Why Most Customer Journey Maps Miss the Mark—and What to Do Instead

Customer journey maps have been popular for more than 10-15 years and it od important to reflect our experience in seeing thousands of maps over that period of time.

Before Journey maps, customer behavior analysis typically was performed at various points in the journey or specific touchpoints. These were insightful and rigorous in their scope and analytics but failed to capture the longitudinal view of the customers relationship.  For example, a Satisfaction score or NPS rating at the end of a transaction in a certain channel could easily miss the impact that early messaging and content had on their experience.

What journey maps typically get right is they take a longitudinal view of the customer’s experience instead of a transactional view.  This is important to understand what customer are looking for at each stage of their journey with a brand and the impact of upstream actions (or inactions) have on downstream behaviors and decisions.

While customer journey mapping has improved in its maturity over the last 10-15 years, many of them are still more like “awkward teenagers” than “maturing young adults”.  Here are 5 reasons that many journey maps don’t reach their full potential and what to do about them.

1. Internal assumptions driven - Many journey maps, especially those performed for technology design reasons, use internal stages and terminology for the journey creation. Many start with the “sales-driven journey stages” or “CRM steps” so that the customer journey map matches up to the existing processes and systems of the company.  What this approach misses are the actions, behaviors, decisions and challenges customer face that are filtered out using the internally-driven frameworks.

• • The Fix: Externally-generated maps uncover the true understanding of the customer journey, the stages they go through, the objective of each stage and the actions, behaviors, challenges and decisions they make in each stage and along their journey – from their perspective.  A clear, outside-in approach.  This is a more complete map, and can easily populate the sales process or CRM steps, and doesn’t miss anything. 

2. Incomplete customer input – Many journey maps were originally developed in cross-functional workshops without customers present, leveraging the customer knowledge of workshop employees to build the customer perspective into the maps. While this is helpful as a starting point, it misses customer terminology, structure and emotions that come directly from customer feedback. Even when internally developed maps are validated with customers (as many were), there is a big gap between “Customer Validated” and “Customer Native” journey maps.

• • The Fix: Start with customer discussions to flesh out the stages, objectives, actions and decisions that customer take and make provides a “customer native” perspective of journey map design that can withstand internal editing. Both qualitative research and quantitative research are needed to uncover the full range of customer input and prioritize their actions and challenges for decision-making purposes. 

3. Outdated data – Many early journey maps were formed using existing customer data, from old market research reports, customer insight presentations and shopper surveys. Because the data came from different sources, at different times and collected with different purposes, it is difficult or impossible to link together to create a story that is both current and integrated. 

• • The Fix: Customer Data Refresh – by using current customer research – both qualitative and quantitative – for journey map development, the data can be synched together to tell a more complete story with consistent questions,  customer segments and timing in the market. 

4. Lack of Metrics – A significant biggest challenge most maps have is a lack of metrics, or if metrics are involved there are readily available operational metrics that may or may not be the key metrics for that customer journey. Many leading journey map companies use only qualitative interview and no data in their maps (just google them and see for yourself), which tell an interesting story, but fail to capture the C-Suite desire for data and without customer-driven metrics, don’t establish a baseline for customer behavior that can be used for measuring improvements. 

• • The Fix: Start with the customer journey and a set of customer driven metrics that are the most important to their final decisions to purchase, repurchase to stay as a customer. This establishes a customer-centric baseline where operational metrics can be linked to the journey and customer metrics easily.  It may also identify missing operational metrics that need to be collected and reported to have a more complete view of the customer experience delivery.

5. Missing Value Leakage – by far the biggest gap in customer journey maps is the lack of identifying where opportunities, revenues and value is lost in the journey, the necessary element to capture C-Suite attention and commitment to improving the experience. 

• • The Fix: This requires a disciplined approach to measure and quantify brand switching and revenue leakage, including the key drivers of both.  Look for where decisions are changed, brand switching occurs or spending/contracts are minimized as a result of friction in the customer’s experience.  This requires quantitative customer data, typically collected through customer research combined with select operational and financial data.  When done correctly, this identifies and quantifies millions of dollars of lost revenue and profits that generate action from senior leaders.

Customer journey maps are a powerful research approach, presentation method and profit improvement tool – but need to be upgraded to a higher level of maturity to be most effective.