COVID-19 Makes Journey Mapping More Important Than Ever. Here’s How to Build One

It feels like there have been a lot of plans made…only to be disrupted.

There was a brief moment in time when it felt like we were planning for a post-pandemic future, only to find it continues to be our present.

I’ve said it before and will say it again – if you have a journey map, it’s a great time to use it.

COVID-19 and the ongoing fallout from it — workers in and out of the office, changing budgets, disrupted supply chains — are competing for your attention, but don’t let your journey map collect dust right now. It’s one of the most useful tools you have in your customer experience toolbox at this moment.

If you don’t have a journey map, now is a terrific time to create one. Or maybe two.

The next normal is still not standard or static. There are unpredictable journeys ahead of all of us as the virus continues to cause outbreaks and workforces shift and change.

Journey mapping can help plan for the future, based on what is known and what we might have to guess. Consider journey mapping a strategic planning tool to consider various options in the customer experience.

Everything outlined here can be applied to more than one map. So go ahead and explore what would happen IF…

Supply chain disruptions continued for a certain period of time
Employees couldn’t return to the office as planned
Labor shortages continued or specific roles were not filled
Customers required additional service through better delivery or pickup options
Automation was introduced to the customer journey

What If… is a great question to ask right now as we look ahead. Regardless of how many journey maps you think you need, it’s important to just start. Start with one and get a better understanding of your customer’s experience today and tomorrow.

Why Journey Maps Matter Now More Than Ever

Customer Journey Maps are a great resource, especially in times of change like these. Consider how you can use a journey map to understand how your customers experience your brand:

To find points of friction for your customers so that you can reduce the effort for them
To uncover duplication of efforts or ways our siloed organizations create inefficiencies or irritations for your customers
To stress-test new processes, products, services, or offerings for your customers
And to envision long-term changes to improve the experience for all your customers

Journey maps are not about the ultimate deliverable, nor are they an outcome unto themselves. They are a way to understand your customer’s real journey, not the one you think is happening. That knowledge can inspire actions throughout your organization to create better experiences that lead to real business outcomes.

Now that we know the future is not about “how it was before,” we need to plan accordingly. What goals are most important right now to your organization?

If you’ve been asked to review or reduce expenses, a journey map can help you identify ways to reduce service costs.
If you are looking for ways to improve retention rates, journey maps can help you identify where to add value for your customers at key points in their journey.
If you are launching a new product or communicating to a new audience, a journey map can help you provide a more seamless experience to customers who need what you offer right now.

If you’re ready to build a customer journey map, I commend you. You’re about to create a path to better outcomes for your business and your customers.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s ok: You can do this. This guide is designed to help you get there.

How to Create a Journey Map (Even virtually!)

Ready? Here are ten high-level ways to get things done using digital tools, virtual meetings, and solid best practices.

1. First things first: know your goals.

Before you can set out on any successful journey, you should have some idea of where you want to go.

What are you trying to do?
What problems are you looking to solve?
What business outcomes are priorities right now?

Don’t jump into mapping something just to map it. Determine what goals you have, so it’s very clear what actions to take once you gain the insights you’re seeking.

2. Know what you’re mapping.

While we’d all love to be able to say, “let’s map every journey possible for every customer,” this might not be the right time for such grand plans. Start with what you know you can manage.

For our purposes, I recommend starting with one customer persona and one journey. Choose a simple one to begin with, and you can always build out other journeys from there.

Here’s a recent example: The onboarding process for a certain type of customer was a known pain point at an organization. They decided that now was a great time to journey map their 90-Day post-purchase onboarding journey. Once the 90 days are mapped, then they can decide to continue mapping this journey. But in the meantime, they are able to act on the outcomes and lessons learned, improving the experience for customers as they go.

What pain point or moment in the journey creates confusion, effort, or frustration for customers? That might be a great place to start today.

3. Know your customer.

Personas help your teams relate and empathize with your customers.

A persona is a fictionalized customer profile. Your persona for that customer will have a name, some demographics like age and income, as well as what her needs, concerns, and points of interest are.

Think of her as a whole person, not just as your customer. What are her concerns beyond your brand? What are her hobbies? The more we can define our customer persona, the more we can engage our teams to show her empathy as we do our best to step into her shoes.

You may have many customers across many demographic and psychographic categories. For the sake of a simple and successful start, I like starting with one customer persona.

This doesn’t mean you can’t include other personas, especially if you have the resources to do so. But if your goal is to take quick action based on your journey map, then starting with one persona will get you there faster.

