Customer Journey Mapping: Unlocking the desire to change

Customer journey mapping is a relatively new industry practice that seeks to help organisations better understand the experiences that customers have as they interact over time – and highlights opportunities and challenges that organisations need to address as they seek to make changes to products, services and customer touchpoints. This report shares the findings of a recent MWD Advisors survey that shows how customer journey mapping is delivering value for organisations.

Top takeaways

A relatively new practice, but one that has potentially dramatic impact

Our survey sample is likely to be more mature than the population of businesses at large in industry: but even in the group we studied for this research project, only 18% had been involved in customer journey mapping for longer than three years.

However those involved in customer journey mapping are sharing with us that the work they do for organisations – although not without challenges – has the potential to unlock the desire to change to a more customer-centred way of thinking and operating. This is because the practice creates a reason for bringing disparate stakeholders together, and facilitates a structured conversation in which they can all participate.

Map quality is the key challenge faced by many

Among many other challenges cited by our survey respondents, the standout response from customer journey mapping practitioners related to map quality.

What we’ve learned from this survey is that the ability to deliver insightful customer journey maps that illustrate clear implications that stakeholders can easily understand is crucial. Given the relative immaturity of the practice in industry, and the lack of standardised methodologies in use, this is perhaps no surprise. However this does suggest that organisations would be well-served by targeted tools in this space that focus on supporting the process of customer journey mapping, and the ability to share and socialise the outputs of that process effectively.

About our survey

To dig a little deeper into the current state of customer journey mapping practice, we decided to carry out an industry survey. Our online survey was carried out over three weeks in April 2016, inviting customer journey mapping practitioners to share their views and experiences. 65 people participated on a self-selection basis. The demographics of the survey group are shown in the Appendix section at the end of this report.

Customer journey mapping: still an immature practice

The findings of our survey support our wider view (from conversations with practitioners and business managers) that customer journey mapping is still a relatively immature phenomenon.

Of our survey group, only 18% have been engaged in customer journey mapping for longer than three years; 34% have been engaged in customer journey mapping for between one and three years, and 12% have been pursuing customer journey mapping for less than a year. The remainder of our respondents are either not doing customer journey mapping at all (25%) or don’t know (11%). Given that our survey was web-based and survey participants volunteered to provide information, we expect that the general business population will be less mature in customer journey mapping than these survey results suggest.

ap_cjm_survey_0416_fig1

Source: MWD Advisors

Key success factors: data, scope and more

Customer journey mapping is not only a relatively new practice in industry: it’s also complicated – something that’s not helped by a lack of specialised tools and established methods that organisations can use with confidence.

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