Living journey maps bring your customers' happiness to life

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022
woman rating cx experience with smartphone

A properly executed living customer journey map is a valuable and versatile tool. But you can’t create an effective journey map without interacting with your customers, because the map is representative of the interactions they have with your brand, from their perspective. While a static journey map represents a fixed point in time and can be hung on the wall for reference, a digital living journey map updates continually as journeys improve and evolve, which allows you to see progress as it happens.

When you observe a customer journey in its entirety, you see not only the spots at which you have delighted them but the points at which you have let them down. With that information, you can set about influencing the choices they make by prioritizing the most impactful touchpoints and personalizing the next best actions.

Our new ebook, The essential checklist for Customer Journey Mapping, was co-written with the author of How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change and founder of cutting-edge CX consultancy, Heart of the Customer, Jim Tincher. He points out that done properly, there are two main benefits to be had from journey mapping, optimization for more positive CX outcomes, and interventions to avoid negative outcomes. To achieve both of those outcomes, a living customer journey map must include:

  • Validated research and accurate data: Having all the data in one central display helps align your teams, gain buy-in from leadership, and break down silos that have departments working at cross-purposes. 
  • A versatile digital display: Your map display should make it easy to visualize each journey’s touchpoints, feelings, outcomes, and insights. Being able to compare customers can provide additional insight about where interventions may be needed.
  • Secure systems integration and compatibility: System integrations and compatibility mean you won’t need to rely on (or wait for) post-experience surveys to know, or intervene with, what is happening during the journey.
  • Updating and testing capabilities: Creating a living journey map is an ongoing project that evolves to reflect journey improvements and changing customer needs. 

Inasmuch as you are already communicating with your customers in some fashion, it is important that you be able to link CX tools to existing CCM strategies and platforms. You need to be able to integrate data across systems like customer communications and relationship management platforms. You need to be able to add documents and media as needed, and you’re going to want to access other systems to execute journey improvements. For instance, to send an email to a customer who is stalled in their journey, follow up on an open support ticket, or create social media content. 

Typically, the underlying opportunity in journey mapping is to fix something that’s broken, support a new corporate initiative, or learn about an unknown journey. These all represent valuable opportunities and the best way to take advantage of them is to be flexible enough to respond to them. In The essential checklist for Customer Journey Mapping, you will find a simple, but critical to-do list for each stage of your journey toward executing living customer journey maps.