Journey Mapping is one of the most widely taught CX techniques. It’s supposed to help businesses fix broken experiences. So why are so many customer experiences still broken?
Are we doing Journey Mapping wrong? Not enough of it? Or are we stopping in the wrong place?
Often, the issue is one of ownership.
We’ll look at what journey mapping is, how to get it done in your organisation, and most importantly, how to use it as a tool to assign accountability and drive action that improves your bottom line.
Since 2010, we’ve made a leading CX insight platform, partnered with some of the globe’s most recognised consultants, and worked with hundreds of companies worldwide on CX improvement projects, which means we’ve seen our fair share of customer journey maps.
We’ve seen what works. We’ve also seen what wastes time.
But before we get into the details, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
A couple of the world’s most recognised CX consultants give great, and overlapping definitions:
A tool used by CX Professionals as a method of documenting what it’s really like to be a customer and to prioritise what should be done about that experience. — Jerry Angrave
A visualisation of the customer journey, a strategic tool to drive action. — Ian Golding
Two people with enough experience to publish books on the subject both reflect a common theme:
Simply treating customer journey maps as a list of touchpoints — however much you embellish those touchpoints with personas and insights — is only half the story, and probably the less-interesting half.
To get value from Customer Journey Mapping, you need to use the maps to do something about the customer experience. And to do that, you need to assign ownership to the customer journeys you map.
The key, underlying benefit of Customer Journey Mapping, is that it gives you a framework to carry out planned, targeted CX improvement work. Once you’re clear on your journeys, you can assign each journey an owner. That owner’s job is to improve the customer’s experience of the journey according to feedback, and demonstrate the ROI of those improvements.
We’ll explore these ideas of ownership and continuous improvement in a lot more detail below, but it’s worth touching on some of the other business benefits of journey mapping:
We see the world not as it is, but as we are
Often individuals in an organisation may think they know what a given customer journey looks like, but without talking to colleagues and documenting these discussions, it’s often the case that the people responsible for delivering a journey only have a partial view of the whole.
Crucially, the organisation itself lacks a consolidated view of the journey, and so can’t commit to measuring it and improving it.
In his book, Jerry Angrave simply summarises this benefit as, it “Shows what we have to do”.
Following on from the first benefit (you know where you are) customer journey mapping shows you where you need to go.
When you have a true understanding of a journey, including any ‘hidden’ steps, and a thorough understanding of the customer’s feelings and frustrations along that journey, you can prioritise and commit to improvements.
The act of customer journey mapping brings people together.
The next section covers this in detail: To do a good job of mapping a journey, you have to bring together people from different corners of the organisation.
Ideally, you’ll carry out face-to-face workshops, but at the very least you should use digital shared spaces.
This act of getting people who ordinarily wouldn’t communicate into the same room can have massive CX benefits.
Most CX teams will be familiar with their worth being questioned.
Journey maps don’t just guide CX activity, they provide a framework for proving its impact.
Without clearly defined, owned journeys, CX often looks like a random collection of initiatives: Some surveys here, NPS on a dashboard there. It’s hard to join the dots, and even harder to explain how those dots connect to business outcomes.
But when journeys are defined, owned, and visible, and process improvements are explicitly tied to a specific point along that journey, CX teams have an easier time showing their results.
Like this:
“In the new purchase journey, we identified that dissatisfaction with information clarity was correlated with low NPS. We got the welcome pack cleaned up, increased NPS by 10, and as a consequence, referrals are up.”
“In the support journey, we saw that dissatisfaction with AI chatbots was high, and people accessing this channel often failed to resolve their issue, ultimately leading to cancellation. This let us make the business case for a knowledge base investment to make human support agents more efficient, meaning they could handle more customers. Cancellations following this journey subsequently went down.”
When actions are mapped, owned, and backed by data, it becomes far easier for CX to hold a seat at the board table.
CX Pop Quiz.
When Net Promoter’s co-creator, Laura Brooks, described the “Net Promoter Operating Model”, what was at the core of that model, a fundamental part of every other step?
If you answered “customer-centric DNA”, you clearly know your foundational CX texts (and also need to get out more).
The creators of NPS have always been clear: without a company-wide mindset shift, the score is just a number.
There’s no silver bullet to align everyone around customer needs. But journey mapping helps. Get people talking about how customers really interact with your business, and they’ll leave with a new understanding of how their work affects actual people.
All failed journey mapping efforts start with good intentions and enthusiasm.
Sometimes they fall to unavoidable factors like poor company culture, but too often they’re torpedoed by an avoidable mistake: skipping the design step.
Don’t launch into a journey mapping session without knowing why you’re mapping, or what you plan to do with the map afterwards.
So before you start, agree three things:
If you’re just getting started, don’t try to map everything.
