Journey Maps for Fun and Retention
Almost every organization has attempted customer journey mapping at some point. Too often, the result is an eye-pleasing visualization that soon sits forgotten in a slide deck. This happens because we don’t use CJMs in a way that guides us in solving real business problems.
This methodology takes a different approach. It focuses on creating practical, actionable maps that improve customer outcomes and customer experience. This is done by paying attention to scope, timescale, and existing user data. By turning customer journey mapping into a flexible framework for understanding customer state, we can actively guide decision-making and improve outcomes and customer experience.
Regularly doing CJM can help a company see what is working at a high, medium or granular level. It can surface where human efforts can be substituted by product enhancement and where they can’t. It can help organizations expedite time to value for customers, as defined as perceived outcomes and customer experience. Being able to maximize these two outcomes leads to longer retention and customer lifetime value.
There are essentially two kinds of CJMs: First, we have single linear paths that focus on the customer’s journey through specific stages and scenarios, showing their satisfaction or frustration at each stage. It can be a map of an actual state or a desired state. Let’s call these deterministic maps. Less data may be needed for these, and they may be used more for documenting the journey, rather than analyzing it.
The other kind of maps examine the broader context or internal processes. These work backward from solving a problem and show the effectiveness or lack of existing touchpoints. They often contain many possible paths and are more similar to a marketing funnel. We will focus on these as they facilitate problem-solving and continuous improvement, and our specific target is customer retention. Since there are different ways to think about retention, we want to define the terminology and methodology clearly.
The Formula for Retention
Understanding customer retention is complex. There may be many reasons a single customer leaves a service, but in aggregate, two important factors are consistent: Customer Outcomes and Customer Experience. Put simply, outcomes are the deliverables the customer values. Customer Experience measures how the customer perceives the overall working relationship, using the product, and working with the humans connected to it. Mapping can visualize many things, but we are going to focus on these two important aspects of the customer lifecycle, as they are the most connected to retention.
It’s important to know your customer’s outcomes, as they are more easily measured than customer experience, which is highly subjective. Here is a primer on what they are and how you can define them.
Customer Outcomes
Let’s imagine we are a B2B marketing automation platform. We build a product that sends emails, tracks customer engagements, and gathers names from forms. Our customer outcomes need to align with specific objectives that drive measurable value. Here are some examples of outcomes that we want to measure in our users:
Lead Generation & Quality
- Leads: A mid-market software company generates 40% more marketing-qualified leads by implementing automated lead scoring and nurturing workflows, resulting in $2.1M in new pipeline opportunities within the first quarter.
- Lower cost per lead: A professional services firm reduces its cost per lead by 15% by automating its social media campaigns and content distribution while maintaining the same lead quality score
Marketing Team Productivity
- Campaigns: A startup enables its 3-person marketing team to execute campaigns that previously required 6 people, saving $180,000 in annual headcount while increasing campaign output by 50%
- Lower time per campaign: A technology company reduces campaign setup time from 2 weeks to 3 days by implementing reusable templates and automated workflows, allowing them to run 3x more campaigns with the same team
Revenue Impact
- Pipeline: A company attributes $4.2M in influenced pipeline to their marketing automation programs through multi-touch attribution tracking
- Pipeline per customer: A services provider increases customer lifetime value by 32% through automated cross-sell and upsell campaigns targeting their existing customer base
Knowing your customer’s outcomes makes Journey Mapping much more focused and actionable. Build segments customers based on outcomes completed, and see if CLV or Churn is correlated. If there is a correlation (there should be), then you can start to map the journeys to outcomes and see where customers are falling off.
We can map single outcomes, e.g. widgets created. We can map the path to outcomes (onboarding or enablement). We can also map the customer experience, which can include sales, renewals, or product uptime.
Customer Experience
Customer Experience is a measure of how the customer perceives to overall working relationship, both using the product and working with the humans connected to it. This includes customer service, account management, support, onboarding, documentation and product marketing. Of course, there are aspects of customer experience related to usage.
