Time Well Spent: Beyond Journey Maps
Perhaps the greatest thing that experience strategists have done to transform companies into customer-centered businesses is to invent the journey map. There was a time, two decades ago, when most companies never mapped the journey their customers must take to engage with them. Now it is common practice. A best practice. And a very important strategic document.
Journey mapping has literally helped 1000s of companies visualize what it’s like to be their customers and to make important decisions to simplify and improve their business practices. For this reason alone we should be celebrating the practice of journey mapping.
Yet, there are problems. Like any strategic tool, journey maps have blind spots and limitations.
Journeys aren’t linear. Perhaps the foremost challenge that any experience strategist faces when creating a journey map is linearity. In most cases, customers do not follow a linear path toward purchase, usage, or ongoing activity. Yet journey mapping relies on sequence to convey the customer’s path (or ideal path).
Channels are proliferating. Complicating things further, most companies today have a wide range of ways of interacting with their customers. The dramatic increase in payment, interaction/delivery, and messaging tools means that most companies engage their customers in very sophisticated ways that a simple journey map can’t capture.
Experiences aren’t processes. Another common challenge is the drift toward process mapping. It’s very easy for an organization to focus on mapping current processes and then simply try to overlay the customer’s needs on the current process, but this just reinforces a company-centric approach which often means the customer’s real job to get done doesn’t get the focus.
In 2014, at one of our Collaborative meetings, I provocatively said, “The Journey Map is Dead!” Mary Putman, who at the time was a member of the Collabs (and now Stone Mantel’s Chief Consultancy Officer), said, “not so fast!” Companies need a way to map experiences and despite its limitations the journey map is still a fantastic tool. That conversation spurred 8 years of research and insights into new ways to map customer experiences.
Experience Maps (Journey Maps 4.0)
We think it’s time to rethink ‘journey mapping’ and build new tools that address a post pandemic, global customer world. This year in our Collaboratives Program we introduced the “experience map”, a whole new set of techniques and tools that build on what is best and most strategic about journey mapping, while ensuring that the map accomplishes its intended purpose: customer-centricity. Experience mapping can help your company:
More accurately describe the customer’s actual experience.
Guide strategic decision-making regarding channel design and data requirements
Address the ‘dynamic’ between individual customers and their families and friends
Focus the company on the real job the customer wants the experience to get done
Motivate the customer
Zoom in on specific interactions that matter to customers
Describe situations that influence your customer
Want to learn more? Reach out to us and we will show you how to harness the power of Experience Mapping for your company.