Customer Journey Map

Purpose

The customer journey map describes a customer's experience from that customer's point of view. It applies to a purchase, an administrative procedure, a complaint: any customer journey that strings events together.

Lemon and Verhoef note that customers now interact with a company through many touchpoints across several channels. Inside the organisation, each department measures its own touchpoints. Nobody owns the customer journey as a whole. Kate Kaplan sees this as the cause of a fragmented understanding of the customer experience.

The map gathers scattered data into one view that the departments share. It serves a decision: where the customer journey breaks and who repairs it. The team draws the list of opportunities from it. Each opportunity carries a phase, an owning department and an indicator. The list goes to the people who decide on changes. According to Kaplan, building the map is often the most valuable part of the work: the departments that build it together come away with the same reading of the customer journey.

Usage

When to use it

• Customer journey across several departments: nobody sees the whole or answers for the hand-offs.
• Figures that show a problem without explaining it: online sales that stall, an underused tool; the map looks for the reason.
• Multichannel customer journey: website, phone, counter and post; inconsistencies arise between the channels.
• Complaints or calls clustered after a procedure: a move, a cancellation, an insurance claim; the map locates the phase that causes them.
• Segments to compare: one map per persona to contrast two customer journeys or study a new type of customer.
• Service to design: a map of the future customer journey, before anyone writes the requirements.

When not to use it

• Problem confined to one screen or form: a customer journey map spreads attention over the whole customer journey and loses the problem in it; use task analysis instead.
• Internal problem with no customer contact: back-office processing belongs to process analysis.

Description

The elements of the map

Gibbons lists the elements common to every map. Kaplan adds touchpoints and channels.

The actor. The actor is the person the map follows. The actor usually corresponds to a persona. The actor's actions rest on research data. A map carries one point of view: a university that wants to understand its students and its teaching staff draws two maps.

The scenario and expectations. The scenario is the situation the map covers. It carries one of the actor's goals and what the actor expects of the organisation. It is real for an existing service or anticipated for a service under design.

The phases. The phases divide the customer journey into major stages and order the rest of the map. They change from one scenario to the next. For an online purchase, Gibbons gives discover, try, buy, use and seek support. The organisation's data sets the phases of each scenario.

Actions, thoughts and emotions. The actions describe the steps of the phase. They do not log every click. The thoughts capture the actor's questions, motivations and information needs, where possible as quotes from the research. The emotions form a single line across the phases. It rises where the actor is satisfied and falls where the actor is frustrated.

Touchpoints and channels. A touchpoint is a moment when the actor interacts with the organisation. A channel is the medium of that interaction: the website, the phone, the counter, the post. Inconsistencies between channels and breaks in the customer journey often appear at these points. The team therefore marks every channel switch on the map: from website to email, from email to phone. A break often sits where the customer must switch channels to finish what the first channel left open.

Opportunities and their owners. The bottom of the map lists what the team has learned: the friction points, the improvement opportunities and the department that owns each one. Gibbons adds the metrics that will measure the effect of the changes. Kaplan gives the reason: without an owner, nobody has the mandate to change anything.

Building the map

According to Kaplan, the team first lays out the actor's goals and actions on a timeline. Thoughts and emotions added to this skeleton turn it into a narrative. The team then condenses the narrative into a visual that communicates what it has learned.

1. Set the business goal. Kaplan has these questions answered before any work starts: which business goal the map serves, who will use it, whom it is about and which experience it covers, how the team will share it. In her view, a map that serves no business goal yields no actionable insight.
2. Choose the actor and the scenario. For an existing customer journey, the map shows the good and bad moments of the experience. For a service still to be designed, it describes the intended customer journey. Set the level of detail: the whole purchase cycle or a single procedure. Several personas on one map blur the narrative: their emotions do not rise and fall at the same phases.
3. Gather the research. Start from existing research, then fill the gaps with qualitative research specific to that customer journey: interviews, field observation, diaries kept by customers. Quantitative data confirms a finding or convinces a sceptic. On its own, it builds no narrative. Kaplan demands a truthful narrative. She calls a map built on assumptions a "fairy tale".
4. Build with the departments. Invite representatives of the departments involved in the customer journey to gather the data and build the map. A map that the analyst draws alone and presents finished leaves the departments with no ownership of the findings.
5. Lay out the timeline, then the narrative. Place the actions under each phase, then the thoughts as customer quotes. Base every point on the emotion line on an observation or a verbatim quote. A point that nobody can justify is the team's opinion.
6. Synthesise before you draw. Kaplan warns against the pull of aesthetics: it produces maps that are beautiful yet flawed. The synthesis is finished and understood by everyone before anyone opens a layout tool.
7. Name the opportunities and their owners. For each low point, write what the team has understood, the opportunity that follows, the owning department and the indicator that will measure the change. The opportunity goes at the phase where the break originates. That phase often comes before the one where the customer complains.
8. Keep the map alive. Kaplan asks for a living document that teams cite in meetings and add to. The department that owns the customer journey names the person who keeps the map up to date. That person revises it when the service changes or when an indicator crosses its threshold. The map is on the agenda of each periodic review in that department. Each owner reports on their opportunity at that review.

