Tips For Effective & Efficient Customer Journey Mapping

In a world driven by customer-centricity, understanding your customers’ experiences is vital to building relationships, fostering loyalty, and achieving overall brand development goals. Customer Journey Mapping has emerged as a dynamic tool that enables businesses to visualize and enhance these experiences – and taking a data-driven approach has proven to boost its effectiveness and impact.

However, the buzzword status of terms like “customer-centricity” and “data-driven” can make it difficult to bridge the gap between theory and action. Even brands that are fully invested in Customer Journey Mapping can find it difficult to unleash their full potential. In my previous newsletter, I wrote about journey mapping within the context of improving omni-channel brand experiences. Here, I’d like to take a step back and expand a bit on the topic of Customer Journey mapping from a more strategic perspective.

THE SITUATION:

When it comes to being a data-driven business, 72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience.

But only 30% of organizations have established their customer journey maps – and most are struggling to use them effectively.

While the majority of businesses believe in the power of analytics, they are missing out on a key strategic tool for data-driven success – Customer Journey Mapping.

(Source1: InsightSquared, 2021) (Source2: Gartner, 2022)

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Customer Journey Mapping offers a unique opportunity to delve into the minds and experiences of your customers. It allows you to holistically understand their interactions, preferences, and emotions at every touchpoint. These insights empower you and your team to tailor offerings to meet customer needs and expectations in unique and memorable ways.

But you likely already know this, and I may be preaching to the choir. So, I’ll clarify that Customer Journey Mapping in itself is not The Opportunity I’m going to focus on. While that is a notable opportunity, especially considering only 30% of businesses have established their Customer Journey Map, the last part of The Situation stands out the most. Even brands that have been prioritizing journey maps for years are still struggling to use them effectively.

Plainly put, The Opportunity I see regarding Customer Journey Mapping is simplification.

While journey maps are meant to be holistic and detailed representations of the customers’ experience, it’s possible to go too big too soon. If your journey map is overly complex out of the gate, it can be so overwhelming that real-world impact gets buried by conceptual nuances. So, if you currently have a Customer Journey Map and your wheels are spinning, taking one step back might enable two steps forward. If you don’t yet have a Customer Journey Map, allow yourself to start small and build it out over time. Either way, if your journey mapping progress is stalled, try taking a less-is-more approach. This can enable you and your team seize the opportunity of effectiveness through simplicity.

THE CHALLENGE:

The reality is that modern consumer behaviors and their journeys are complex. With the various channels, platforms, and methods of interacting with brands, a holistic Customer Journey Map covering all the different pieces can be very complicated and confusing.

I did a quick online search for “Customer Journey Map” and here’s one of the top results:

From a conceptual and tactical standpoint, this is an impressive journey map. It is a detailed and all-inclusive representation of customer interactions across all brand touchpoints. For some decision makers, their eyes light up when seeing this. But for others (me included), their eyes glaze over and their vision gets blurred. It's a lot to process and can be difficult to follow.

Within that same online search, another example looks like this:

These are two distinctly different ways to approach journey mapping, and at the end of the day there’s no right or wrong way to go about it. But that is The Challenge. A Customer Journey Map visually represents an inherently complex string of touchpoints and experiences – understanding that each individual customer may pass through differently. So, we don’t want to subjectively omit any touchpoints for the sake of our sanity, yet it’s not always wise to cover everything under the sun.

Looking back at The Situation, it makes sense that only 30% of companies follow through with the Customer Journey Mapping process. It also makes sense that most of those companies are struggling to use them effectively. But still, journey maps are undeniably valuable. For those who find an effective balance between complexity and simplicity, there’s a competitive advantage to be gained. This is why, I believe, journey mapping is worth the effort. 

THE SOLUTION:

Having established the value, opportunities, and challenges of Customer Journey Mapping, let’s get to the good stuff – taking action. This is where The Challenge of complexity meets The Opportunity of simplification with the ultimate goal of producing an effective journey map.

I know I’ve talked and written about Customer Journey Mapping in the past. Quite a bit, actually. But it’s an important topic with a lot of moving parts and broad influence. So, there is a lot to cover and discuss. Here I want to look at things from a slightly different angle than in previous articles – shifting from steps and tactics to strategy and perspective.

Thinking in terms of maximizing effectiveness through simplification, here are a few tips and suggestions for Customer Journey Mapping:

Define Clear Objectives

Before you start mapping, establish clear goals for the process. Are you aiming to improve a specific touchpoint, understand pain points, or optimize the entire journey? Defining objectives upfront will help you stay focused and ensure the resulting asset aligns with your business objectives. It will also provide guardrails to help avoid branching off in so many directions that you lose sight of the original purpose.

