Today’s customers expect seamless, personalized, omnichannel experiences. They have the power to choose how and when they engage with your business. And they can easily switch from one brand to another when their needs aren’t met.

Businesses, meanwhile, face significant challenges in meeting those needs. Fortunately, there are solutions and strategies that empower organizations with tools that help them satisfy rising customer expectations. Customer journey mapping (CJM) is the foundation of these customer experience management (CXM) strategies.

Analyst firm, IDC, has found that despite the proliferation of technologies and channels, few brands know their primary customer journeys. Too many brands mistakenly believe they understand the customer journey when they have identified a few of the touchpoints a customer generally interacts or engages with on their way to purchase your product or service. That isn't a customer journey.

A customer journey is the sum of every interaction that a customer has with your brand, from the first moment a potential customer sees your ad, to their satisfaction survey response once they become a customer.

Touchpoints along the customer journey occur via both online and offline channels, such as websites, email, mobile apps, review sites, and brick-and-mortar stores. Some of these touchpoints are out of a brand’s control, such as reviews posted on social media.

To learn how customers experience your brand—and more importantly, their perception of that experience—you need to walk a mile in your customer’s shoes. Customers expect you to know their situations, goals, and preferences. So, you need to discover what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at every touchpoint ... including the steps they take before they even interact with you.

To communicate and engage with today’s customers effectively, and stay ahead of your competitors, it’s imperative that you understand your customers’ journey and take action to improve it. A customer journey strategy is the way to do this.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map. A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interactions with your brand through all touchpoints – physical and digital. Journey maps enable an organization to gain insights into customer pain points and how to improve them. 

Journey mapping helps you determine precisely where you’re delighting your customers and where you’re falling short. Armed with that information, you can leverage analysis that takes you far beyond a find-and-fix mentality. You will be able to prioritize the most impactful touchpoints to improve, design and personalize next best actions that elevate your customers’ experience and boost your bottom line.

When you integrate customer insights from journey mapping with journey management capabilities such as journey analytics and orchestration technologies, you bring the customer journey to life and get a comprehensive view of customer behavior and needs. Gaining and leveraging these insights takes the guesswork out of your CX initiatives and yields faster results.

Going one step further to integrate these powerful journey management tools with customer communications management (CCM) systems provides a transformative ability to improve customer satisfaction and business outcomes. This game-changing strategic CXM approach is getting a lot of buzz. Experts agree, those who don’t adopt it will be left behind.

A properly executed living customer journey map is a valuable and versatile tool. It can lead to increased revenue and decreased costs, creating better outcomes for both your business and your customers on an accelerated timeline.

That’s a natural outcome of looking at the journey from the customer’s point of view and focusing on building an emotional connection, rather than just making a sale. These days, the steps in the map (sometimes even your products!) don’t matter nearly as much as the overall experience you provide and the relationship you build with each customer by providing an empathetic journey optimized to meet their individual needs.

As the technology continues to evolve, journey mapping capabilities will only become nimbler and more effective. More advanced artificial intelligence (AI) will propel some advances, the availability of more granular customer data others. The only constant is innovation. The danger lies in waiting too long to adopt this methodology, giving your competitors a lead that might be too large to overcome.

The two primary ways you’ll see the benefits of customer journey mapping:

1. Journey optimization drives positive CX outcomes​​​

• Customer lifetime value increases by 1.6x for CX-focused companies (Forrester)
• 81% of customers want brands to understand them enough to know when to approach and when not to (Postclick)
• 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company offering personalized experiences (Epsilon)
• 70% of consumers report a company’s understanding of their personal needs and how they use the company’s products is very important in deciding who to do business with (Salesforce)
• Companies focusing on personalization have increased revenue 15% on average (McKinsey)
• A positive customer experience encounter can increase spending by 140% - happy, loyal customers are eager to spend more with you (Deloitte)

2. Journey interventions avoid negative outcomes

• 1 in 3 customers will leave you after one bad experience. 92% after 3. (PwC)
• It costs about 5-25 times more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one (Invesp)
• 70% of Millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant communications (SmarterHQ)
• 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people, but 13% share with 15 or more people when they’re dissatisfied (Esteban Kolsky)
• Loyal customers are valuable customers: Increasing retention rates by just 5% can boost profits 25-95% (Bain & Co.)
• 72% of customers say they only engage with personalized messaging (SmarterHQ)

These are the essential elements to include in your living customer journey map:

Validated research and accurate data

Journey maps are only as reliable as the data you feed into them, so solid data is a must. Be sure to include every step of the journey you aim to map, keeping in mind customers may interact with you in multiple ways through a variety of channels. Interactions with your competitors may also be relevant to the journey.

