Transform Customer Experience

Chapter 5Customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a framework that maps out the stages in your customers’ relationship with your organisation. The map breaks each stage into steps, telling the story of your customers’ experiences from their perspective, exploring their lifecycle stages and identifying their key interactions with your organisation from start to finish.

Importantly, the map talks about your customers’ feelings, motivations and thoughts at each point of contact and gives a sense of what they want and expect from your business. Once this is clear, you can work on delivering the ideal customer experience from their perspective.

Customer journey mapping helps an organisation understand how its customers interact with it. Mapping their journeys allows you to see your organisation through your customers’ eyes, encouraging insiders to put themselves in their customers’ shoes and describe the experiences and emotions associated with an interaction, identifying patterns, sentiments, ‘pain points’ and opportunities to improve the experience at each stage. Seeing the organisation’s processes from their customers’ point of view helps staff to empathise with them and identify the internal processes that are not aligned to their needs.

When customers are dealing with your organisation, they aren’t aware of the internal mechanics within the organisation, such as technology limitations or internal processes. For example, they don’t know where there might be silos ...