Which persona should you start with?

Typically, you may want to use the persona of your most representative customer… But in today’s environment, you may want to address a specific customer type who is especially challenged by the circumstances surrounding our new normal.

You don’t have to limit this planning to just customers. Employees and workplaces are directly impacted by the unpredictability of the near future.

For example, you may want to consider a persona for any one of these customers or employees:

Those who have delays in receiving their products, due to factors like supply chain disruptions
Those employees who want to return to working in the office
Those juggling working and caring for their family from home

Don’t allow indecision about which persona to start with stop you from moving forward. You can always adjust your persona down the line and create additional personas to fill in your customer roster. Do what you think is right, then begin.

4. Evolve your approach.

I’m the first one to say I don’t think there’s a perfect formula for journey mapping. Customers and their journeys are nuanced and complex, so no map will perfectly capture it all.

The goal here is to understand the customer’s real journey, gain valuable insights, and turn those insights into actions that lead to outcomes.

It can sometimes feel a little overwhelming because some organizations have SO MUCH data about their customers. And some organizations have almost NO DATA about their customers.

So where to start? Consider a recipe to gain the insights you need. Use a dash of this and a pound of that.

If you have too much data: Narrow down what you’re really looking for before you start.
If you don’t have any data: Consider places that can give you some, like customer service case codes and social media discussions.

I consider three categories when gathering data for journey maps.

Customer feedback and emotional data
Customer behavior and actions
Systems, procedures, and touchpoints

With the technology and tools today, we can gather a lot of this virtually.

Look at your existing Voice of the Customer (VoC) and behavioral analytics data if you have it. Some areas to investigate:

What trends are you able to identify?
What are customers telling you in their open-ended feedback?
Are certain customers visiting your support pages more?
Are they traveling through your site differently?
What are the channels, touchpoints, and systems your customers are using?
Is your mobile app more popular right now?
What happens if a customer starts on the app but has to call your contact center? Will they have to repeat themselves or access information that is hard to find (like an account number?)

Challenge yourself and your team to consider more places to play detective.

What are your customers saying on social media?
Are there user forums or online communities where they gather, with or without your brand?
What emotions are they expressing?

Finally, tap into the people in your organization who already know your customers.

Interview front-line employees like contact center agents, account managers, and delivery workers. Hop on a video conference and talk to them about what they are hearing about the journey. They can often see a trend before it becomes an actual trend line on your dashboard.

Why collect all of this data? So you can really start identifying what’s most important to the customer.

One word of warning: Data can often be used to confirm what we already believe, so be aware of that inherent bias. Instead of seeking out data that confirms your existing beliefs, look for data that helps you ask other questions to bring to your mapping initiative.

Consider three categories when gathering data for journey maps: 1) Customer feedback and emotional data; 2) Customer behavior and actions; 3) Systems, procedures, and touchpoints.

5. Workshop virtually.

Journey maps usually start with an internal group of people who start to identify the known opportunities and challenges of the customer journey. This is usually a cross-functional team who can share their assumptions and hypotheses about the customer’s perspective and experience.

This is totally possible virtually. With robust platforms like Zoom , you can even send groups to breakout rooms to solve issues and report back to the larger group. Just like an in-person workshop, there are virtual whiteboards and sticky notes to create in-real-time with the group.

Mural is a popular whiteboard app that lends itself well to this. You can also do this with simple techniques like Google Slides .

Planning this workshop is even more important, so you can set fair expectations for everyone’s involvement and set the stage for a productive session.

You want everyone who attends to stay actively involved and contribute. Consider ways to keep up engagement.
Set expectations for time together, time to work in small groups, and breaks, just like you would for an in-person workshop.
If you can, send some pre-work like collecting specific data points or reviewing specific challenges.
You can even use digital tools like real-time polls to vote on moments of truth or prioritize next actions.

Technology makes virtual journey mapping easy to do successfully. Consider Zoom’s breakout rooms to solve issues and report back, virtual whiteboard tools for brainstorming, and real-time polls to vote on moments and next actions.

6. Involve customers.

Interviewing customers is a great way to find out if the map you’ve built so far is reflective of the true customer experience.

This step can also be handled remotely. In fact, some techniques actually work better virtually.

For example: recording your interviews is a great way to use real customer quotes. Just transcribe the audio and pull out specific quotes from customers to help everyone really internalize what’s happening to customers and use that to build empathy.

