Is Your Customer Journey Map Inside Out?

Many customer journey maps are inside-out, based on company structures, not customer needs. Without an accurate journey map, companies struggle to be relevant.

A 2019 Gartner survey reported that 82% of organizations had created customer journey maps. That figure is probably higher now. Customer journey is a term tossed about as liberally as confetti at a wedding so people assume it must be a well-understood concept.

But is it?  

Many companies need to adjust the way they view their customer journeys.

Image: Ronan Furuta from Unsplash

Many customer journey maps are inside-out.

Over the many years that I’ve advised marketing leaders, I’ve found customer journey maps often suffer from a common predicament – they are inside-out. A customer journey map is inside-out when it originates with a structure meaningful to the company rather than their customers. Inside-out maps cause several problems – content mishaps among them.

I recently talked to a company whose marketing team struggles with salespeople’s unrelenting pleas for more content. The marketers feel like they are on a hamster wheel of constant delivery and, according to their customer journey map, they’ve checked all the boxes. Yet, the sales team continue to complain.

The most common inside-out configurations are based on sales funnel stages (i.e., contacts, prospects, qualified), AIDA-type stages (i.e., awareness, interest, desire, action), or “most likely” campaign/experience paths. All these configurations have value, but none of them are customer centric. By basing customer journey maps on inside-out configurations, marketers miss out on a critical insight tool.

The customer-centric journey map is a goldmine of insights.

A customer-centric journey starts in the customer’s mind. It maps the psychological steps towards a decision. Harvard's Theodore Levitt famously advised that customers don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. A customer journey map should be an insight tool to understanding your customer's quest to get a quarter-inch hole.

Understanding how your customers make decisions, unobstructed by the desires and objectives of your company, opens critical windows of insight. Of course, you hope they will choose your brand of drill to achieve their mission, but you risk failing to persuade them if you don't understand their true needs, concerns, and opportunities.

Here's what inside-out maps miss:

Revenue funnel maps: Funnels describe an internal business process. Customers feel no obligation to proceed down a funnel-type path. Instead, they follow a path that makes sense to them resulting in customer journeys look more like children’s scribbles than orderly funnels. The squiggly path to buy a car, for example, might include a few months of listening to their brother’s opinions, clicking on a few ads, stopping by a dealership just to look, and then rejecting the brand they’d been investigating because of an Instagram post about service problems. Thus, customers weave in and out of sales pipelines causing persistent frustration between marketing and sales.

AIDA-type maps: CEB called this type the “customer-purchase-from-us-journey” because these maps describe customers’ awareness of us, interest in us, and desire for us. Marketers who use this type of customer journey map leap over the analysis of what’s in the customer’s mind in their race to get clarity on marketing tasks and usually miss some important insights.

“Most likely” paths: A campaign or experience path identifies a string of actions needed to accomplish a task, such as “download an ebook”. Detailed sequences are essential for digital programming because technology is profoundly literal. But people are not literal; we are inventive and maybe a little crazy.  A “most likely” path, even when based on data, can lead to false conclusions if it hardwires customer choices to predetermined options. What if, in the real world, a customer who is trying to reach a store two blocks down were forced to travel a mile out of the way because only certain streets were open. A marketer watching this behavior could jump to the conclusion that the long way was the customer's desire.

A customer journey map starts with a purpose and proceeds through questions.

The first step to develop a customer-centric journey map is discovering the customer’s real purpose. The customer wants to know the equivalent of: how do I get a quarter-inch hole in my wall? Once you identify this purpose, you can then mine for the psychological decision steps. A useful method is to express these steps in a series of questions that traverse from apathy (i.e., Do I care about this problem enough to solve it?) through exploring options (i.e., What is the scope of what’s possible? What alternatives are available to me and how do they compare? What are others choosing and why?) through negotiating acquisition (i.e., How can I get purchasing assistance? Are terms and conditions acceptable?) and so on through a successful implementation of that quarter-inch hole.

When I’ve taken marketers through journey analysis, invariably someone fearfully admits “but we don’t know the answer to some of these questions”. Exactly! And this is where the content problems arise. Marketers find they lack answers to as many as half the questions customers need answered. They’ve got 50 million variations on “why our product is great” and “here’s how you can buy this” but big gaping holes for difficult questions such as “what kind of a service record does your product have?” Answering these questions isn’t simple. Some questions represent issues that are hidden even to the customer themselves. But every time a significant question goes unanswered, prospective customers either stop in their tracks, thus prolonging the sales cycle or drop out of the quest entirely. These interrupts drive salespeople to seek content that answers missing questions.

Because your company has sold products in the past, someone somewhere answered those questions. Perhaps it was a partner, a service rep, another customer, or someone on Instagram. Marketers can dig up those missing answers and summarize them in basic content. It’s better to have simple answers to all the questions than dozens of creative responses to just a handful.

Once you map your customers path, you’ll have invaluable insight tool. Then, you’ll be prepared to determine the content and experiences that will help customers progress through their journey. With a successful implementation of that quarter-inch hole you will have made your customer a hero. And along the way, earned the right to revenue.

This article first appeared on CMSWire in May 2023