The Ultimate Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a strategy that organizations can use to identify a customer's needs, values, desires, and friction points across different touchpoints. 

These insights can inform a broader customer experience strategy and reveal growth opportunities. It’s important to note that successful customer journey maps are not designed from the viewpoint of company leaders or brand managers. Instead, they peer into the perspective of the customer to plot out their experiences, frustrations, and needs.

Customer journey mapping is critical to align an organization’s mission with customers’ needs, desires, and expectations.

On a more granular level, here are a few ways that customer journey maps sharpen a view of the customer’s perspective and elevate the customer experience (CX): 

Gather in-depth customer intelligence

Customer journey maps dig deeper into the customer’s experience than traditional survey approaches. As a result, they reveal the moments that are important to customers and unearth instances that impact their perception of the brand.

Pinpoint inconsistencies and friction points

Separate intentions from reality

Understand customer feelings

Pinpoint opportunities

Plans to Target

Customer lifecycle

Moment of truth

Experience capability

• Lifecycle phases/journeys
• Micro journeys
• Mindset articulation
• Touchpoints
• Pain and gain points
• Moments of Truth
• Voice of the customer
• Emotions
• Operational, channel, customer score, and performance data
• Opportunities

Wondering how to develop customer journey maps that zero in on the customer’s experience? These are the steps to building a CX-focused journey map:

Step 1: Plan

Not sure where to start? Here are a few guiding questions to carve out a plan:

• What is this map’s purpose?
• Who are the key users?
• Which customers are being targeted?
• What is already understood about these customers?
• What segments should be included?
• What time period will the map cover?
• Where will the map live? Will it be digital only, presented at a visual image in a conference room, or take another form?

Step 2: Gather Research and Data

• How did you feel when ... ?
• What’s most important to your purchase decision?
• What’s going well?
• What’s missing?
• What took too long or was harder than it should have been?
• What has been critical to your experience?
• What steps are repetitive or unnecessary?
• What would you change?

In addition to listening to customers, it’s important to gather input from key stakeholders. These figures can help identify sensitive areas or opportunities in the customer experience that deserve a deeper look.  

Step 3: Build Map and Moments of Truth

The next step is to build the map and plot critical moments. During this stage, build out the map’s wireframes and gradually fill these frames in with touch points, channels, and pain points with customer experience data to add insights to the journey. Throughout the process, it’s important to identify how customers started their journey and note any clear steps or interactions that emerge from the findings.

After customer paths and interactions are charted, search for moments of truth. These are those critical instances that define the customer’s experience, and ultimately are most impactful to a customer’s decision to purchase, engage or stay with a brand. Choose carefully. Moments of truth should be interactions that have the power to make or break the customer’s experience and bring the brand to life. 

Step 4: Identify Opportunities to Take Action

• How many people will be needed to seize this opportunity?
• What processes need to be changed?
• What technology changes are needed?

Step 5: Socialize

Once journey maps are designed, it’s time to start using them to deliver a memorable customer experience. At this stage, there are ways to pull more value out of mapping and drive more lasting results. These are a few creative tactics to wring more out of journey maps:

Tying Customer Journey Maps to Key Metrics

Customer behaviors can shift, and one of the best ways to keep up with those changes is to connect customer journey maps to metrics—for instance, gathering ongoing feedback about customers’ preferred digital channels or methods of communication. With this info in hand, the organization can adjust to and keep up with changing customer preferences. 

Act Out Role-Play Scenarios

One way to help employees crawl into the skin of customers is to act out roles. For instance, organizations can list out common challenges and role-play as customers and service providers. This helps bring customers to life, and it can jumpstart problem-solving. 

Create Visual Graphics 

Another way to amplify journey maps’ messages is to distill takeaways into visual graphics. This breaks down the customer’s full journey in an easily digestible way during onboarding. It’s also a useful way to pass messages on quickly to multilingual global staff members.

The best journey maps aren’t stagnant. They’re living documents that shift alongside customers’ needs and organizations’ goals. That’s why journey analytics is so important. Measuring journey figures can identify what’s working, how customer experiences are changing, and new opportunities to propel growth. 

Customer Understanding

Cross-Channel Support

Common Goals and a CX Vision

Technology

Data Analytics

Stakeholder Management 

Elevate a Brand’s CX Capabilities