Customer journey mapping (or journey mapping) is a visual story of how your customers interact with and experience your products, processes, and services.
The customer journey map is a visual map that illustrates the customers’ processes, goals, needs, and perceptions throughout their interaction and relationship with an organization. The customer journey map often captures the customers’ experience before, during, and after an interaction.
The journey map allows the project team to map and analyze the customer’s journey to design customer-centered solutions. A key to successful customer journey mapping is to employ empathy to experience what the customer is experiencing –challenging oneself to see the process from the customer’s perspective.
As an improvement method, journey mapping should…
- Be approached as an ongoing discipline. Journey mapping is not a one-time event.
- Be collaborative.
- Be customer-focused. The customer journey map must be developed from the customer’s perspective, not the organization’s.
- Include quantitative and qualitative data. Journey maps are created using existing data and observing, talking to, and engaging customers and front-line employees. The goal is to get them to tell a story of their experience.
- Be easy to understand, share, and update.