Customer Journey Mapping — Where to Begin — Part 1 Catalog the Journey

It is important to understand that a customer journey, at its core, is a process. It may seem limited from the customers point of view, but it is a process, nevertheless.

In this series, we are going to discuss how to understand, catalog, and capture the overall customer journey and relate it back to your internal business architecture. This includes processes, resources, and systems that are required to make that journey happen successfully. Of course, a successful journey is not always the best experience. By aligning internal business architecture with the customers journey, we are now in the best position to identify improvements that will simultaneously benefit the customer and be a strategic fit for the overall business.

So where do we start?

#1 – Identify and Catalog the Journey(s)

To begin we will engage the stakeholder community to identify potential Experiences. Each experience may have multiple journeys that will be mapped and captured in the platform. A few examples of an Experience may include:

• customer buys a new car
• a new home
• new mortgage
• opens a new account
• requests a new service
• requests to close an account
• move/transfer service

Once the Experiences have been identified, we can begin to Map out the journey(s) from the customer point of view. This may include identifying and capturing the “moments” or distinct interactions a customer may have throughout the journey. These moments may include the trigger event that caused them to begin looking for a product or service, all the way through to obtaining and using the product and any support they received afterward.

For example, a prospect looking to purchase a software product might go through:

1. Trigger
2. Research
3. Web Demo
4. Custom Demo & Sales Advisement
5. References
6. Offer
7. Order
8. Implementation
9. Training / Support

Figure 1 Customer Journey Map

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. That will be the topic of the next article.