Customer Journey Mapping Hype Cycle: Leap The ‘Peak Of Inflated Expectations’

As any customer experience consultant or practitioner knows, there’s a lot more to improving customer experience than the creation of journey maps.

Many of us are familiar with Gartner’s Hype Cycle, representing the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. At core, the hype cycle is all about helping people understand what’s real—and what’s hype—when new ideas come along that make (or are perceived to be able to deliver on) big promises.

And while journey mapping isn’t actually a technology, I think it’s time to apply the hype cycle lens to it. After all, the focus on journey mapping as a silver bullet for customer experience improvement is something CX practitioners have noticed for some time.

Reality? Customer journey maps are often thought of as the solution to customer experience improvement efforts. But they’re not. As any customer experience consultant or practitioner knows, there’s a lot more to improving customer experience than the creation of journey maps.

That said, customer journey maps are a key tool for looking at an organization from the outside in and gaining a better understanding of customer wants, needs, and pain, as well as opportunities for improvement. As great as the promise of customer maps is, we suspect they’re climbing the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

So let’s look at each of the five phases of the customer journey mapping hype cycle, both to see where your organization might be today and where the true promise of journey maps might be in the future.

The Trigger: The Value And Promise Of Customer Experience

Though CX has been around some time, it’s more recent that there’s been a huge breakthrough in recognition of its value.

Stories of the radical advantage CX leaders enjoy (like typical growth over double that of their competitors or 2.5 times greater annual revenue per customer) have driven fevered interest. Everyone wants to get it, but only a handful are all in. Nine of 10 execs say CX is critical to their future success.

Peak Of Inflated Expectations: Journey Mapping Looks Easy

It seems like any company can do this—and many are.

When you see how much value companies that actively manage customer journeys gain (companies with a program in place enjoy more than 50% better marketing return on investment and over 250% more revenue from customer referrals, to name just a couple) it’s easy to see the hype.

Yet still, only a third of companies have established customer journey mapping.

Trough Of Disillusionment: Customer Experience Is Tough To Pull Off

Even those orgs that say putting customers first is a key priority have a really hard time getting it right. This also means that journey maps aren’t going to solve the entire customer experience puzzle.

As the reality of customer centricity and what that actually means in practice bumps up against entrenched attitudes, journey maps are likely to fall out of favor or simply become a check box for business processes or marketing teams.

Slope Of Enlightenment: Better Understanding Journey Maps

As more companies actually figure out how to do customer journey mapping right—bringing cross-functional teams together, knocking down silos by appropriately socializing maps and driving action—it will become more and more obvious how journey maps can benefit the enterprise, and they’ll become more widely understood and used.

More and more companies will explore pilot journey management programs, even as more cautious firms hold back.

Plateau Of Productivity: Journey Mapping Takes Off

As the approaches to and benefits of customer journey management become broadly understood across industries and company types, executives will start to climb on the bandwagon in bigger numbers.

No longer a dark art, the tools for and knowledge of how to create and use them (along with measurable top- and bottom-line results) will make them a regular part of the way every company works to better understand and serve customers.

Today, we’re pretty sure that we’re climbing the Peak of Inflated Journey Mapping Expectations. But we know that the path forward—though currently a complex and resource-intensive exercise for most organizations—is one with a huge payoff at the end.

Because as companies work through their own journey mapping hype cycles, we know that landing on the plateau of productivity delivers a better understanding of the customer, a clear cross-org picture of ways to serve those customers better, and a better customer experience.

And that’s a payoff well worth climbing a couple of peaks to reach.