Use Technology Wisely

There are a variety of tools and tech stacks to help evolve your journey map. But remember, these only play a supporting role; they aren’t the star of the show. You still need an overarching strategy, clear objectives, and some informed subjectivity – which are things most tech tools cannot offer.

This is especially important considering how individualistic and personal these journey maps need to be. No two brands or their audiences are exactly alike. So, standardized journey mapping platforms can be valuable additions to the process but are not themselves a holistic solution. Furthermore, technology can offer more features than are needed. It’s tempting to get excited and click every box. But unless the feature is serving a specific purpose, it can take away more value than it adds.

Test and Iterate

Do not hesitate to implement changes based on new information. These journey maps are living-and-breathing pieces that should be evolving along with the customers themselves. Seek to regularly gather insights, assess competitive markets, test for impact, and converse with your internal teams. The strength of a customer journey map is in its relevance and real-world applications, both of which are connected to variables that continually change over time.

This reinforces the point that less is more. By having a streamlined journey with only the most relevant pieces in place, you can make structured and controlled updates without completely spinning out. The more complex a journey map is, the more disruptive changes can be. So, keeping things simple, especially in the beginning, allows more flexibility and agility.

Leverage Personal Experience

If you’re struggling to get started with journey mapping, try building out the journey you think exists today. This becomes a hypothesis to be confirmed or rejected by verifiable information. Once the hypotheses are mapped, walk through making comparisons to customer insights, performance metrics, and touchpoint lists. Whether or not you were correct in your hypotheses is much less important than the fact you got the ball rolling.

Also, while leaning on data-driven customer insights as a foundation is key, each of us are consumers. We have our own favorite brands with good and bad experiences. These can be valuable assets when developing customer experiences because they can help brainstorm and identify new opportunities. This isn’t to say we assume we know what other customers want based on our own preferences. Rather, we can incorporate our own personal experiences within the broader developmental process.

Create a Future-State Map

In addition to mapping the current state of your customer experience, put time and thought into the ideal state – or what you want the customers’ journey to be in the future. This will help strengthen internal goal alignment, establish performance benchmarks, and guide forward-thinking decisions. When you pair where you stand today with where you want to be in the future, it’s easier to start planning steps needed to get there.

MY ADVICE:

As referenced in The Opportunity, there is no need to compile everything all at once in the first iteration of your journey map. Commit to this being an ongoing process that grows and evolves over time. Looking back at images listed under The Challenge, trying to do too much too soon can be counterproductive.

The overarching goal of journey mapping is to support decision making and brand development initiatives. If the journey maps aren’t being used because they aren’t making sense to the users, then it’s as if they don’t exist at all. Instead, simplify your approach from the beginning. Think carefully about which facets are actionable and relevant to your internal audiences. Moving forward, you can expand and evolve the journey maps in ways that align with internal comfort levels and information availability. But it’s much harder to shave down a journey map that is found to be too complex.

HOW WE CAN HELP:

Sometimes, all it takes is an outsider’s perspective and a fresh set of eyes to see things clearly. Many times we partner with brands who are so close to the finish line, yet can’t quite seem to cross it. In the case of Customer Journey Mapping, we help brands strengthen and refine the work they’ve already done, which tends to shine a light on the few pieces needed to bring everything together. Whether it’s filling insights gaps, connecting dots, or polishing customer personas, we lend our 35+ years of experience to guide brands through the final stages of journey map development.

Other times, when brands are starting from scratch, knowing how to get started with journey mapping is what’s holding them back. So, we help build a data-driven strategy based on their unique goals and situation to establish development steps. From there, we provide both high-level and tactical support through each step to ensure things are done the right way the first time. Whether it’s capturing new customer insights to paint a more detailed picture or getting all the puzzle pieces organized, our focus is on effectively and efficiently building a Customer Journey Map that offers both short-term and long-term value.

Wherever you are along your journey mapping process, we have the skills and experience to support your efforts! To learn a bit more about our approach, click here for a brief overview.

YOUR TURN:

I'd love to see your comments and thoughts about Customer Journey Mapping. Do you have any tips or suggestions for people just getting started? How has journey mapping strengthened your overall customer experience efforts? Did any new thoughts or ideas pop up while you were reading?

By sharing your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions, we'll foster a collaborative community where actionable insights are the foundation and collective success is the outcome.

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