Journey/Experience Mapping Isn't Just for Customers

Jim   Sinur
Jim Sinur VP and Research Fellow, Aragon Research Read Author Bio || Read All Articles by Jim Sinur

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?

# # #

Standard citation for this article:


citations icon
Jim Sinur, "Journey/Experience Mapping Isn't Just for Customers" Business Rules Journal, Vol. 17, No. 10, (Oct. 2016)
URL: http://www.brcommunity.com/a2016/b878.html

About our Contributor:


Jim   Sinur
Jim Sinur VP and Research Fellow, Aragon Research

Jim Sinur is an independent consultant and thought leader in applying business process management (BPM) to innovative and intelligent business operations (IBO). His research and areas of personal experience focus on business process innovation, business modeling, business process management technology (BPMT), processes collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, business policy/rule management (BRMS), and leveraging business applications in processes. Mr. Sinur was critical in creating the first Hype Cycle and Maturity Model, which have become a hallmark of Gartner analysis, along with the Magic Quadrant. He has been active in the rules, data and computing communities, helping shape direction based on practical experience. Mr. Sinur has vertical industry experience on the investment and operational sides of the insurance and financial services.

Read All Articles by Jim Sinur
Subscribe to the eBRJ Newsletter
In The Spotlight
 Jim  Sinur
 Ronald G. Ross

Online Interactive Training Series

In response to a great many requests, Business Rule Solutions now offers at-a-distance learning options. No travel, no backlogs, no hassles. Same great instructors, but with schedules, content and pricing designed to meet the special needs of busy professionals.