With SaaS companies there is a balance of human and product touchpoints, and often touchpoints start as human and then are automated (often to diminishing returns).
Customer experience can be measured a few different ways, and each has their challenges. Automated surveys are a common way to do it, but usually do not contain a sample size large or continuous enough to be used at scale. It can vary widely based on the product and customer, so we recommend trying to attach surveys to support tickets, and other touchpoints.
The best way to
Mapping for Outcomes and Experiences
When done well, customer journey mapping connects your organization’s work – both product and services – directly to customer outcomes, which are the currency of value. It also provides clear benchmarks that let you measure the impact of your changes over time, tracking metrics like retention and engagement. It also gauges whether great outcomes aren’t being sabotaged by poor customer experience. Did they wait too long, did they have to open multiple support tickets, were they immediately asked to upgrade to get the job they wanted done? It all becomes clearer on a clean, well-designed map.
Making CJM an org-wide tool
So if this is so useful, why isn’t every org doing it? Usually, it’s because can be pretty, and not useful at the same time.
The journey maps you see online are often done as a Website UX exercise. While these maps serve their purpose for that specific team and use case, blindly copying this template to answer different questions is like using a subway map to plan a hiking trip. Each mapping exercise needs carefully consider scope, stages, and data.
If this is done right, then CJMs are accurate, relevant, easy to use, and actionable. They become an important tool in aligning organizations on the overall customer journey.
The key is to start small, iterate often, and expand your scope as you learn. With proper planning, a good first mapping session should take just a few hours with the right team in the room. Subsequent iterations should be quicker to map. If you find yourself going longer, you’re probably trying to map too much at once. The goal is to map quickly and spend most of your time on discussion on process improvements that lead to better outcomes or experience.
Steps to a Successful Customer Journey Map
- Agree on Goals and Objectives
- Gather Operational and Customer Data
- Define Relevant customer segments and personas
- Define Relevant Customer Stages
- Identify Relevant Scenarios the Customer Undertakes
- Identify Touchpoints and Handoffs
- Complete and Validate the Customer Journey
- Analyze the pain points and devise opportunities
- Implement changes, close the loop, and measure
journey
title A Book About Creating Customer Journeys
section Plan
Set goals and objectives: 2: Author
Define relevant customer personas: 3: Author
Define relevant stages as customer states: 4: Author
section Gather Data
Add relevant scenarios the customer undertakes: 3: Author
Identify all customer touchpoints and interactions: 2: Author
Add quantitative data: churn, adoption rates: 1: Author
Add qualitative data: interviews, observations: 4: Author
section Map and Improve
Map the current customer journey, showing stages with high reconsideration: 3: Author
Analyze the pain points and devise opportunities: 5: Author
Implement changes and measure results: 4: Author
Before diving into the mapping, you need to establish the foundation that will make your CJM both accurate and actionable. These prerequisites ensure your mapping effort stays focused and produces useful insights rather than becoming an overwhelming documentation exercise. You may have done these exercises as a company, or you may need to build them ad hoc. They aren’t exactly trivial but they are keys to a good result. Here’s what you need to have ready:
1. Agree on Goals and Objectives
CJM starts with defining the problem you want to solve, understand, or visualize. Depending on what you are trying to find out, your map will look vastly different. Just like maps can be topographical, political, etc so can journey maps.
Here are common problems that CJM provides a framework for solving:
- How to identify churn risk and preempt it with triggered touchpoints or holistic changes to the customer experience.
- How to operationalize retention using segmentation and personalization.
- How to improve adoption with better onboarding, high touch enablement, or other programs.
Mapping to the objective
Back to our example of the SaaS marketing automation company. We are mapping t solve a problem: 18% churn. We know the outcomes our customer should be amassing: Higher lead gen quality, campaigns completed, or influenced pipeline.
Let’s then define the breadth of what we are going to map.
CJMs are like any other map. There are infinite ways of looking at the world, and just as many ways of looking at the customer journey. Imagine that you have a question about the boundary between France and Spain. Your choice of map matters tremendously:
- A map of the universe will not be helpful here. It’s the wrong scale.
