#20: Do We Really Need Customer Journey Maps?

This week I am discussing the very important but highly contentious question "Do We Really Need Customer Journey Maps?"

In my 10+ years in Customer Success, I've seen and helped design my fair share of Customer Journey maps. From the simplest — containing only the stages of the lifecycle — to complex, multilayered and crossfunctional ones. 

The sad reality is that having a Customer Journey Map doesn't always translate into delivering the desired experience. 

Why? 

Because having pretty slides is different than having processes, systems and teams aligned and optimised to drive outcomes for customers.

But I still believe Customer Journey Maps are a valuable tool when used right. 

So today I'm sharing 3 ways you can take your Customer Journey Map from the PDF and into reality. 

🛣️ Mapping the Customer Journey Of Today

As CS professionals, we pour our hearts and souls into creating an optimal space for customers to thrive. But we can get so attached to the idea of the "perfect", that we can’t bring ourselves to accept the harsh reality of today. 

My advice to you is to leave your idealism at the door for this exercise. 

Start by mapping the actual journey of your customers from prospect to customer. Not what you would like it to be, but what it is. 

You can do this by interviewing internal stakeholders and existing customers and looking at website behavioural data and other data points across marketing and sales. An underrated option is to become a mystery shopper in your own business and pretend to be a prospect. 

💣 Identify Areas Of Friction

By building a map of today's reality, you should also have gained a deeper understanding of where things go wrong today. 

Make a list of those pain points and organise them according to the ones that have the biggest negative impact on your customers.

And then, plot them on a 2x2 matrix of the pain that it causes vs. ease-to-fix. You will end up with 4 buckets: 

1. High Pain, Easy to Fix -> These are your quick wins.
2. High Pain, Hard to Fix -> These are your high-impact plays.
3. Low Pain, Easy to Fix -> These are things to look at if capacity allows.
4. Low Pain, Hard to Fix -> These are things you forget about for now.

🗺️ Create A CS Roadmap

Unfortunately, as much as we want to fix everything right away, we can't stop the company for 6 months and start again. We have to take an iterative approach. 

That's why you need to take your top priority improvements and create a roadmap. 

My tip is to build a 12-month roadmap using the top 2 categories of the prioritisation exercise you did.

• Quick Wins: The list of painful and easy-to-fix items should be something you dive into straight away. They are your low-hanging fruit improvements that can make a big difference. Because these are simple items, they make great delegation tasks for CSMs who are looking for extra responsibilities and growth opportunities. You can pick multiple of these each quarter.
• High Impact Plays: The list of painful and hard-to-fix items should be prioritised by their ability to generate value or remove risk. These will likely need more investments and cross-functional work. You will likely only move the needle on 2-3 of these a year.

This roadmap should become a one-page document that you can easily share with your cross-functional partners, leadership and team. 

Next, you will take that roadmap and build it into a tracker. You can use a project management tool, a Trello board, a Notion page or a simple Excel sheet. This is what you will use to ensure each play is moving in the right direction.

Armed with your CS Roadmap, you will have an accountability structure for your team and a communication tool to demonstrate progress to your leadership team. 

As you make progress in those fixes, remember to update the journey map with the latest processes!

Summary

A Customer Journey Map anchored in reality is a valuable tool to help you understand where you have friction in the CX. But it doesn't end there, you need to follow up with a CS Roadmap to drive continuous improvement. 

P.s.: When you want to drive big transformation, you might benefit from designing a futuristic customer journey to communicate the desired future state. But unless it's backed up with a roadmap of how to get there, it's worthless.

That's it for today folks.

See you next week!