis mapping workshop, is the key to really putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

That’s what I’ll be discussing at the conference next month.