It’s time for customer journey mapping to have a 2.0 reboot

Having been at the forefront of the customer journey mapping (CJM) world for roughly 20 years – yes I am that old, or some would say experienced – I am often asked how CJM has developed.

Let’s just make this point upfront: it is still true that there is confusion in language when we talk about customer or employee journey mapping. A customer/employee journey map (C/EJM) is an outside-in customer or employee view of what it is like to do business with you.
It will, importantly, include activities that your company is neither involved in or controls, but are valid customer activities. A process map is an internal view of the actions and activities that your company completes in order to deliver a particular service, product or interaction. More of this later.

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The history of journey mapping

I have to confess that when it comes to C/EJM and me, we have history. I was there pretty much when CJM was born, around the turn of the century, a phrase that still sounds strange. We have grown up together, or at least I have gotten older, and CJM has unfortunately stayed quite youthful in the maturity stakes. It is definitely time for CJM and its baby sibling EJM to come of age!

To take a moment of reflection on the journey so far is always time well spent, a good thing to remember in lots of aspects of business and career life.

The first challenge for any new kid on the block is getting noticed and back around the year 2000 there was a big burst of interest in the idea of CJM and being at the leading edge of delivery. Our little consulting business built a really robust and repeatable methodology and tool kit and our clients liked both.

It was different and novel and early adopters got onboard with the idea that focusing on your experience in a structured way has big potential as a commercial differentiator.

When something is new, however, it very quickly has those who are not onboard trying to kill it off – often via the simple request “please show me the money”. CJM was not built into anyone’s budget. Any investments in CJM came out of discretionary in-year spend and that quite rightly comes with a higher degree of oversight on value for money. This situation remains largely unchanged 20 years later.

The scenario typically played out like this: an advocate started a CJM-based project, we took six to 10 weeks to produce the outside-in journey map and a list of resulting issues and opportunities. The activity then stopped either because other priorities were identified, or it failed the return on investment (ROI) test.

What this did not account for is that the value of creating a C/EJM is not the map, it is what you use the map for. This is when you can start to build in clear connected ROI into the future. The map itself is an upfront sunk cost to enable future change, so this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lessons for today’s CJM vendors

For the reboot you need to be clear upfront about this and manage expectations from the outset. Whilst nice to have, a map of your current state of CX is as much use as a chocolate fireguard if you do not have the plan and resources to use it to action change.

That issue, by my estimate, accounted for around 90 percent of our early engagements and those early adopters never got beyond base camp. Roll the timeline forward to today, and too many projects and programs in the space still suffer the same fate.

If only we had emulated maybe five percent of the success of process mapping over that time period, the world would feel very different. Clearly it had the advantage of longer heritage and a solid foundation in the engineering and production world, but it has also transferred across into the service sector with incredible success. From Six Sigma and Lean to Kaizen, it has devoted followers and practitioners.

Can you imagine walking into a virtually any business in the world today and asking the question: “Do you have any process maps and if you do are they regularly updated?”
You will be met with universal incredulity and rightly so. If you follow that up with “…and what about C/EJM?” the likely reaction will be the same as the first response as they seem to be interchangeable in too many minds.

Of course, the real answer will in most cases be “no” and those that do say yes are unlikely to update those maps very often.

No leaders is going to be nervous about process mapping if they understand it and see the benefits, but far fewer are knowledgable enough about C/EJM, its business benefits and contributions to business strategy, to be real advocates.

It still languishes in the mentality that we get this intuitively; that understanding our business from the external customer perspective could be hugely valuable but it’s still something of a mystery about how you do that and then use that knowledge to deliver value. Perhaps worse there are situations where a process review charged with stripping out cost and creating ‘efficiency’ can come into direct conflict with a customer view, ending a call 10 seconds early saves cost and over thousands of calls that can look attractive. Yet asking “is there anything else I can help you with” can add two minutes…who wins?

That is not to say that the world of C/EJM has stood still. There have been thousands of maps created (I have hundreds) across sectors and geographies, that are a rich source of information. What I learned over many years is that whilst not quite aligned to the Pareto Principle – AKA the 80/20 rule – large chunks of journey maps are common across a business with different customer groups and, in reality, across different industries. This is so true that I consider I could produce a baseline outside in C/EJM for any business within 48 hours of starting, as opposed to the six to 10 weeks it took when this all started.

We have also seen vendor consolidation in the component parts that need to come together to create an effective customer contribution to a business strategy. When the CJM software and strategy consulting firm I used to be deputy chair of, SuiteCX, joined forces with the surveys, research and experience analytics business Question Pro, it was very much with the mindset of more efficient delivery of these key components for clients.

The shift to 2.0 mapping

For me the potential for a paradigm shift to 2.0 is to shift the emphasis from building maps to using mapping methodologies and maps to act as the springboard for exciting experience design and redesign on a vastly accelerated arc, shortening the ‘as is’ and focussing on the ‘to be’ experiences. But to do this not through massive programmes of change rather lots of smaller team led interventions where teams are facilitated and coached and educated how to integrate CJM thinking into their solution development and everyday thinking.

C/EJM is not just about the end-to-end big picture, that is important to give you that transverse view of your experience and to be able to identify cause and effect across the lifecycle. Equally as valuable is the ability to use those mapping techniques to unpack very specific interaction and create incremental experience improvements.

It is always a joy to take a client team through a design session based around C/EJM and customer outcome-based thinking, after the initial fear and self-doubt fades away it is almost guaranteed to be a better experience than a process review. What emerges from this process can be fun, exciting, engaging and deliverable; that is where the process review then helps to work out how to deliver the new innovative approach. It is the best of both worlds!

As for all those journey maps that exist and are gathering dust, here is a challenge to the vendors brush them off, anonymize them and make baseline maps available for free, complete with pre-populated common interactions for clients to quickly verify and adjust to their unique experience.

The 2.0 future for me is about all of these things, from using the accumulated knowledge for the collective good to better integrating into the day-to-day business of doing business. Education is going to be key to building confidence around what the value add of C/EJM really is and how it contributes to the overall business strategy and commercial success.