The 6 common mistakes in Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey that ultimately does not deliver the desired results is a waste of your precious time and money. To change this, here are six common mistakes in Customer Journey Mapping.

Customer Journey Mapping is a valuable methodology for gathering insights that can improve the customer experience. It is well worth an investment. Why? With these insights you understand the needs of the customer and you get a good picture of what is of value to him. You can then respond intelligently during your customer contact moments. Then you make more customers happy, customers are more loyal and you achieve more profit. Still, many companies make customer journey maps that end up as a failed attempt.

What 6 common mistakes do organizations make while mapping the customer journey?

6 Mistakes in Customer Journey Mapping

1. Creating a customer journey map based on assumptions rather than research

Organizations often think they know more about their customers than they really do. Based on assumptions, they outline a customer journey map. These assumptions are often based on their own experiences or "anecdotes" in which the customer showed the back of their tongue, but what value should you assign to such experiences? Also, creating a customer journey without research often leads to endless discussions with colleagues, because everyone thinks and thinks something different. This can cause you as an organization to end up making decisions based on arguments that are not true, and that does not lead to improvement of the customer experience.

Instead, the journey map should be based on customer experiences, and that means interviewing customers, analyzing CRM systems, doing web and mobile analysis and so on. Then discussions with colleagues will only be about what you know based on research, you'll make wiser decisions, and you'll take an effective step-by-step approach, after which the customer experience will truly improve.

2. Choosing the wrong scope for your customer journey

When does the customer journey you want to map begin and when does it end? That is the scope you need to choose for the journey map. A scope requires consideration in details, otherwise you quickly lose the overview and your focus.

An important question to ask yourself is: Are you focused on a specific process or do you want to gain insights into the entire system to discover opportunities for improvement? Knowing this will help you determine the scope of the customer journey, and the insights you gain will likely be more valuable. It will also reveal what strategic opportunities are open to your organization. By the way, both approaches provide good insights. So depending on your organization's needs and interests, choose the form that will benefit your organization the most.

3. Not choosing a clear customer perspective for the customer journey map

Many organizations create one "overall journey map. They map a customer journey on the assumption that every customer has the same needs. If you recognize yourself in this, then Blauw would like to help you out of this dream: this is not the case. When students 'quickly' eat in a restaurant on the corner of the street, their experience is different than when grandpa and grandma go out to dinner with their grandchildren in the same restaurant.

Although the steps within the customer journey may be the same, different customer segments often have different goals, expectations, needs, emotions, and thus different customer journeys. If you lump them all together, you miss a lot of valuable nuances and important insights. So you can't optimally improve the customer experience.

4. Make internal processes leading the customer journey

Suppose you sell smartphones and you want to map the customer journey. You can first look at what the organization does internally and visualize a customer journey based on customer contact moments. Unfortunately, chances are that you will then miss important moments of truths for your customer, because you will not have the customer's experience in focus. Instead of an inside-out view, you will have to develop an outside-in approach. Look at the journey from the customer's perspective. Where does his journey of buying a smartphone begin? After all, it's about how your customer experiences the journey, not what happens behind the scenes to make that journey happen. What happens internally is not important to the customer. The customer only sees and experiences the outcome of internal actions and forms his opinion based on that.

The pitfall of an inside-out customer journey map is that you focus on customer-related issues that relate only to your organization. For example, if a train at NS is delayed, it is important for NS to know whether it is due to a defect in the train or something else. But for the traveler, the cause makes no difference, he needs other transportation, this can be arranged by the NS, or outside the NS. If these kinds of important moments for the customer are not in the customer journey, you cannot add value for them at those moments. Thus, you miss unique opportunities to improve the customer journey. Therefore, start by mapping out the activities your customer undertakes during the situations the customer experiences. Keep in mind that the customer may be experiencing situations outside your company. Internal processes, customer contact moments and the like, by the way, can be added to the map later.

5. Seeing the journey map as an end goal rather than a starting point

It is not your end goal to visualize a customer journey and hang it on the wall as a painting. Nor is it your goal to improve your organization's customer experience just once. No, with that mindset, mapping a customer journey is useless. The goal is to know how your customer experiences your service, to discover problems and opportunities and to take action to improve the customer experience. It is an ungoing process: you are constantly improving your services. A customer journey map is not an end goal, but a starting point.

Before you start with customer journey mapping, it is therefore of great importance that you involve all the people who can make the difference. In this way, everyone involved gains insight into the customer's experience, everyone understands how different target groups experience the service and everyone within the organization can work to improve the customer experience.

6. Not involving relevant stakeholders in creating a customer journey

If relevant colleagues hear about your improvement actions and plans only after you have mapped out the customer journey, we predict that there will be little enthusiasm for your good ideas and improvement plans. Your colleagues will not feel involved in the process, even though they play an important role in your service and customer experience.

Do you want to prevent each department or employee within an organization from continuing to think and act from their own bubble, instead of joining forces and really working well together? Involve relevant team representatives and stakeholders from all departments within the organization in the customer journey research right from the start. This way they will feel involved, they can contribute to the design of the research in advance, everyone will see the results, and they will be more open to ideas to actually implement improvements.

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