Another example: I’ve never been a fan of traditional focus groups. I find they aren’t as valuable as we want them to be, and some people just take over or don’t speak up enough. With virtual focus groups, you can hear from many people at once but get their honest feedback.

They aren’t competing with all the voices in the room, and they don’t see what others are saying in the same way as an in-person focus group.

Some of the tools available, like CX Workout , tap into artificial intelligence to help rank the responses.

Customers are one of your most valuable resources. Collecting and reacting to their true feedback will virtually always create better outcomes than trying to predict their wants, pain points, and goals.

7. Synthesize the information and insights.

Once you’ve included objective data, internal insights, and customer commentary, it’s time to put it all together. Review what you’ve collected for what are the most important moments to customers.

What are the high points?
What are the low points?
How do those moments relate to your original goals and the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve?

That’s the story you want to tell. But it’s not the ONLY story. There are lower-priority stories that are still valuable, and while you may not (and arguably should not) be able to get to them immediately, you don’t want to forget about them entirely either.

The solution is simple but easy to overlook: Make sure you have a centralized place to gather and rank those customer issues and opportunities, even if you aren’t addressing them right away.

8. Produce a journey map template that works for your organization.

I’m often asked for journey mapping templates. Companies want something that’s easy to plug and play, and they want something beautiful to share and display.

If you’re on the look out for a journey mapping template, good news: We’ve got one, and it’s available both as an Interactive Google Sheet and bundled as part of our Customer Journey Mapping Workbook .

Now I understand that after all this work, it’s nice to produce a really beautiful map. It’s tempting to want to spend a lot of time making a well-designed document to share.

But first we should ask, how are we sharing this? With whom? And WHY?

The truth is, there’s no single customer journey mapping template that works for everybody.

I’ve seen all sorts of maps work:

Interactive, shared journey maps are available via many of the tools like UXpressia and CX Workout . This is a great way to work collaboratively and share throughout your organization.
An engineering client decided their best journey map template was a color-coded spreadsheet. For the purposes of driving the behaviors that would have the most impact quickly, the spreadsheet worked because it was already a format their employees understood.
Simple, one-page journey maps to tell a specific story are great when they are designed well. Design tools (and designers themselves!) can be extremely helpful in getting this right.

While your journey map framework will vary from others, most journey maps have these common characteristics:

A visual representation of the customer’s journey that includes their actions, emotions, and thoughts.
The customer’s journey phases and touchpoints
Potential next steps or recommendations for each phase.

A great journey map can use complex software or a simple spreadsheet. It can be a static document or a robust, interactive experience. The important thing is to stress how whatever you use, the map is a tool to a greater good. This is about improving the customer’s experience.

A great journey map can use complex software or a simple spreadsheet. It can be a static document or a robust, interactive experience. The important thing is to stress how whatever you use, the map is a tool to a greater good.

9. Share and prioritize.

A journey map is not something to keep to yourself!

Since social distancing began, we’ve all participated in some sort of “videoconferencing party.” Leverage all those great online meeting tools again and host a prioritization party.

What needs to be addressed first?
Who owns it?
What will they do?
How will you hold everyone accountable?

The important takeaway here: Share, share, share!

Offer to run through the findings with leaders who should know.
Ask for more input.
Share feedback.
Repeat.
Ask other departments if they’d like to host a “lunch and learn” hour.
Get creative!

10. Take action.

Once you have your map, you’re ready to take action. But don’t let the map become a relic.

It’s important to follow up, revisit your journey maps, and repeat these steps to see if those improvements are working. Use your maps to guide you and to create some sense of urgency around what needs to happen.

As things settle down and your available resources increase, you can also move on to the next phase, the next customer persona, the next journey.

But your customer journey map is never something to consider “done.” It’s a living, evolving tool… and in today’s environment, it may be changing at an especially rapid pace.

Don’t let your customer journey maps become a relic. Follow up to see if they are working and improving. A journey map is a living, evolving tool… and in today’s environment it may be changing at an especially rapid pace

Closing Thoughts

A true customer experience strategy includes not just gathering feedback but creating real strategies to take action on behalf of your customers and your brand.

While a customer journey map is one tool in that CX toolkit of yours, there are others like micro mapping, storyboarding, and service blueprinting that can be helpful, too.

Now more than ever, there’s no perfect formula for reacting to customer needs. But leveraging journey maps could be one of the best ways we can create empathy, reduce effort, and improve the brand relationship with our customers.

Sounds like a winning formula to me.