What Is a Customer Journey Map?

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

Storytelling and visualization are essential facets of journey mapping because they are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise and that creates a shared vision. Fragmented understanding is chronic in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per individual department or group because many organizations do not ever piece together the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical aim of journey mapping, because without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Journey mapping creates a holistic view of customer experience, and it’s this process of bringing together and visualizing disparate data points that can engage otherwise disinterested stakeholders from across groups and spur collaborative conversation and change.

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Key Elements of Customer Journey Maps

While journey maps can (and should) take a wide variety of forms, certain elements are generally included:

Point of view. First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? For example, a university might choose either students or faculty members, both of which would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually aligns with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative.

Scenario. Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events, such as purchasing behavior or taking a trip.

Actions, mindsets, and emotions. At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies. The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Is the purpose to evaluate or design an entire, broad purchasing cycle or a contained system?

Touchpoints and channels. The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the company) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or physical store) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered.

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Insights and ownership. The entire point of the journey-mapping process is to uncover gaps in the user experience (which are particularly common in omnichannel journeys), and then take action to optimize the experience. Insights and ownership are critical elements that are often overlooked. Any insights that emerge from journey mapping should be explicitly listed. If politically possible, also assign ownership for different parts of the journey map, so that it’s clear who’s in charge of what aspect of the customer journey. Without ownership, no one has responsibility or empowerment to change anything.

Even with all the above critical elements included, two journey maps could look completely different, yet both be perfectly suitable for the context in which they were designed. Tradeoffs in scope, focus, and breadth vs. depth are required when deciding on what elements to include. To make informed decisions on those tradeoffs, consider the following:

• What level of detail is needed in order to tell the complete story?
• What elements (such as device, channel, encountered content) are also necessary in order to provide the most truthful narrative?
• Is the purpose of this journey map to diagnose issues with a current experience or to design a new experience?
• What’s the balance between external actions (on the customer side) and internal actions (on the organization side)?
• Who will be using this journey map?

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