Framework library · Marketing strategy
Customer journey map
A customer journey map follows one type of customer through a task, from the moment the need arises to the point it is done. For each stage it records what the customer does, the touchpoints they meet, what they think and how they feel. The low points of feeling, read against the touchpoints, show where to act first.
Use it when
- Complaints or churn cluster around a process, such as installation or moving house, that no single team owns from end to end.
- You are designing a new service and want to see the customer journey before building the processes behind it.
- Each team reports good performance on its own stage while customers report a poor experience overall.
Avoid it when
- You plan to map an average customer across very different segments. Map one segment at a time, chosen with STP.
- You need the root cause of one known failure. Use five whys or a fishbone diagram on that stage.
- Nobody will talk to customers. A map built only from internal process charts shows how the business works, not what the customer meets.
How to run it
Choose one customer and one task
"A home broadband customer moving house", not "our customers". The task starts when the need arises, often well before the customer contacts you.
Name the stages from the customer's side
Use the customer's words, such as "find out if I can keep my deal" rather than "retention call". Five to seven stages are usually enough.
Record what they do, meet and think
Touchpoints are anything the customer meets: website, app, call, letter, engineer, bill. Quote real customers where you can.
Score how they feel at each stage
From -2 (angry or anxious) to +2 (pleased), using surveys, complaints or call recordings. The chart of feelings by stage shows the low points.
List pain points and opportunities
For each low point, the specific cause and what would remove it. Opportunities can also sit at high points worth repeating elsewhere.
Give each fix an owner
The owner is often in a team other than the one whose stage the customer complains about, such as billing fixing a problem felt on moving day.
Work through it
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Mistakes to avoid
- Mapping the process the business runs instead of what the customer experiences. The customer does not see the handoffs between teams, only the delays they cause.
- Filling in feelings from the team's guesses rather than complaints, survey comments and call recordings.
- Mapping only the stages you own. Many of the worst moments happen before first contact or between two teams.
- Producing a wall chart and no owners. A map changes nothing until each pain point has someone fixing it.
Where it comes from
No single originator. Journey maps come from service design practice, and an early relative is G. Lynn Shostack's service blueprint, in "Designing Services That Deliver", Harvard Business Review, January to February 1984. Katherine N. Lemon and Peter C. Verhoef review the research in "Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey", Journal of Marketing 80(6), 2016. Source.
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