Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience

Before it became a business five years ago, Heart of the Customer was a blog I started when I was leading CX at a Fortune 100 company. Along the way I learned about journey mapping, and created the post Customer Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements to reflect the limitations I saw at the time. That post has since had over 108,000 views, including over 4,000 in the last year. When I started the business, that post drove us to number 1 in any Google ranking on the topic – journey map, customer journey map – even “journey mapping software,” we didn’t even offer software!

Since then, journey mapping has become even more popular, as you can see from the chart above.

Journey mapping is now the go-to customer experience tool, and has been discussed in Forbes, the Harvard Business Journal, and countless other journals.

The graphic nature of journey mapping partly explains the appeal. Science tells us that visual journeys maps are easier to remember. Rather than looking at yet another PowerPoint, we have an immersive image that helps employees learn about customers’ moments of truth.

That’s the good news – the power of journey mapping has driven it to become indispensable. Tomorrow we’ll talk about one of the reasons why 65% of journey maps fail to drive change.

————-

This is the first of five posts of reflections after five years of journey mapping. All five will be:

1. Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience.
2. We still have challenges navigating trade-offs when deciding what to map.
3. Too many see journey mapping as a workshop.
4. Journey mapping tools still don’t address the most critical challenges.
5. Journey mapping is still happening in silos.

These all reflect, to varying degrees, the five journey mapping questions that you should consider before embarking on a project:

1. What is the business problem or opportunity?
2. What is the right journey to map?
3. Who is the right customer to map?
4. What is the right approach to bring the voice of your customer to life?
5. Who should be on your journey mapping team?

Please, join in the discussion by leaving your comments on our blog, or on LinkedIn.