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06/30/2020
At Heart of the Customer, we’re known for creating world-class journey maps. (You could even say I’m driven by it, as you can see from my license plate!)
But sometimes, it’s not a journey that you need to map.
When a potential client contacts us to inquire about journey mapping, one of the first questions we ask is, “What are you looking to learn?” If the answer is “the customer journey,” we’re going to be asking a lot more questions.
“What is the right journey?” is the second question in our Five-Question Framework. At the extremes, you would map either the end-to-end experience or a specific sub-journey. Some CX folks refer to these, respectively, as a customer experience map or a journey map, so I’ll use those terms for this post.
At the risk of oversimplifying, you need a customer experience map when you don’t know exactly where the problem is, and a journey map when you do, but need to go deeper.
In early 2019, CustomerThink CEO Bob Thompson put together an excellent piece of research that I’m still talking about more than a year later. (I originally wrote about it here.) It homed in on what separates successful CX programs from the rest. The critical differentiator was that the best programs started with a customer experience map to understand the overall experience and biggest opportunities, then created multiple journey maps to explore those findings in more depth.
Experience maps work well when you need a broad understanding. Some use cases include:
About a third of our projects focus on an experience map. (Check out our book, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer?, to see how “ABC Software” created an experience map to build their listening strategy for a segment of banks.)
In the “AquaLabs” sample map to the right (with anonymized text), a medical device company gained an understanding of a specific segment of health care practitioners (HCPs) who were only buying from them sporadically. The company needed to learn how these HCPs worked with patients, so they could build programs appropriately.
Now look at the Meridian map pictured below it. Notice how far more real estate is dedicated to what customers do than in the Meridian map? Emotions are displayed in both, but they’re a relatively small part of the top map, unlike on Meridian’s, where they play a larger role. That goes back to AquaLabs’ goal: to understand what the HCPs do.
Journey maps work best to diagnose a specific portion of the overall experience. Some common examples:
As an example, the map just below is based on work we did with a life insurance company. They had an initiative to change their underwriting and wanted to understand how their 
customers – in this case, financial professionals – felt about the existing journey. Notice again that a fair amount of space was used to show what customers did. This isn’t true of most of our maps, but again happens to be the case here. Also, as there is little joy in underwriting, it only shows levels of friction, as opposed to the Meridian map above, which reflects both positive and negative emotions.
The Meridian map, featured in both Jim Kalbach’s Mapping Experiences book and ours, is from a journey mapping initiative conducted for Meridian Health. For that project, Meridian wanted to focus exclusively on the advanced radiology journey, from test scheduling through receiving results back from the doctor. The steps of the journey were well-known, but Meridian needed to find out how customers felt about them.
Selecting the right scope for your mapping initiative is one of the top three requirements to effectively drive change through journey mapping. There isn’t one choice that will be right for every situation. It comes down to fully understanding the current state of your experience…and the changes you need to drive to improve it.