- A map of Western Europe showing every address, road, and town would be an unreadable mess of black ink; it presents the wrong kind and amount of data.
- Even with the right scale and data, the map needs the right legend and level of readability for its intended audience
These same principles apply to CJM. You need the right scope, the right data, and the right level of detail for your specific question and audience.
Scope
Mapping is the process of zooming in and out to come up with the answers you need. The scope of a CJM can range from the entire customer lifecycle to a few stages or even the fine details of a single stage. The key is to include only the stages that are relevant to the problem at hand—no more, no less.
If you try to capture too much, the map becomes overwhelming and difficult to act on. If you zoom in too much, you risk missing crucial context. Instead, focus on the stages that matter most to your objective. For example:
- A high-level map of the full lifecycle helps executives understand broad trends and strategic priorities.
- A mid-level map covering onboarding and early adoption helps customer success teams diagnose activation issues.
- A granular map of a single stage, such as a support ticket resolution process, helps improve operational efficiency.
Choosing the right scope allows you to go deeper into the areas that will drive the biggest impact. Think of it like adjusting a telescope: push in to see details, pull out to understand patterns, and find the right perspective to do your work.
In this example, our scope it the entire first year of the customer lifecycle. We will go back 24 months and create a segment of all customers that churned within that period. We will track them, along with a second group who renewed at least one year. We don’t care about upsell in any detail, and we don’t care about customers beyond renewal. We have two rough segments: churned and not churned. We have 15 churned and 50 retained.
Data
Depending on what you want to get out of it, you add the minimum number of fields to solve the problem. That’s why you start with the problem you are looking to solve first. To define the scope and the fields you will add below.
This table is essentially a pyramidal view of strategy from the top down at whatever stage. Even how you create stages is a reflection of your strategy and will grow and change over time.
Your maps depend on the best data you can get your hands on. If you can’t measure something, it’s going to be hard to improve it. However, don’t throw away CJM if you don’t have perfect data, no org does. Start with the data you have and identify data gaps. Even qualitative data is useful as a benchmark for comparing after implementing change.
Timescale
The most confusing part of CJMs is the time scale. While some customers move in a linear fashion through marketing stages, that happens to be a poor way to assess the health of a customer. It rarely fits in any usable way.
Successful customers generally move forward, but struggling ones move back and forth, and that’s more important to focus on. Forcing a time dimension as an axis into your mapping makes it less usable.
Let’s think about that differently. Think about what are the possible states they are in and what is their temp at the time.
Putting this all together
Just as a cartographer chooses their map’s scale, data, and presentation based on its intended use, your CJM choices should flow from your specific needs. If you’re trying to speed up the renewal cycle, timelines will be crucial. If you’re trying to reduce churn, other factors may matter more. Start with your problem, choose the right scope and data to answer it, and build your map accordingly from the particular user’s perspective.
We will work through setting these properties logically in the next step: setting goals and objectives.
CJM helps with the obvious issues around adoption, engagement, and retention. It also can help with streamlining cross-functional activities, such as onboarding handoffs and communications. It helps align teams by sharing journey maps across departments to eliminate silos. Most importantly it helps validate go-to-market fit and product-solution fit.
If they need to fix existing problems, start with mapping the current state of your user journey. If you are planning major changes or innovations, build a current state and future state, to track the different process and validate results. If the goal is optimizing internal processes, adding internal time and labor, as done in service blueprints will help.
The first few forays into CJM will help you pressure test the real stages in the customer journey. It will take a bit of practice, but it’s expected. It’s why “uncharted territory” is always a bit exciting and scary.
- What is the vision? Dev teams quickly integrate our tool with their CRM, insuring they
- Where are we now? 30% of teams require our team’s assistance. 10% of teams give up, leading to churn. 80% of teams say they don’t like the tool.
- Where do we want to be? Teams are self-sufficient and can implement complex integration on their own.
- How do we get there? We look for any option to improve enablement.
Now we have a problem to solve, and we know how it will be solved. It’s usually necessary to pass this around to stakeholders to align on the goals and next steps.
