Customers are the most important part of any business; customers are the very purpose of business. Keeping your customers happy should be at the top of your list of priorities. If your organization is among those that have created customer experience maps, kudos to you and your team! If not, and this is an itch you want to scratch.

The most common method for improving the customer experience is to map the journey to identify the potential breaking points – those points where prospects or customers ride off into the sunset – in your existing processes, enabling you to prioritize process improvements. The more you understand your customer’s journey, the better you create the expected and exceptional customer experience.

Before we offer advice for mapping the customer experience, it might be useful to make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we mean by customer experience. At VisionEdge Marketing, when we refer to customer experience, we mean the points of interaction between the customer and your organization. These touch points include, but are not limited to, interactions associated with pricing, purchasing, servicing, payment/billing, support, and delivery of your organization’s offerings (goods and/or services).

Understand Perception vs. Expectation

How customers evaluate their experience is based on their perception of the actual performance of the organization at that point of interaction compared to the customer’s expectation. James Allen from the Harvard Business School revealed that while 80% of businesses state that they offer a great customer experience, only about 8% of customers feel similarly about their experience. Understanding this perception versus the expectation, and the gaps across all experiences, enables you to create customer experience performance targets and key performance indicators.

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The Purpose of Creating a Customer Experience Journey Map

Before we launch into how to create and use a customer journey map, let’s get on the same page

Map Your Customer’s Experience Journey to Identify and Prioritize Touch Points to Improve

page as to what constitutes a best-in-class customer journey map. In 2010, Adam Richardson, author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage, crafted this definition, a customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. He highlighted that “the more touch points you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes.” The purpose of a customer journey map is to illustrate the path your customers take from THEIR perspective for whatever aspect of the process you need to map.

The foundation of any journey map is capturing your customer’s steps and the touch points, such as analyst reports, peer reviews/testimonials, demonstrations, product information, and channels, such as phone, in-person, online, etc., that they prefer in each part of the journey.

Customer experience or journey mapping is a vehicle for capturing the perceptions versus the expectations across all points of interaction, ideally for each customer segment and/or persona. The mapping process should enable you to develop processes and skills designed to deliver an experience that sets your organization apart in the eyes of your customers, hopefully resulting in customer loyalty and becoming advocates for your goods/services.

Many organizations often mistake creating a process map with creating a customer experience map. While similar, their focus is quite different. A process map describes your company’s internal processes, functions, and activities and generally uses the company’s internal language and jargon. A customer experience map describes the customer experience in, and only in, the customer’s language. What makes customer experience mapping challenging is the fact that the customer experience is typically quite complex, because it cuts across divisions, departments, and functions and typically is not linear.

