Virtually every business in the world aspires to enhance its customer-centricity. Despite not being a new ambition, mastering customer-centricity remains an ongoing challenge for many organizations.
A widely adopted yet often underutilized tool in advancing this goal is the customer journey map. While many business leaders conceptually love the idea of customer journey maps, many find them to be lacking in practical utility, especially after their initial creation.
Unfortunately, many customer journey maps quickly fall into disuse, remaining untouched in some forgotten corner of a server, effectively gathering ‘binary dust’.
So why do these important strategic tools for customer-centricity end up neglected in a world where businesses strive to be more customer-focused?
I believe there are three primary reasons:
Ill-Defined Use-Cases
Often, journey maps are created with little consideration for potential use-cases, so it’s no surprise that they aren’t consistently found to be particularly useful.
A more effective approach is to start by identifying how these maps can add value to various teams and departments in your organization, such as customer experience (CX), product, marketing, digital, growth, and technology, to list a few.
Homogenization of Audiences
Many journey maps attempt to encapsulate the entire customer base as a singular cluster, ignoring the diversity and individuality of consumers and their respective mindsets, behaviours, drivers, barriers, and influences.
Acknowledging this diversity and designing segment-specific journey maps can lead to more relevant and applicable insights and strategies.
Low Commitment
The value of journey maps often peaks shortly after their creation, primarily due to a lack of ongoing commitment to their maintenance, evolution, and use.
Continuous maintenance and update of journey maps is crucial, given the ever-evolving nature of: consumer behaviour; environmental factors like technological advancement, economic dynamics, and cultural shifts; and the drive to identify new opportunities to strengthen your customer experience.
Customer journey maps are a central strategic tool for customer-centricity, and can be used for a wide variety of applications, including CX design, marketing strategy, product strategy, channel strategy, innovation strategy, comms planning, content strategy, and much, much more.
Maximizing the value you experience from customer journey maps is up to you – your level of commitment to customer-centricity and to using these important tools, and your ongoing investment in their maintenance and evolution.