Journey Mapping: It’s Not Just for Customers

by Jim Sinur

Customer Journey Mapping is one of the linchpins of digital transformation. If you are a planning organization, you map the journey before designing the customer experience. If you are a measurement focused organization, you mine the experience and map it for analysis. If you are an organization that pursues excellence, you map the journey before you design, test the new experience with focus groups, and keep measuring the satisfaction with customer experience audits.

But what organizations often neglect to think about is creating complete journey maps for employees, partners, and managers.

Employee Experience Mapping:

How your employees feel can often affect how the customers feel about your organization, so creating a pleasing journey for your employees as they service their customers can be as important as the customer journey itself. If this is not motivation enough for organizations, consider how difficult it will be to attract the new and tech savvy generations to your organization if the experience is not pleasing and effective. Organizations are not only competing for the hearts of customers, but also for the hearts of employees and recruits.

Manager Experience Mapping:

While employee journeys lead to happier employees and increase the effectiveness of your organizations operations through employee workbenches or personas, managers are often left to fend for themselves. As the speed of business increases in velocity and the emergence of new signals and patterns happen more frequently, managers will struggle without some journey mapping for recognizing opportunities / threats, making effective decisions, and taking appropriate actions. Organizations will be dependent on managers doing the appropriate thing in any number of business scenarios, so the managers journey will become more important over time.

Partner Experience Mapping:

Like it or not, the end-to-end process or journey to deliver a product or service will become even more important over time. Even if you are outsourcing parts of the experience, you will want to consider the overall effectiveness of the journey for the partner and your customers affected. If you have intimate partners that really add significant value to your product or service, making them happy is just smart business practice. The days of “big dogs” dictate to partners is evaporating, so partner experiences are growing in importance.

Net; Net:

While the case for Customer Journey Mapping is pretty obvious today, there are myriad opportunities to create a better digital organization. I think that journey mapping will become a staple for organizations in many ways in our new digitally focused world that is constantly changing and improving.