Customer journey map, service blueprint and story map

Gibbons distinguishes the customer journey map from the experience map, the service blueprint and the user story map.

The service blueprint starts from the customer actions that research or a customer journey map has established. Under each one, it shows the organisation's actions that the customer can see. Staff or a system performs them. Next come the backstage actions and the processes that support them. A line of visibility separates what the customer sees from what the customer does not see. The customer journey map shows where the customer stumbles. The blueprint shows what in the organisation makes the customer stumble.

Some opportunities on the map become features. The story map slices them into releases. Others are settled by a change to a process or to a letter. When the map locates a break in an internal process, process analysis and root cause analysis take over.

AI considerations

A language model speeds up the synthesis. It sorts interview transcripts and verbatim quotes by phase. It groups the recurring pain points in a batch of complaints, customer service emails or online reviews. It proposes a first chronological skeleton that the team corrects in a workshop. For a Swiss organisation, it translates quotes collected in German or Italian into French before a workshop in Romandy. It also produces layout variants from the validated synthesis.

The team still has to do the research. A model asked for the customer journey of someone who is moving produces a plausible one without any data from the organisation. Kaplan rules such a map out (step 3). The team itself places each point on the emotion line, chooses the opportunities and names the owners. A quote that the model translated also appears on the map in its original language. A workshop in Romandy that quotes a customer from Zurich shows her own words beside the translation. Transcripts contain personal data. Before handing them to a hosted service, the team anonymises them and checks that the processing complies with the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP).

Examples

An electricity distributor in Romandy wants to cut calls to customer service after a move. It maps the customer journey of a tenant who moves to another flat within its supply area.

The low point falls on the final bill, which arrives seven weeks after the move. Its cause lies two phases earlier. At the handover of the keys, the tenant has no channel to submit the meter reading. With no reading submitted, the bill rests on an estimate. The opportunity therefore goes at the Read meter phase. The head of billing owns it.

Visualisations

The map's three zones come from Kaplan: the lens, the experience and the insights. When segments differ, each persona gets its own map. A current-state map sits beside a future-state map for the same scenario. A multichannel customer journey takes one row per channel. Kaplan observes that two maps can look entirely different and each still suit its context. As long as the three zones stay legible, a poster on the wall, a digital whiteboard or a slide will do.

Cost

Tooling

Paper sheets and sticky notes on a wall are enough for an in-room workshop. The departments watch the map grow and correct it on the spot. A digital whiteboard such as Miro or Mural plays the same role for a team spread over several sites. It also keeps the map accessible after the workshop.

A spreadsheet supports the synthesis: one row per observation or quote, with its phase, its source and the emotion it signals. The team lays out the published version in a presentation or drawing tool. Specialised tools such as Smaply or UXPressia offer map templates and link maps to personas. They pay off when an organisation keeps several maps up to date.

Sources

The Nielsen Norman Group is a user experience consultancy. Its articles describe how practitioners build customer journey maps.

• Sarah Gibbons, "Journey Mapping 101", Nielsen Norman Group, 2018: the definition, the elements common to every map, the example phases and the distinction from the experience map, the service blueprint and the user story map.
• Kate Kaplan, "When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps", Nielsen Norman Group, 2016: the three-stage build, the zones of the map, touchpoints and channels, the business goals the map serves and the rules for building it.
• Sarah Gibbons, "Service Blueprints: Definition", Nielsen Norman Group, 2017: the service blueprint and its layers of action beneath the customer journey.
• Katherine N. Lemon and Peter C. Verhoef, "Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey", Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 2016, pp. 69-96: the many touchpoints and channels through which customers interact with a company.