We all know that mapping the customer journey/experience 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 and then test the new experience with focus groups, and you keep measuring the satisfaction with customer experience audits.  The often-lost idea is that you can also complete journey maps for employees, partners, and managers.

Journey Mapping. 

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 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 organization's 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 happens more frequently, managers will struggle unless there is some journey mapping for recognizing opportunities/threats, making effective decisions, and taking appropriate actions.  Organizations will be increasingly dependent on managers doing the appropriate thing in any number of business scenarios, so the manager's 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 more important over time as well.  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 affected customers.  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" dictating 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 other 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, which is constantly changing and improving.  How can you compete over time without journey/experience mapping?

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