Customer Journey Mapping: How to map...

With customer journey mapping being a growing area of interest over the past few years, it might be a surprise to hear that it is still considered a relatively ‘new’ discipline – 32% of businesses have been conducting journey mapping exercises less than a year, and only 18% doing it for less than 5 years. But what does ‘doing it’ actually mean? And doing it right look like?

Meaning of customer journey mapping

Put really simply, customer journey mapping (CJM) is the process of capturing everything that customers see and experience in the context of a specific customer journey and towards their specific goal/ objective

Doing customer journey mapping right?

With anything new, there tends to be lots of interest – and this has already shown itself in a couple of ways – 1) many organisations are doing it with 67% of organisations claimed to be using customer journey mapping 2) an expanding number of consultancies and agencies alike are offering their journey mapping services 3) available to access templates, standards and ‘how to’ guides to support with customer journey mapping…

With this, we are understandably seeing a number of different approaches being taken to mapping customer journeys – from operationally focused mapping to a puristic customer research piece through to a data driven customer journey project…

We would advocate that doing customer journey mapping ‘right’, whatever the overall approach, should always involve a blend of exercises that involve stakeholder and frontline engagement, primary customer research, customer, operational and commercial data analysis and operational process and systems mapping.

Using the below as a guide should help ensure you have customer journey mapping success:

1. Aim to have a consistent business-wide approach to customer journey mapping  (test out through an initial pilot study and refine as necessary to ensure the approach works for the business)

2. Always involve the business / internal view of the customer journey – this should then be followed by the reality of the customer view

3. Mapping a journey should always involve primary research – at that point in time – read more about why here

4. Your mapping exercise will be informed by the relevant commercial, customer and operational data that exists within the business

5. The map will visualise a clear single view – bringing together the internal (business) and customer perspectives

6. There should always be a plan for how mapping the journey will feed directly in to optimisation of the experience       

Are you considering what the best approach might look like for your organisation? Are you looking to build a business case to conduct customer journey mapping? We’re here to help – e: hello@thisislens.co.uk  t: 0113 344 8640