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Journey mapping is still happening in silos.

Jim Tincher Jim Tincher 11/16/2018

This is ironic. Journey mapping is a fantastic tool to break down silos by creating a shared view of the customer experience.

Except when it isn’t. All too often, companies focus on small teams to move quickly. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” they argue. “Aligning all those teams will take time, and we need to be done in 6/8/12/16 weeks, and we don’t have time to educate HR, IT, Legal, or other groups about what we’re doing. We’ll catch them up afterward.”

So they get their small strike team, talk to customers, gain critical insights and develop action items. Then they get bogged down when Legal tells them they can’t do it that way, or IT says they have to wait until a release that isn’t scheduled for another 18 months. They want to create employee training, but because HR doesn’t see this as a priority, it doesn’t get taught.

What Have We Discovered?

In our research on journey mapping practices, we discovered that silos were rampant. What’s ironic is that participants rated “involving a large, cross-functional team” as the most important item for success. Yet, just over half involved sales in their project, and less than half included market research.

That second one I found very interesting. While journey mapping isn’t market research, there are certainly shared disciplines – for example recruiting customers and creating discussion guides – where the research group could be helpful. What was especially surprising was that 86% of vendors included market research teams, more than any other department; at the same time, only 46% of CX practitioners included them. Only IT and HR were involved less often than market research.

perry-grone-732606-unsplash.jpgThe exclusion of IT was also a surprise when every journey mapping initiative we’ve led has had technology implications. Furthermore, poor HR is only invited by CX practitioners 7% of the time. How do you drive culture change if you don’t involve HR?

Even if you do everything else right – involve customers, make a deliberate decision on your journey, get key leadership on board – your success will be severely hampered if you don’t involve a broad, cross-functional team in your efforts. Every CX program is starved for resources. Why not involve these groups in your efforts to create customer-focused change through journey mapping?

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This is the fifth and final post of reflections after five years of journey mapping. All five are:

  1. Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience.
  2. We still have challenges navigating the trade-offs in what we 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.

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