Start with a single, clearly defined customer journey.
Not “the whole end-to-end experience.” Not “onboarding.” Something concrete and narrow. Like:
Narrowing scope like this increases your chances of success. Remember, you want usable, actionable, ownable maps. Rather than risking over-shoot, and mapping a wider area of the business than one person can own, start tight.
Once you’ve demonstrated success and won buy-in, you’ll develop an instinct for the ‘right’ size of a map, but don’t undermine your chances of early wins by overreaching.
To help pick which journeys to tackle first, look at whatever real CX data you have, however anecdotal.
Complaints, call transcripts, support tickets, feedback scores — whatever you’ve got. You don’t need to to run an intensive AI analysis and extract themes and sentiments, you’re just trying to establish a base camp.
If you have literally no CX data, it’s time to do some guerilla research. Start talking to people in the business who interact with customers and find out:
As far as possible, start from the position that you want to make things great for customers.
The all-important counterpart to “what matters to customers”. Another common CX failure is treating CX metrics as an abstract thing, rather than a measure that’s directly connected to revenue goals.
CX doesn’t have to always map cleanly to revenue goals, but the more examples you can give where your efforts delivered a measurable improvement in revenue or retention, the more credible and trusted your team become.
If you can answer these three questions clearly:
…then you’re ready to run a session that produces something useful.
If not, wait.
Mapping for the sake of it doesn’t just waste time, it damages trust in CX work. Get the design right, and everything that follows will be ten times easier
Here’s how to keep your session focused on delivering actionable outputs:
You don’t need a full pack of agency-researched personas to get going (though by all means use them if you have them).
You just need a realistic, relatable ‘prototype’ customer (or set of customers) who use the journey you’re mapping. This shouldn’t be too hard to build if you have the right people in the room.
Take ten minutes at the start of the session to sketch something on the fly. You should aim to include:
As we already discussed, it’s important to get a variety of perspectives in the room.
Don’t just include people with ‘book’ knowledge of the customer and their journeys, you want as much first-hand, lived, experience of your customers as possible.
If you’re struggling to get cross-team buy-in, your issues may run a bit deeper. Any long-term improvement in customer experience comes from the top down, so you might need to look at building a business case (or finding a new job!) first.
You don’t have to start by engaging customers directly.
Eventually, you’ll need to validate and refine your map with real feedback, but many teams benefit from an internal-only first pass. It gives them a safe space to learn and spot their own blind spots before inviting customers in.
Jerry Angrave says in his book:
“Journey mapping is fun.”
It’s not only a chance for people to step away from their desks, and have a bit of a laugh by going deep on customer personas. It’s a chance for front-line staff to have their voices heard.
Give people a chance to let their hair down, and crucially demonstrate their value, and they’ll leave the room as advocates for your CX efforts.
If you’re planning to run a session, we strongly recommend Jerry Angrave’s Journey Mapping Playbook. It’s one of the most practical, experience-led guides available, covering everything from workshop dynamics to post-session follow-through.
There are probably as many customer journey mapping templates as there are customer journey maps.
Rather than overwhelm you with options, we’ll boil it down to the basics: The 20% that gives you 80% of the benefits. But as you build confidence with your journey mapping efforts, feel free to adapt our starter template to suit your needs, and include what you find most impactful.
When you’ve completed your session, you should aim for a journey map that looks like this:
Each step should include:
Finally, you should have an idea who will be the owner of the journey.
You may need to get sign-off for this from other teams in the business, but don’t leave the room without an idea of who will have responsibility for listening to customers and improving the experience based on their feedback — without this ownership, you’ll struggle to use the journey to deliver meaningful change.
We promised that we’d teach you how to make customer journeys actually work.
A journey mapping workshop, though an essential starting point, doesn’t deliver business change on its own.
But put a journey map in the hands of someone empowered to listen to customers and effect changes based on what they say? It becomes a tool you can use to focus improvement efforts, and demonstrate a return on investment in CX.
We can’t do this for you, but we do give our famous plain-talking advice to help the people who use CustomerSure make the necessary changes in their organisation.
But if you’re intent on going it alone, here’s the minimum you’ll need to do to use customer journeys to effect real change:
Customer Experiences are still getting no better.
We can’t lay that entirely at the feet of bad journey mapping, but getting journey mapping right can certainly help.
The key stage that we see most organisations miss is ownership and authority.
Once you empower people to take ownership of a journey and drive through improvements, using real customer feedback from a world-class CXM platform, you’re at the start of a virtuous cycle of satisfaction improvement, which ultimately leads to bottom-line improvements.
Chris is a member of CustomerSure’s founding team. Since 2010, he has worked with our clients to help them put VoC programmes in place that respect the customer and deliver measurable results. The best part of his job is learning something new from every new client.
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