Customer experience and journey mapping

Most organisations know their experience is inconsistent. Few can show where or why.

Every team can describe their part of the journey. Almost nobody can describe the whole of it, in order, with evidence. That gap is where budget gets spent on the wrong problem.

The symptoms are familiar. Customers repeat themselves at every handover. Two teams give contradictory answers because they are reading different systems. A process that made sense when it was designed now spans four owners and nobody has authority over the whole thing. Everyone agrees the experience should be better, and nobody agrees on what to fix first.

This service produces the missing artefact: one evidenced picture of the journey as it is, one agreed picture of the journey as it should be, and a sequenced route between them that names owners and effort. It is deliberately practical. The output is not a poster for the wall. It is a decision making tool.

What this service covers

• Customer experience strategy

  What experience you intend to deliver, to whom, and how you will know whether you are delivering it. Principles specific enough to settle an argument, and measures the business already understands.

• Customer journey mapping

  The real path a customer takes to reach a goal, across every channel, team and system involved. What they are trying to do, what they actually encounter, where effort accumulates, and what is happening behind the scenes to cause it.

• Product vision

  A clear statement of what a product is for, who it serves and what it will deliberately not do. Written so that a roadmap can be argued against it, not so that it can be printed on a slide.

• Single customer view

  Where customer information is created, duplicated, contradicted and lost across your systems, and what it would take to hold one joined up view. Part data, part process, part governance.

• Business and process alignment

  Mapping the internal processes, teams, handovers and systems that sit underneath the customer journey, so an experience problem is traced to its operational cause rather than blamed on the interface.

• Current state and target state

  The journey as it is today, evidenced rather than assumed, alongside the journey you intend to deliver. The gap between the two is the work, sized and sequenced.

How an engagement runs

1. Frame and scope

   Agree which journey, which customers and which outcome matters. One complete journey done properly is worth more than six mapped at a surface level. Scope, effort and dates are confirmed in writing before work starts.

2. Discover

   Interviews with the people who own each part of the journey, review of the systems and data involved, and research with real customers, including people with disability and people using assistive technology.

3. Map the current state

   The journey as it actually runs, including the workarounds, the manual steps and the dead ends nobody documented. Pain points are recorded with evidence attached, not asserted.

4. Trace the operational cause

   Each significant failure is followed back to the process, system, data gap or ownership boundary that produces it, so remediation targets the cause rather than the symptom.

5. Define the target state

   The journey you intend to deliver, agreed across the teams who will have to build and run it. Written with enough specificity that a design or a backlog can be checked against it.

6. Sequence the work

   A prioritised roadmap from current state to target state, with effort estimates, dependencies, named owners, and quick wins separated from structural change.

7. Hand over or continue

   A walkthrough with the teams who will carry it. Where you want delivery support as well, we can continue into product management, project management, design and remediation.

What you receive

• A current state journey map, evidenced, covering every channel and handover in scope
• A service blueprint tracing the journey to the teams, processes and systems underneath it
• A pain point register with severity, evidence and traced operational cause
• A defined target state journey, agreed across the participating teams
• Customer experience principles and the measures that show whether they are being met
• A product vision statement where the engagement covers a specific product
• A single customer view assessment covering where customer data fragments and what it would take to join it
• A sequenced roadmap with effort, dependencies and owners
• An executive summary written for the people who approve the funding

Where accessibility fits

Accessibility and customer experience are the same subject examined at different resolutions. An accessibility barrier is simply an experience failure with a clearly identified cause and a clearly identified group of people it stops. Our longer piece on that overlap sets out the argument in full.

Journey work that only follows the easy path produces a target state that is not achievable for a meaningful share of your customers. We build people who use screen readers, magnification, switch access and voice control into the research, so barriers surface during discovery rather than during a conformance audit two years later, when they are far more expensive to remove.

That does not turn this into an accessibility engagement. It stays a customer experience engagement. It simply produces a target state that survives contact with all of your customers, and it means the work feeds directly into user testing and remediation if you choose to continue.

Who this is for

Engagements are senior led, delivered on shore, and scoped in writing with fixed pricing before any commitment. See how we work for engagement structure, insurance and service levels.