Customer Journey Mapping — Where to Begin — Part 2 Connecting the Business Architecture

In part 1 of this series, we talked about how to identify and catalog your various customer experiences into journeys. Now that our journeys are identified and mapped, we are ready to move on to the next step, creating the relationships to our business architecture.

2. Connect the dots between your customer experience and business architecture.

Remember — a Customer Journey is merely a process that focuses on the customer point of view. If we have a process centric platform in place, we can now identify and relate the internal processes that are required to support that journey.

Close collaboration between your stakeholders, business analysts, and Business Process Management (BPM) team is required here.

• Helpful Hint: Workshops and collaboration with your customers / stakeholders who understand the process are key to breaking down the moments in your overall journey.

BPM and Process Knowledge Management platforms can really help here. The iGrafx platform provides a variety of Business Objects to help organizations clearly track relationships between Customer Experience, Internal Process, Resources, Systems, Regulatory or Operational Risk, Mitigating Controls, all the way to Corporate Strategy. Without them, our journeys are nothing more than pretty pictures on a wall with no real way to visualize their requirements or how they truly flow. In addition, making or suggesting experience improvements are best guesses rather than rooted in actual data.

Figure 1 Customer Journey with related Business Architecture

With our processes and journeys now documented and aligned we can begin to look at how to effectively monitor and measure various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure we are meeting both our internal and external expectations. That will be the topic of the next article.

Figure 2 Journey Moment with connected Business Architecture