2. Gather Operational and Customer Data
Quantitative data
Quantitative data brings objective measurement to your journey map through metrics that indicate success or struggle at each stage. This data should be captured in your segmentation and personas, but can also be included in the conversion rates between stages, time spent in each stage, feature adoption rates, and engagement metrics. Choose metrics that directly relate to outcomes, customer experience and objectives. Common ones should be:
- Product analytics tracking actual user behaviors
- Conversion metrics at each stage
- Drop-off points
- Channel interaction data
- Usage patterns and frequency
Start by establishing baseline metrics for each stage and isolating these metrics for the churned and successful segments of each persona. Track how these metrics change over time and look for patterns that might indicate problems or opportunities. Pay special attention to metrics that show significant variance between customer segments or those that predict churn.
Qualitative data: interviews, observations
Qualitative data adds context and emotion to your journey map through customer interviews, feedback sessions, support tickets, and direct observations. This data helps explain the “why” behind the quantitative metrics and often reveals unexpected insights about customer behavior and motivation. The goal is to understand not just what customers do, but why they do it and how they feel about it.
- Customer interviews
- In-app surveys
- Customer support interactions
- User feedback
Gather diverse perspectives through various methods: one-on-one interviews, focus groups, support ticket analysis, and user testing sessions. Look for patterns in customer feedback and pay attention to the specific language customers use to describe their experiences.
Summarize this into a single row. Call this row: What are they thinking, feeling?
Also add color to any touchpoints that may not be working the way you expect: Maybe onboarding is conducted differently, slow or rushed and the rushed version is showing up as poor customer experience or higher churn.
NPS isn’t included here because it often doesn’t give enough detail, and isn’t accurate enough to be useful in many cases. It also rarely has enough of a sample size to show improvement over time. Information gathered at QBRs or account checkins, support feedback, and other data is usually more useful. If this isn’t your experience, by all means use NPS.
These can be documented as the emotional state at each stage. It’s important to isolate the differences between your quantitative and qualitative data to see where there is dissonance. A best practice seems to be triangulating these types of data sources rather than relying on just funnel data or just surveys.
3. Define relevant customer segments and personas
Have generic personas ready. It’s much easier to start with the persona you work with the most. Personas are always wrong, but keep building them. Start with guesses. Other companies with savvy data teams use ad-hoc segments that are found using PCA or other classification methods.
Some of the qualitative things personas are useful in many cases in CJM:
| Demographic Information | Job title, education level |
|---|---|
| Purpose in Life | Why are they in this role? What box is it checking or not checking? The “why.” The purpose is the core driving force behind an individual’s actions and commitments. |
| Mission | What are they doing at their job to fulfill this purpose, how are they actualizing it? The “what.” The mission supports and fulfills the purpose. It’s more concrete and role-related. |
| Values | What drives their decisions? What are their non-negotiables? Values are the standards of behavior that guide how they pursue your mission and purpose. |
| Accountability | Who are they accountable to and what are they responsible for? How are they involved in decisions and execution? |
| Goals and Objectives, J2BD | Primary and secondary goals in using your product. What is the job they are doing and what is the gap your product fills here? |
| Pain Points | What keeps them awake (bigger problems) at night? What are the difficulties they face using your or other’s products (smaller problems) |
| Communication methods | how they issue and consume information. |
| Character traits | Describe their personality type or types. |
Data-driven personas are run via machine learning analysis or other data queries to help select and define personas. Some companies can use unsupervised methods of machine learning to identify hidden personas or segments.
Most b2b personas are very qualitative and as a result, they are not super accurate. But businesses have succeeded at this level for decades, so don’t let this stop you. Don’t be the non-marketer who can’t understand why marketing attribution isn’t perfect. Start with your gut (usually something like: “Developer, IT manager, C-level”), and try to build towards personas that stand up to both levels of scrutiny.
Give them a name that the company agrees on. Personas are fun, but keep your eyes on the prize. If you are going to give them names and avatars and Tinder profiles, don’t forget it’s not the point of CJM, they are a factor in the process.
