Customer Journey Maps in a cul de sac

September 01, 2015

Faddy time again. Now don’t get me wrong we really do need to understand the customer, what

constitutes success and how we should play the game to win the triple crown consistently. What I don’t get with is this fascination with pretty diagrams full of fancy graphics and arrows purporting to be Customer Journey Maps.

Oh I know the top team were sold the idea by some new age consultancy who with religious zeal often get engaged to map our customer journeys across the enterprise. Swathes of people can get sucked into these workshops which then produce an output that certainly looks pretty, and may well be understood at a very abstract level.

Worst of it is the task then of actually integrating the CJM’s into the real business, the nuts and bolts of process, systems and people. And of course we typically discover the CJM guys don’t do that stuff, you need to engage an expert for that.

So how do we break this cycle of wasted money, exhausted resources and mislead top teams? How can we produce, from the get go, representations that talk to the top team, architects, process people, systems guys and people people? Is there a way to produce a unified picture that we can all relate to?

Let me share two short videos that I hope for you and many more shine some light into these very murky shadows.

Steves view on Customer Journey Mappinghttp://youtu.be/vccl-OkdjI0

And what is the best way to deploy Customer Journey Mapshttps://youtu.be/KaMwqVkkH5c