How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a visual timeline of the experience a customer has with a business. It follows the customer through stages such as discovering an offer, considering it, buying or applying, receiving the service and seeking support. A touchpoint is any moment when the customer interacts with the business, including an advertisement, website, shop, call, email, employee or digital process.
Marketing, product, sales, service and operations teams use journey maps to see the complete experience from the customer’s point of view. The map helps them find gaps between departments, moments of unnecessary effort and parts of the experience that deserve improvement. A realistic map starts with a defined customer group and business purpose, then combines what customers say with evidence of what they actually do.
What a customer journey map contains
The form changes with the business question, but a useful map normally identifies who the customer is, the situation being examined and the result the customer wants. It then follows the stages of the journey and records the evidence needed to understand each stage.
- Customer or persona: The group whose experience the map represents, including its relevant goals, needs and circumstances.
- Stages: The main phases through which the experience develops.
- Touchpoints and channels: The moments of interaction and the website, branch, telephone, employee or other channel through which they occur.
- Actions and responses: What customers do, the questions or difficulties they encounter and the responses they report or display.
- Pain points and opportunities: Where the journey creates friction, uncertainty or loss, and where the business can improve it.
Start with the decision, not the diagram
A journey map can support service redesign, product development, channel strategy or customer-experience improvement. The purpose determines what belongs on the map. A bank examining digital account opening needs to understand verification, abandonment and requests for help. A hotel examining arrival needs different stages, signals and outcomes.
Define the customer group and the result before listing touchpoints. Different customers may enter through different channels, carry different prior knowledge and value different parts of the service. Research by Rosenbaum, Otalora and Ramírez shows why assuming that everyone follows the same route and values every touchpoint equally produces an unrealistic map.
Compare the expected journey with actual behaviour
The expected journey records how the organisation intends the service to work. The observed journey uses evidence from transactions, digital events, support contacts, interviews, surveys and observation. Comparing the two can reveal repeated steps, transfers between channels, delays, workarounds and moments where customers leave.
Marketways first aligns the evidence. A website event, branch visit and call-centre contact need consistent customer, case and time definitions before they form one sequence. Journey, Behaviour & Usage Analysis then shows the paths and customer groups involved. Process Mining can reconstruct routes from time-stamped events when the systems record enough of the work.
Measure the moments that matter
Do not give every stage the same importance. Measure duration, abandonment, repeat activity, channel movement, failure and the customer outcome relevant to the decision. Interviews and feedback help explain why a path is difficult. Sentiment, Emotion & Response Analysis can add the timing of expressed or observable response when the collection conditions, consent and validation support it.
These measures turn a drawing into an analytical representation. They also stop a highly visible complaint from being treated as the most important problem when evidence shows that another stage creates more loss or effort.
Turn the map into a testable improvement
The completed map should identify a small number of decisions: which stage to change, for whom, what operating condition appears responsible and which measure should move. The business can then redesign the stage, test the change and compare the new journey with the earlier evidence.
Read why a customer journey map should become a behavioural model for the analytical principle, or see how the approach applies to digital account opening.
Sources
- Harvard Business School Online, What Is a Customer Journey Map?
- Nielsen Norman Group, When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps.
- Rosenbaum, Otalora and Ramírez, How to create a realistic customer journey map.
- Lemon and Verhoef, Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey.
- Bernard and Andritsos, A Process Mining Based Model for Customer Journey Mapping.