4. Define Relevant Customer Stages
To have a truly cross-functional CJM, start with mapping all the ways your org maps customer lifecycle stages (decision, adoption, reconsideration). Then go to each department: product, marketing, Customer Success, Sales and get their stages. You don’t have to agree on them, but CJMs become much more relevant in the organization when the various customer states are considered and unified into a journey map. It should look like a table with a row for each stage. Each company do these differently, and often several departments are doing them all differently. Or not at all.
To make the map more readable, decide on a single set of stages. A good way to do this is to use the stages that reflect the journey from the customer’s point of view. This is a simple version that has stood the test of multiple mappings:
| Prove Value | Gain Efficiency | Innovate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reconsideration |
About “Reconsideration”
One of the ways to make CJMs valueable is to not make every journey a happy one. That’s where reconsideration and risk states come in. Reconsideration can happen at any stage of the customer journey when something triggers doubt about continuing with your product. It’s a “risk state” rather than a discrete stage, meaning it should be tracked across all phases. Common causes include unmet expectations, performance issues, evolving needs, budget constraints, or internal business changes.
Here is an example:
| Prove Value | Gain Efficiency | Innovate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reconsideration | Can’t use the tool meaningfully | Can’t get expected results or poor performance | Hard to use, low fit for long-term needs |
To incorporate reconsideration into your CJM, catalog the primary reasons customers re-evaluate their purchase. Then, align them with your journey map to highlight when and why risks emerge. This ensures proactive mitigation strategies are built into each phase.
Stage Exit Criteria
Finally, each stage has to have unique criteria that determine if that persona in question is really in that stage. It’s going to be different for each persona. For the stages above, here are the parameters to determine which stage a persona is in:
| Prove value | Gain Efficiency | Innovate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry Criteria | Initial implementation or usage has begun. Working to achieve their first meaningful outcomes. | Meaningful outcomes achieved on an increasing basis. The customer is building reliable, repeatable processes | Usage is optimized achieved outcomes are leading to new or improved products and services. |
| Key indicators | • Solution is installed/configured but not yet delivering measurable results | ||
| • Teams are in training/onboarding phase | |||
| • No successful widgets completed yet | • Core use cases are successfully implemented | ||
| • Teams have established standard operating procedures | |||
| • Getting consistent, measurable results | • Teams are creating custom solutions/workflows | ||
| • Integrating with additional systems/APIs | |||
| • Driving business transformation beyond initial use case | |||
| Reconsideration | Can’t use the tool in a meaningful way | Can’t get the expected results or hampered by poor performance. Not fit for purpose or use | Hard to use, low overall fit |
| Stage | Exit Criteria | Reconsideration Triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation | 3+ successful API calls | >48h delay in first integration |
| Adoption | 80% feature adoption | <2 weekly active users |
Identify the outcomes at each state.
These factors shouldn’t have to be redone for each CJM. Essentially they are the constants in the framework, and while they may change over time, they are a solid starting point for mapping. Here is an example of what they should look like.
Example Prerequisites
- The problem we are trying to solve, understand, or visualize:
- Personas in question:
| Persona | Qualitative factors | Quantitative |
|---|---|---|
| Name | ||
| Name |
- Stages in question:
| Stages | Prove Value | Gain Efficiency | Innovate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | |||
| Sales | |||
| Product | |||
| CS | |||
| Composite, Agreed Upon Stages | |||
| “Reconsideration” |
5. Identify relevant scenarios the customer undertakes
Scenarios are the activities your customer takes within each stage to achieve outcomes. At each stage list all of the activities the customer undertakes to achieve an output (something deliverable) or an outcome (some kind of deliverable that is actually of value to them). Outputs may have zero value to the customer. Outcomes, however, should have value to the customer.
Give each scenario a name, a description and the outcome they are trying to achieve. In most cases, you will want to capture how often customers engage in these activities. An “H-M-L” level of effort is sufficient in accordance with the “Keep it simple” rule of CJM.
