Stop Doing Yourself a Disservice by Doing Journey Mapping without Research

Customer Journey mapping is a popular tool and approach that many companies are using to better understand their customer’s experiences, pain points and satisfaction at individual touchpoints and overall.  At Customer experience conferences, one of the most popular topics is how companies organize cross-functional teams to develop the customer journey maps.  They reference post-it notes on long rolls of paper, gallery walks of different journey stages, swimlanes, and “persona cutouts in customer rooms”.  

What rarely gets mentioned is customer research.  Our estimate is that over 80% of journey maps have not direct customer research input into the map creation.  With the power of customer journey maps to pull the organization forward into the customer’s world and align every department and employee to deliver an on-brand experience, why not invest in real customer research to populate the customer journey map? 

Several limitations of internally-developed customer journey maps are apparent:

• they bring in employee bias and individual perspectives
• they are departmentally focused vs. customer end-to-end journey focused
• they tend to describe “what we do with customers” than “what customers experience with us”
• and they miss the raw “voice of the customer” – getting employee interpretations instead

3 easy ways to “customerize” your Customer Journey maps:

• Integrate Voice-of-the-Customer data, comments and insights into the journey maps. This provides qualitative and quantitative data to the maps that improve the objectivity of the information in the map (but may still be

• Perform Qualitative Research – a wide variety of qualitative research approaches can be activated – intercepts, focus groups (online or in person) and 1:1 interviews (phone, online, in-person) are easy to design and mobilize. More elaborate and insightful approaches include mobile and home ethnographic research, digital online tracking, eye-tracking, biometric and video observation in retail environments.  These are proven to provide critical insights and double the quality and impact of customer journey maps.

• Execute Quantitative Research – while qualitative research gives great insights, the sample sizes are frequently too small to leverage for planning and analysis purposes. Quant research – online surveys, national scale mobile ethnographic research, website intercepts or broad video observation analysis all provide large-sample data on customer actions, decisions, preferences and pain points that are necessary to building the business case for the C-Suite to make large-scale changes.

Leading companies are making investments in proactively managing their customer journeys and delivering measurable results:

• Revenue growth of 30% – 50%
• Retention improvements of 30 points
• NPS increases of 30-50 points

Don’t do a disservice by doing Journey mapping without research

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experiences in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.