Qualitative customer feedback will provide a detailed picture of customers’ emotional responses. It will also reveal pre-purchase steps you might otherwise be unaware of. For example, when prospective customers ask friends for recommendations or check out your website.

Once you’ve compiled that information (perhaps in a static journey map), add the steps, emotional outcomes, pain points, and key customer touchpoints into your living journey map. Including data from IT, Operations, Sales, and other departments—when you can get it—adds depth to your insights and helps you establish baseline measurements.

Having all this data in one central display helps align your teams, gain buy-in from leadership and break down silos that have departments working at cross-purposes. It allows everyone to see the journey from the same perspective: your customer’s.

A versatile digital display

Make sure your journey map is visually compelling and appealing, so that viewers are engaged with and understand what they’re looking at. Those are the qualities that make journey maps such an important change management tool.

A well-designed journey map doesn’t just monitor and display data. It helps every employee see the role they play in improving the experience for customers. That’s critical to your end goal, which—remember! —is taking action to increase customer loyalty.

Make it easy to share the journey map and clearly indicate how you are tracking journey performance over time. When all stakeholders across an organization can access this view of the journey, teams are better able to coordinate their efforts.  And executives are better able to understand the need for action and the potential benefits for the business.

Provide a query-able view of individual journeys in real time, over time. You can also designate data-driven segments or personas for customers that share characteristics, though often engaging on an individual level is more powerful.

Your map display should make it easy to visualize each journey’s touchpoints, feelings, outcomes, and insights. Being able to compare customers can provide additional insight about where interventions may be needed.

Secure systems integration and compatibility

The most effective journey maps update seamlessly, so your journey map is not a static, standalone creation. Integrating your data across systems is imperative. You must have compatibility features that allow you to feed in data from, for example, customer communications and relationship management platforms. Digital tools will also enable you to add documents and media as needed.

This will also set the stage for your next steps. Once you’ve created your journey map, you’re going to want to access other systems to execute journey improvements. These might include sending an email to a customer who is stalled in their journey, following up on an open support ticket, or creating social media content. It’s easy to see how journey mapping can take response-based marketing to the next level.

System integrations and compatibility mean you won’t need to rely on (or wait for) post-experience surveys to know, or intervene with, what is happening during the journey. If you add artificial intelligence (AI) features to the mix, you’ll ultimately gain the ability to predict and avoid churn and other issues before your business takes a hit.

But the benefits of shareable data must never outweigh security concerns. Your customer journey mapping capability should meet the highest standards for protection and privacy to safeguard your organization.

Updating and testing capabilities

Creating a living journey map isn’t a one-and-done project. The work is ongoing throughout the entire customer lifecycle. So, the greatest benefit of a journey map is its ability to evolve to reflect journey improvements and changing customer needs over time.

Another benefit of this flexibility is the ease with which you can plan, test, and implement proposed changes to your CX strategy. A|B testing used to be a costly, time-consuming undertaking. With today’s journey mapping platforms, it can be as easy as a few clicks to determine which message or promotion is more effective, or which campaign will make the greatest impact. Then you can scale up.

While the potential payoff of journey mapping is game-changing, it’s also obvious that getting it right requires a significant commitment.

Not only do you need to put in the work to get all the pieces in place, but you also need to simultaneously take steps to drive the organizational change necessary to implement your improvement initiatives. A journey map enables you to drive that change.

Are you ready to start a journey mapping initiative? Start with our Essential Checklist for Customer Journey Mapping. Building a strategy and considering these questions at different stages in the undertaking will increase your chances of success.