The granularity depends on the objective of your CJM. For example, scenarios can be tied to customer touchpoints, to estimate the labor involved in delivering an outcome. This starts to mimic a service blueprint type of exercise, and that may not the problem you are trying to solve.
Here is an example of defining scenarios in the “Prove Value” stage for a developer. The CJM is focused on improving adoption. The detail should match the scale of the problem in question.
| Task or Sub-task | Description | Output/Outcome | LOE | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task: Get started | First time user experience | N/A | ||
| Sub-task: Install SDK | Going to website, finding version, downloading and installing SDK | Output | L | Well-tested, works on all three supported OS |
| Sub-task: Get Token | Contact the CSM and request a token. | Output | H | Can take >5 days depending on day of week requested |
| Sub-task: Get Authenticated | Runs a command that matches the dev to the account and allows them to use the SDK | Output | M | So rated because there are frequent issues |
| Sub-task: Run example script | Execute a script that shows a simple scenario | Outcome: Assess results | L | 99% of the time, this just works if everything else is set up. Could this be improved? |
Notes:
- Your LOE depends on the persona. Do Windows users struggle to download the SDK? It might be considerably higher for them. Either be more specific in the CJM scope or average out the overall LOE.
- LOE should be graded on the same scale by the entire team. It should be subjective, based on the persona in question. Look at the “Get Token” example. This team rated getting an authentication token as High, because many other competitor services provide this via command line. If tokens were avaliable in a dashboard, they might have given the LOE a medium level. In this case, the consensus was that for a developer, the expectations are that they can use their preferred tool, the CLI.
- These sub-tasks can be rolled into one one “Getting started” task or all can be included. If they are rolled up, use the maximum LOE to define the overall task LOE. In this case, getting started for a developer is a High LOE.
6. Identify all customer touchpoints, handoffs, and interactions
In the context of customer journey mapping, touchpoints are the intentionally designed interactions between your team and the customer to drive successful outcomes. These are your planned moments of engagement that help customers achieve value throughout their journey. This definition may differ from other use cases, but we want to separate activities that involve the product (normal use) from the moments we are adding, editing, or otherwise trying to influence.
To map your existing touchpoints, start by documenting every current interaction your teams have with customers. List them chronologically within each journey stage. Include all omnichannel, programmatic touchpoints (like automated emails or in-app messages) and human touchpoints (such as onboarding calls or QBRs).
Each touchpoint should include:
| Probably Required | Context |
|---|---|
| Name | What triggers this interaction |
| Description | Owner |
| Delivery (Automated, Human, Hybrid) | LOE |
| Desired outcome and success rate | Labor costs per touchpoint |
A group workshop isn’t the place to capture all of this information. Pick a name, add the available information and populate the other data before the brainstorming starts later. The goal isn’t to create new touchpoints yet – it’s to understand your current state. This exercise often reveals gaps in coverage, overlapping efforts, or misaligned timing that can be optimized later.
| Touchpoints | Trigger | Desired CS Output | Desired Outcome | LOE | Outcome Success Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome email drip (Marketing Automated) | Signup | Sets expectations for onboarding process, generates excitement, educate. | Move to Innovation stage faster, positive customer experience | L | 75% click through |
| Kickoff call (CSM-led) | Signup | Establishes success criteria and timeline, supports | Prove Value, Efficiency, Customer Experience | L | Attendance: 75%, Participation: 50%,Next steps: 35% |
| First training session (CSM, SE) | Kickoff Call | Covers core features | Prove Value, Efficiency, Customer Experience | H | Attendance: 65%, Participation: 75%, Next steps: 50% |
| Health check email (CS Automated) | Signup + 30; Kickoff call | Checks for early warning signs | Prove Value, Efficiency, Customer Experience | M | 55% click through to dashboard |
| Follow-up training (CSM, SE) | Kickoff Call | Addresses specific use cases | Prove Value, Efficiency, Customer Experience | L | Attendance: 50%, Participation: 60%, Next steps: 40% |
| QBR (CSM-led) | Signup + 90 | Validates initial value delivery | Prove Value, Customer Experience | H | Attendance: 30%, Participation: 40%, Next steps: 60% |
Here are a few questions that might be unearthed with this example:
- Why is dev attendance at QBRs so low? Is there a dev-focused version that can be executed that contributes to Innovation or Efficiency?
