A Mile in Their Shoes
Why Customer Journey Mapping is a Critical Discipline
If you ask a marketer, a salesperson, a product manager, and a customer support leader to describe the customer, you will get four very different stories:
· Marketing will talk about buyer personas and campaign performance.
· Sales will focus on objections and pipeline health.
· Product will highlight user personas and feature requests.
· Support will point to tickets and escalation trends.
While each perspective is valid, but when they remain siloed, the organization fails to fully comprehend the customer experience.
This is where customer journey mapping shows its true potential. Customer journey mapping is a strategic discipline that gives everyone a shared understanding of the customer’s perspective.
My first exposure to customer journey mapping was when the exceptional Jennifer Jaffe led one at Convercent. It was transformational. Since then, I have had the opportunity to see the impact of journey mapping across several organizations. Each one a game changer.
Walking in the Customer’s Shoes
The most powerful outcome of a well-executed journey mapping exercise is empathy. It drives teams to step into their customer’s shoes and consider the lived experience of engaging with the entire breadth of their organization.
By doing this, teams can see not just what customers do but also what they feel. What motivates them to take the next step? What fears hold them back? Which moments spark delight, and which cause frustration?
While data is a powerful, objective input. Data alone can’t answer these questions. Conversion rates, NPS scores, and churn metrics point to outcomes but rarely reveal the human “why” behind them. Journey mapping fills that gap by adding qualitative insights from customer interviews, win/loss analysis, and frontline feedback.
As a result, you get a deep understanding of the customer experience across all touchpoints, and a shared understanding of that experience across all teams.
The Power of a Shared Perspective
Every team views the customer from its own perspective. Journey mapping forces those perspectives together to render a multi-dimensional picture. Now, marketing sees the friction that sales encounters, product understands the promises sales are making, and support recognizes how upstream pressures create downstream pain.
This shared perspective does more than just improve understanding, it creates accountability. When the whole organization sees the journey from end-to-end, it’s impossible to dismiss customer frustrations as “someone else’s problem.” Everyone owns their piece of the journey, and the journey map itself becomes the unifying force.
Why It’s Essential
To summarize the value you can realize from a well-executed journey mapping exercise:
Empathy: Develop a deep appreciation of your customers lived experience, understand their motivations, anxieties, and moments of delight.
Voice of the customer: Immerse your organization in the authentic voice of your customer. Infuse it into product roadmaps, GTM plans, and customer success strategies.
Friction detection: Expose the choke points where leads stall, deals die, relationships sour and customers churn. When all teams appreciate these friction points you will be surprised at the collaborative innovation that ensues.
Alignment across silos: Enable coordinated action with Marketing, sales, product, and support now sharing one customer story.
Strategic prioritization: Elevate your prioritization away from tactics. Understanding the customer journey highlights which investments will create the greatest impact.
From Map to Compass
Finally, a journey map is not a one-time deliverable. Like a compass, it only works if you continue to use it to navigate. Your customer’s needs, expectations, and behaviors evolve over time. So too must your understanding of their journey and the friction that exists.
Widespread adoption of AI is driving an acceleration and elevation in customer expectations. Taking a moment to walk a mile in their shoes is the strategic refresh that your organization needs to keep moving forward, drive growth and create a community of delighted customer advocates.
