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Creang a Customer-Focused Customer Experience Journey Map
Creating a Customer-Focused Customer Experience Journey Map
A customer journey map charts your customer’s experience and helps you target improvements
with the greatest return. By identifying those steps in the customer experience with the greatest
impact, your journey map becomes a centerpiece to your customer experience planning process.
This White Paper will explain what a customer experience journey map is, introduce the Guiding
Principles of great journey maps, and will show examples of their implementation.
Journey Maps: The Foundation for Planning Your Customer Experience
Customer experience journey maps go by different names, such as customer experience maps, journey
maps, and touch point maps. A map is a visual means to identify the steps a customer goes through as
they experience your product or service. See pages 5 and 6 for examples.
Journey maps are used for different reasons, with the two most common being:
1. Understand Touch Points. Touch Point Maps show each customer interaction within a larger
experience—whether a consumer or business customer. A primary goal is to understand which
touch points are used, and how each assists or interferes with the process. Many experiences
include touch points outside of a company’s direct control, such as friends and family, social media
and third-party websites. Each has an impact on the journey and needs to be understood.
2. Understand Emotional Impact. Every journey has an emotional impact on your customer, even in a
business-to-business relationship. Whereas Touch Point Maps identify which interactions exist in an
experience, Emotional Impact Maps target a specific phase and how each interaction builds or
destroys value in your customers’ eyes.
As visual artifacts these are powerful tools to teach you how the journey impacts your customers. They are
also effective ways to unlock the secrets to improve loyalty and avoid defection.
Guiding Principles
Heart of the Customer uses ten guiding principles to create Customer Experience Journey Maps:
1. Maps represent your Customer’s perspective. Your journey map needs to represent the interactions
as your customer experiences it. For example, when studying the shopping education process for a
retailer, we discovered that most of the shopper education was complete before they ever visited
that retailer or their website. This directly impacted how the retailer went to market, as they
realized they needed to influence these other sites’ content.
2. Measure your brand promise. A journey map begins with your brand promise, and identifies how it
is supported by your customer experience. If your brand promise is to have an experience that is
effortless, highly customized, or unique, then your journey map needs to show whether your
customers feel you are meeting that goal.
3. Require qualitative research. Qualitative research focuses on the why. Depending on the scope, the
mapping process can involve interviews or ethnographies. Surveys can complement these with a
broader perspective, but are not sufficient by themselves.
4. Represent your Customer segments. Different segments experience your products and services
very differently. In a project for a service company we found that one segment spent two hours
researching the category while another spent over six weeks doing the same, using very different
tools. Trying to combine these very different experiences creates a diluted map that applies to no
one.
5. Include your Customer goals. A great journey map shows what your customer is trying to
accomplish at each stage of the process. Goals change as the process unfolds.