Making Customer Journey Mapping Come Alive

Nate Brown, Co-Founder of CX Accelerator, explains how to make customer journey mapping come alive.

How to Make Customer Journey Mapping Come Alive

Nate Brown, Senior Director of CX at Arise and Co-Founder of CX Accelerator — Nate Brown

So many of these customer journey maps are just a map to a dead end. They’re just going nowhere. And it becomes an exercise in futility, that winds up in a trash bin somewhere, in your inbox or a literal physical trash can in your office somewhere.

How can we make these journey maps stick and make it something really meaningful? Well, I mean, let’s think about why we would do this. So in many ways, it’s like the culmination of this voice of customer engine that we created.

We’re reflecting it in this exciting, engaging way. The point of a journey map is to connect our customer in their reality with our employees. That’s why we’re doing it. So we need to do it through the lens of the customer.

This isn’t something where we can do a service blueprint and see our internal processes better and things. So often it kind of boils down to that, where we basically just map out our own departments as we see them and put in some what is the customer trying to achieve here and blah, blah, blah.

No, no, no. We’re doing this through the lens of the customer. What are their milestones in their journey, whether that fits into one of our departments or not.

And then it’s asking that question we talked about earlier. Are we able to listen here? Do we know what our customers are experiencing here? Can we put real customer data against this moment in time in their journey? And if not, it’s time to evolve our voice of customer engine.

We need to introduce a new listening path, whether structured or unstructured, so that we can have real insights here. So that we can make this map come alive. But be careful here, because it can be a dead end if you’re just assuming: here’s how our customer feels here. Sticky note.

And then what happens when you walk out of that room? There’s just residue on the walls from your post-it notes. That’s it.

You didn’t really educate. You didn’t take that map and make it come alive in a way where you could take that to any employee in the business and say, here’s how you impact the lives of our customers.

Here’s how you can make their lives better and easier by nailing this part of their experience right here. By the way, here’s the parts where we have an opportunity to do better here. Here’s the friction in this part of the experience.

We’ve got that mapped out right here for you. So if you do these things, if you alter your mentality, alter your behaviours a little bit here, use knowledge better here. If you create a seamless interaction here. If you’re more proactive here, then what that does downstream to the journey, it’s remarkable.

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