Have you mapped these 3 vital components on your customer journey?

Before you make any decision around your business, be it people, investment, strategy or customers, you need to understand its impact. As the proverb goes: look before you leap.

But what we don’t talk about enough is the quality of the "look”. Most organisations already have experience workstreams, a business intelligence team, and numerous metrics to provide insight and understanding. However, the real problem isn’t the lack of these components; it’s that they’re not connected or visible in a holistic view to decision-makers. If your view is blinkered by siloed thinking or poor workplace understanding, even well-intentioned decisions could do more harm than good.

It’s for this reason that more business leaders are focused on building a holistic view of their organisations, so they can see the full picture at any one moment and understand the real impact their decisions have.

However, building a holistic view isn’t always straightforward. It requires three key ingredients: experience, intelligence and measurement.

Related content: Blueprints to Evolve Your Voice of Customer Programme

1. Experience: customer and employee

Experience isn’t just about customers. To gain a truly holistic understanding, you need to look at the experience of your customers and employees, and the experience of your channels and processes.

A powerful starting point is to map your experiences for both customers and employees. This helps you see:

• Where friction points exist
• Where technology is relied on
• Where that same technology is causing problems.

This gives you a clear picture of where your experiences are working and where they’re breaking.

Test your understanding: Can you point to one single map that shows both the customer journey and the key employee moments that enable it? If you can’t, you’re likely missing hidden friction that never shows up in your CX dashboards.

2. Business intelligence

Business Intelligence is about understanding your customers and the needs, emotions and behaviours that drive them. This can take the form of surveys, customer studies, behaviour observation, analytics, and more.

While intelligence helps you derive business value and customer value, it is not something that can be gathered and forgotten. Having effective intelligence requires two critical components:

• Oversight over all the intelligence your business is gathering. When teams operate in silos, you end up with duplicated studies, confused results, findings and recommendations that don’t take into account the bigger picture, along with wasted spend. The best intelligence is unified and accessible to all of your organisation.
• Action: You need people to turn insights into action. This can be done in-house or by third-party specialists; however, critically, they need the skillset and capacity to design solutions and embed and support their adoption.

Test your understanding: When was the last time two teams accidentally commissioned overlapping research on the same audience or problem? If your answer is “recently” or “I’m not sure”, your intelligence isn’t unified.

3. Measurement

Measurement underpins both experience and intelligence. These are the brand, business, customer and employee metrics. Without them, you don’t know if you’re improving or just spinning your wheels.

What makes the ‘right’ measure?

The right metrics are those that move the business. If that metric improves, so does your business performance.

Test your understanding: Can you name one metric that all three of these teams are jointly accountable for across the journey? If not, your measurement is likely driving misaligned behaviours.

It’s also worth noting that you may have the right metric but are measuring it in the wrong way.

Bringing all three together on the customer journey

Once you have experience, intelligence and measurement in place, the next step is to review all stages of your customer journey from acquisition through to purchase, onboarding, win-back and beyond. Across this journey, you overlay experiences (customer and employee), intelligence and insights, and measurements, along with any technology you use.

“Not surprisingly, this should reveal where the gaps are,” says Nathalie Phillipsen, Director of Growth at Perceptive. “Once you’ve fully mapped it all, you’ll be able to see where your biggest problems and opportunities are.”

Let’s run through a hypothetical example: Imagine a customer wanting to buy a new phone.

You’ve mapped the buyer journey and applied all the experience touchpoints, intelligence and measurements to it. The data shows a major friction point: customers can’t buy the phone as a guest and need to log in with their customer ID. Your metrics reveal a 60% drop-off at this step. Most customers don’t know or can’t find their IDs and don’t return to purchase despite prompting later.

With this friction identified, you introduce a one-time login code. Customers no longer need to remember an old password, drop-off falls, and phone sales lift by 20%.

The benefit of having experience, intelligence and measurements mapped onto a customer journey is it helps to identify the most impactful changes you can make to improve both your experience and your bottom line.

So, the next time you’re mulling over a big decision, first ask: “What does our map tell us?” And if you don’t have a map that connects experience, intelligence and measurement on your customer journey, that’s your first decision.

Quick self-scan: How strong is your map?

Score each point from 1 (weak) to 3 (strong).

• Experience: We have a joined-up view of customer and employee experience across the journey.
• Intelligence: Our insights are unified and shared; teams aren’t duplicating research.
• Measurement: We have a small set of shared metrics that teams align around, not competing scorecards.

If you’re below 7 out of 9, there’s probably significant value trapped in your current data and journey.

Ready to build out your business’ map? Talk to one of our CX experts.