Where People Go Wrong with Journey Maps

by Braden Kelley

When it comes to doing great customer experience work on behalf of HCLTech clients, journey maps are foundational. But it is harder to create meaningful, actionable journey maps than people might think. Here are a few ways people stray from the optimal path when it comes to journey maps:

Not creating meaningful personas first
Not talking to their chosen group of people before building personas and journey maps (do your research)
Not validating the high-level journey phases internally and externally before beginning to map
Building a journey map for multiple personas without consciously identifying and understanding the risks
Accepting sticky notes during journey mapping sessions as-is — don’t probe to make sure meanings are clear
Failing to cluster similar sticky notes and request permission to combine where appropriate
Not having workshop participants vote on the importance of touchpoints, the intensity of pain points, and impact of experience improvement opportunities

A journey mapping workshop is an incredible opportunity to surface assumptions, uncover the hidden and build alignment, motivate action and create long-term momentum and commitment for people-centric improvements.

Creating Journey Magic

Improving customer experiences is an investment with real returns. These returns can go beyond the financial into the realm of psychological and social benefits. If you didn’t care about these people, you wouldn’t invest the time (and money) to go beyond your marketing or process funnel-based understanding of them and dive deep to understand what their experience and interactions with your organization really look like in a journey mapping workshop.

A well-researched, lovingly crafted journey map can be a thing of beauty that many organizations share far and wide and even print poster-sized and mount in the hallways of their headquarters so that everyone can remain anchored in the experience of those they serve and laser-focused on the latest experience improvement projects.

Continue reading the rest of this article on HCLTech’s blog