Customer Journey Mapping: What is it and why should I care?

Customer Journey Mapping is a key practice for any organisation serious about setting and executing Customer Experience (CX) improvement strategies. It’s a relatively new practice, but it shows huge promise in helping create new perspectives that enable transformational change.

Top takeaways

Process discovery, but applied to your customers’ processes

Customer Journey Mapping is a practice that’s not yet truly mainstream, but it shows a great deal of promise. Principally led today by specialist consultancy firms, it’s a collaborative business assessment and planning practice that involves multiple stakeholders working together to understand how customers’ interactions with a business play out over time, across multiple channels and venues – and then involves understanding how internal processes, practices, people and resources contribute to those interactions and how changes can be made to improve things.

Customer Journey Mapping provides an unique perspective of your business that cuts across silos

In a world where so many organisations understand the importance of competing not only on products/services and price but also the quality of the customer experience, Customer Journey Mapping plays a crucial role. The practice is so potentially valuable not because it introduces any major technical or organisational innovation: but because, done right, it creates an environment in which multiple business stakeholders come together to understand the ‘big picture’ of the customer experience, how their own responsibilities play into that, and how only by working together across organisational boundaries can they have lasting impact.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Revealing a customer-centred perspective on your business and its operations

Customers’ experiences in today’s world aren’t purely shaped by customer service teams or the help they get in a physical store: they’re shaped by the interactions they have online; conversations with salespeople; the quality of a product; the accuracy of bills; and so on. By definition, delivering great customer experiences depends on the effective execution of activities that your organisation carries out across many teams and departments. Understanding how effective these activities are in practice is where the concept of the ‘customer journey’ comes in.

A ‘customer journey’ is often metaphorical – it’s a way of looking at all those interactions from the perspective of the customer as they experience them, quite possibly across multiple channels (your website, social networks, a mobile app, a branch or store, your call centre, and so on). A customer journey is the process through which a customer comes to have a particular total experience in dealing with your organisation.

Typically speaking, at a very high level a generic customer journey has four main stages:

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