- Is there a way to improve follow up training participation, or is it even necessary?
- Why aren’t more devs clicking through on the health check information? Are we surfacing the right information, or is nothing worthy of a visit?
By mapping these existing touchpoints in each stage, you can uncover gaps, inefficencies and activities that do not create customer value.
| Touchpoint | CSAT (Quant) | Common Complaint (Qual) | Cost Per Interaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | 4.2/5 | “Too many disjointed emails” [37%] | \$23 |
7. Complete and Validate the Customer Journey
Map the typical stages the persona goes through and documenting the experience.
Mapping the current journey involves synthesizing all the collected data into a visual representation that shows the end-to-end customer experience. This map now clearly shows stages, scenarios, touchpoints, and metrics, at each stage. By highlighting areas of success or high reconsideration, you have created a visual understanding of the current state.
Now you can use this information to assess a baseline journey map that compares the ideal path through each stage to the actual path taken by your persona or segment. By overlaying the actual customer experience, including points of friction, emotional highs and lows, and areas where customers commonly get stuck or consider alternatives.
Investigating and Addressing Dev Drop off issues. Devs get stuck. We want to know why and discover how to fix.
Persona: Entire Dev User Profile
| Stages | Prove Value | Gain Efficiency | Innovate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outcomes | Successful API calls, CRM Integration, Initial experiments | Marketers running experiments, Experiments show positive results | |
| Scenarios | 1. Install SDK (LOE: H)2. Make first API call (LOE: M)3. Connect to CRM (LOE: H) | 1. Set up personalization rules (LOE: M)2. Configure deduplication (LOE: L)3. Optimize data flow (LOE: H) | 1. Design experiment (LOE: M)2. Run A/B test (LOE: L)3. Analyze results (LOE: H) |
| Touchpoints | 1. Email drip (Automated)2. Onboarding call (Human)3. Documentation (Self-serve)4. Support tickets (Human) | 1. Check-in call (Human)2. Webinar (Hybrid)3. In-app notifications (Automated) | 1. Quarterly business review (Human)2. Advanced feature workshop (Human)3. Community forum (Self-serve) |
| Quantitative Data | 1. API call success rate: 75%2. Time to first API call: 2 days3. CRM integration rate: 60% | 1. Personalization adoption: 40%2. Dedup efficiency gain: 25%3. Data processing time: -30% | 1. Experiment participation: 20%2. Positive experiment results: 65%3. Feature adoption from experiments: 35% |
| Qualitative Data | “API documentation is confusing””CRM integration was harder than expected” | “Personalization has improved our campaigns””Dedup saved us hours of manual work” | “Experiments are helping us innovate faster””Need more guidance on advanced features” |
| Reconsideration | Unable to use API effectivelyToo long to get up and running | Errors or downtimeDifficulty scaling personalization | Missing advanced featuresLack of innovation support |
| What are they thinking, feeling, doing? (from Qualitative) | |||
| Pain Points (from Qualitative) | |||
| Opportunities | |||
8. Analyze the pain points and devise opportunities
The whole reason you do mapping is to read between the lines. Data driven solutions are incredibly powerful. But this is a way to see things from a different perspective and make an informed but gut-driven assessement of the customer journey. It’s a chance to read between the lines of the systemization that has been put into place.
It’s time to analyze the data and insights you’ve gathered. Start by reviewing each stage of the journey, focus on customer experience and the most important outcomes. Cross-reference qualitative feedback with quantitative data to validate pain points. Look for areas where activity sinks, outcomes fizzle, customers struggle or express frustration. Review high-effort touchpoints, emotional low points, and stages with poor quantitative metrics.
| Stage | Emotional Score (1-5) | Common Sentiment Phrases |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | 2.8 | “Confusing”, “Rushed”, “Lost” |
Now add your thoughts how we get to our desired state. As a brainstorming tool, its good to start with all ideas on the table. No idea is bad. Stack rank execute and redo a much quicker version of CJM in a quarter. Brainstorm cross-functionally.
| Opportunity | Impact | Confidence | Effort | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Extended onboarding | 9 | 7 | 6 | 1.5 |
| Editor Day 0 inclusion | 8 | 8 | 3 | 2.67 |
Finally, the document is usually a mess by this point. Remove extraneous data and information. Make it look good and ready to present.