Apply Seven Best Practices For Customer Experience Journey Mapping

Define the experience journey stage. Mapping the entire end-to-end journey can be a very daunting undertaking. It helps to have focus. Therefore, you need to define what part of the customer experience journey you are going to map and what market community will be the focus of the journey. For example, are you trying to understand the customer journey for large established global manufacturers, or a particular group of emerging niche manufacturers? If you’re not sure what stage deserves your attention, use existing data, such as customer satisfaction data that reveals potential breaking points, voice of customer data about buying preferences, sales data such as win/loss analysis, marketing data related to what did or didn’t produce action, and so on to identify the most important sub-journeys or stage within the overall journey. Many journey stages fall into one of these four sub journeys: Pre-sales/Demand Gen; Sales/The Journey of the Deal; Consumption/ The Journey of Usage; and Community/The Post-Sales Experience. Start with the universal touch points that can be applied across all your customers (you can create more specific experience maps as time goes on).
Choose the persona(s). Different personas may approach a sub-journey differently. They may have different motivations and may react differently to situations. Visionary Victoria may be far more flexible and experimental in a beta test situation than Risk Averse Randy. The type of content and touch points, their order, and frequency may vary significantly even though both Victoria and Randy are CIOs at large global companies. Each persona should reflect a type of prospect or customer you can easily recognize. If you haven’t developed personas, take this step first. Learn more about personas, their value, and how they differ from roles and profiles.
Create your Map. Identify the path for the experience stage you’ve selected. Do your best to take the walk from your customer’s vantage point. For each step in the journey, capture the following:
- What they do (behavior).
- What motivations are they experiencing, and what thoughts are they having at that stage?
- What questions, issues, or challenges are they likely to experience at that stage that might deter them from moving forward?
- What moves them (content, conversation/interaction, etc.) to the next stage? This step provide insight into what content (a revision in the help or qualification scripts), touch points (call center, internal technical support, inside sales), and channels (phone, online chat, etc.) additions or changes are needed. Identify the location on the map for each of these.
Make a list of each of each touch point. Write a description, method of interaction, and customer expectation. We have found that this step is best accomplished by:
- Involving as many people as necessary, including members of your customer advisory boards, to identify all touch points
- Holding working sessions and conducting interviews to capture and incorporate the expected and actual emotional, experiential, and functional experiences for each touch point.
Validate your map. Before you make decisions or take action, you need to verify how accurately the map reflects the actual journey. There are various ways to validate the map. You can engage customer advisory boards or focus groups and have them go through the same exercise. Or you can circle back to the persona research participants and invite them in the next phase of the study.
Determine what constitutes success. Establish the measures and metrics by which you will measure improvements in the customer experience (for examples the reduction of leakage in a particular stage, the change in adoption rate, the amount of time to problem resolution, overall improvement in customer satisfaction, reduction in time to renewals, etc.) AND the success of map implementation.
Go live. Produce a visual of your map, develop your implementation plan, implement your action plan, monitor results, and document your learnings. Build a plan to address James Allen’s “Three D’s,” which he believes enable organizations to offer an exceptional customer experience:

Design the correct incentive for the correctly identified consumer, offered in an enticing environment.
Deliver the proposed experience by focusing the entire team across various functions.
Develop consistency in execution.

Sometimes organizations need help with this, which is why there are experts out there! Be willing to ask for help—it’s important to correctly capture your customer experience journey. It is the primary vehicle for aligning your Marketing and Sales teams and processes.

FAQ:

(written by Penn of Sintra.ai)

Q1: What is customer experience (CX) in practical terms?
A: CX is the set of interaction points between the customer and your organization—touchpoints tied to pricing, purchasing, servicing, billing/payment, support, and delivery—across the lifecycle.

Q2: Why is journey mapping the most common method for improving CX?
A: It helps identify “breaking points” where prospects or customers drop out, enabling you to prioritize process and experience improvements. The better you understand the journey, the more consistently you can deliver an expected—and exceptional—experience.

Q3: How do customers evaluate their experience at each touchpoint?
A: By comparing their perception of actual performance to their expectation. Understanding these gaps across touchpoints enables you to set CX performance targets and KPIs.

Q4: What is the purpose of a customer journey map (best-in-class definition)?
A: A diagram that illustrates the steps customers go through when engaging with your company—from the customer’s perspective. The more touchpoints you have, the more complex (and necessary) the map becomes.

Q5: What is the foundation of any journey map?
A: Capturing customer steps and preferred touchpoints (e.g., analyst reports, peer reviews, demos, product info) and channels (phone, in-person, online) for each part of the journey—ideally by segment and/or persona.

Q6: What is the difference between a process map and a customer experience map?
A: A process map reflects internal processes and company language/jargon. A CX map reflects the experience strictly in the customer’s language. CX mapping is typically cross-functional and non-linear, making it more complex.

Q7: What are the first four best practices for journey mapping?
A: (1) Define the journey stage and focus (don’t map everything at once), (2) choose the persona(s), (3) create the map by capturing behaviors, motivations, questions/barriers, and what moves customers forward, and (4) list each touchpoint with interaction method and customer expectation using working sessions and interviews.

Q8: What are the final three best practices to make the map actionable—and sustain improvement?
A: (5) Validate the map with customers (advisory boards, focus groups, research participants), (6) define success metrics (leakage reduction, adoption rate change, time-to-resolution, satisfaction, renewal cycle time, etc.), and (7) go live—visualize the map, implement, monitor, document learnings, and build for the “Three D’s”: design the right incentive/environment, deliver cross-functionally, and develop consistency.