Most organisations understand the touch points they control, what they don't know is the full journey customers experience, including all the moments that happen outside their direct view, some of these are critical moments that matter.
You invest in improving experiences based on internal assumptions about what matters, only to discover that customers are struggling with something you never mapped, measured or even considered. And its these moments that lead to a change in their behaviour they go, they tell others about their experience and on the up side they decide to stay and buy more products.
This is why we have included Customer Journeys as a category in our CX Scorecard. It's more than whether you've created journey maps. It's about whether you systematically use journey visibility to identify where friction exists, prioritise improvements based on the customer reality rather than internal assumptions and validate solutions with real customers before building them.
The real problem this solves
When you don't have systematic journey mapping and testing capability, you miss where customers struggle. Without understanding the full journey including the parts you don't control (research before they contact you, workarounds they create when your process fails, effort required across multiple channels), you optimise touchpoints while missing the friction that drives customers away.
You build solutions customers don't want. When you don't test with real customers before implementation, you discover problems after you've invested. Projects cost more and take longer because you're fixing issues that prototyping would have revealed.
And your journey maps gather dust. Organisations create journey maps in workshops, present them to leadership then file them away. The maps don't drive prioritisation decisions, don't show how you are performing against customer expectations and don't evolve as customer behaviour changes. They become static artifacts rather than tools for continuous improvement.
What strong capability looks like
They map the full customer journey, not just their touchpoints. This means understanding what happens before customers contact you, what happens when your processes break down (workarounds, multiple channel switches, repeated contacts) and what happens after the transaction (whether they actually achieved their goal). This visibility reveals friction and opportunities your internal view misses.
They use journey maps to drive decisions. Rather than creating maps as documentation exercises, they use them to prioritise which experiences warrant investment, identify dependencies across teams and systems and align stakeholders on where effort should focus. Journey maps become the foundation for improvement roadmaps.
They test before they build with real customers. Before implementing new products, channels or services, they prototype with real customers. This reveals assumptions that don't match reality, identifies friction you didn't anticipate and validates whether customers can actually use what you're building. Testing surfaces problems when they're cheap to fix rather than expensive to rebuild.
They keep journey maps current. Customer behaviour evolves, new channels emerge, processes change, performance drifts. Strong capability means journey maps are updated based on new customer research and are used as living dashboards to measure and track performance of moments that matter, over time.
What we're measuring
We're not looking for perfect journey maps across every experience (you don't actually need this). We're identifying whether you have the capability to see the experience from the customer's perspective rather than your internal view, one map of a critical experience is a great place to begin, and whether you test assumptions with real customers before committing investment.
Customers don't experience your organisational chart, your systems or your processes. They experience THEIR journey. And organisations that systematically understand that journey from the customer's perspective, rather than assuming they know it, are the ones that are able to invest in improvements that help customers achieve their goals and achieve better commercial outcomes.
If you're responsible for customer experience but can't demonstrate where customers struggle most in their journeys, can't explain their behaviour or you're building solutions without validating them with real customers first, that's the gap this capability fills.
Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.