9. Implement changes, close the loop, and measure
Create an action plan. After generating ideas, prioritize your opportunities based on potential impact and feasibility. Consider factors like estimated impact on key metrics (e.g., churn reduction, adoption increase), resource requirements, implementation complexity, and alignment with overall business goals. A simple prioritization matrix can help visualize and decide which opportunities to pursue first.
Create cross-functional teams and assign owners, ensuring representation from relevant departments. Set clear, measurable goals for each improvement. For instance, you might aim to reduce token generation time from 5 days to 1 hour, increase CRM integration success rate from 60% to 85%, or boost developer QBR attendance from 30% to 60%.
Develop detailed action plans for each initiative, breaking them down into concrete steps with timelines and resource allocations. Execute these plans in sprints, starting with quick wins to build momentum. This iterative approach allows you to make progress while remaining flexible.
Schedule regular review sessions, either monthly or quarterly, to analyze results and adjust strategies as needed. Use your CJM to “diff” the changes. Your journey map should be a living document, constantly showing the results of changes being implemented.
- Conduct “undercover customer” simulations with executives
- Implement session replay tools to compare mapped vs actual paths
Tailoring maps for specific needs
As your journey mapping practice matures, you’ll want to create specialized maps for different use cases and stakeholders. Here are some examples of tailored maps:
A churn risk map focuses on identifying early warning signs of potential churn. It highlights emotional low points and high-effort interactions, including metrics like engagement drop-offs and support ticket frequency. This map helps customer success teams proactively address issues before they lead to churn.
An adoption acceleration map emphasizes onboarding stages and feature discovery. It showcases successful user paths and “aha” moments, incorporating product usage data and feature adoption rates. This map is particularly useful for product and customer success teams working to improve time-to-value.
A cross-sell opportunity map highlights moments when customers are most receptive to additional offerings. It includes customer lifetime value (CLV) data and product affinity scores, mapping touchpoints where complementary products or services can be introduced naturally. Sales and marketing teams can use this map to optimize their upsell and cross-sell strategies.
An internal process optimization map focuses on behind-the-scenes activities that support the customer journey. It includes metrics on internal response times and handoff efficiency, highlighting areas where automation or process improvements can enhance the customer experience. This map is valuable for operations and customer service teams looking to streamline internal workflows.
Remember, the key to effective journey mapping is continuous iteration. As you implement changes and gather new data, regularly update your maps to reflect the evolving customer experience. This living document approach ensures your journey maps remain a valuable tool for driving customer-centric improvements across your organization.
By tailoring your maps to specific needs and continuously refining them based on real-world data, you’ll create a powerful framework for understanding and enhancing the customer journey, ultimately driving better business outcomes and stronger customer relationships.
Conclusion
That’s it. I hope we have conveyed that Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) are powerful tools that provide organizations with valuable insights into their customers’ experiences. By know whould should understand the essential steps of creating effective CJMs, from setting clear objectives, defining relevant personas and stages, identifying key scenarios and touchpoints, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data, to using the resulting insights to implement meaningful improvements. Please start to tailor CJMs for your specific needs and use them as living documents to continuously enhance the customer experience.
By visualizing the customer’s journey from initial engagement to long-term loyalty, companies can pinpoint areas of friction, optimize touchpoints, and create more personalized, value-driven experiences. Moreover, CJMs serve as a unifying force, aligning cross-functional teams around a shared understanding of the customer, breaking down silos, and fostering collaboration to enhance the overall customer experience. Best of luck.
Scott
References
- ITIL v4
- Mapping Experiences
- Your Guide to Practical Experience Blueprinting
- The Accountability Circle