What a customer journey actually is

You know your process. You built it. You could stand up right now and describe every step, in order, from the first enquiry to the final invoice. You know which parts are slow and which parts your team is good at.

Now describe the same thing from the other side of the desk. Not the steps you take. The steps your customer takes. What they do in between your steps. What they are thinking while they wait. Who they ring when they are not sure.

Most owners find the second one harder. That is not a lapse in attention. It is the shape of the job. When you run the business you see your own process, because it is the thing you built and the thing you manage every day. Your customer never sees that process at all.

The journey is theirs, not yours

A customer journey is everything a customer does to get what they came for. Not what you do. What they do.

That takes in a lot of ground you have no hand in. The evening they spent comparing you against two other businesses. The form they filled in twice because the first one timed out. The fortnight they waited without hearing anything and decided you had forgotten them. The conversation with whoever else has to sign off, which happened in their kitchen on a Sunday and which you will never see.

None of that is in your process. All of it is in their journey. And all of it shapes what they think of you by the time they speak to you again.

Think of it as security footage of your own shop. You know what is meant to happen in there. You wrote the procedure and you trained the staff on it. Then you watch an hour of real footage and you see people standing in the wrong spot, reading a sign that made perfect sense to you and none to them, waiting at a counter because nobody looked up. The procedure is not wrong. It is just not what happened.

Why most journey maps end up in a drawer

Plenty of businesses have done a journey map at some point. Very few have acted on one. There is usually a single reason.

The map was drawn from the inside. Someone got the team in a room, wrote the stages across the top, and filled in what the business does at each stage. Enquiry, quote, onboarding, delivery, invoice. It comes out tidy and everybody recognises it, because it is the org chart with arrows on it.

A picture of your own process cannot tell you anything you did not already know. And a document that surprises nobody gets filed.

The version worth doing is built out of what real customers actually did, in their order, including the waiting, the chasing and the parts that happened when none of your people were in the room. That version is untidy, and it tends to be uncomfortable reading. The discomfort is the value. It is the only evidence that you have stopped looking at your own process and started looking at theirs.

The five minute version

You do not need a workshop or a wall of sticky notes to start. Take your last five customers. For each one, write down in order everything they had to do to become a customer. Every form, every phone call, every wait, every time they had to ask you where things were up to.

Then mark three things.

• Every step where the customer had to chase you. Chasing is a step you never designed and never see, and it is the most common one on the list.
• Every step you believed took a day and actually took a week. Not what the system says. What the dates say.
• Every step where the customer had to explain something to you twice. Twice means the first telling went somewhere nobody reads.

Five customers is enough for the pattern to show. It will not be a complete picture and it does not need to be. You are not building a document. You are finding out which parts of your customer's experience you have been taking on faith.

What to do with what you find

Resist the urge to fix all of it. A list of twenty small frictions is a list nobody works through, and it will be back in the drawer by the end of the month.

Pick the one that costs the most. Usually that is not the ugliest step. It is the one nearest the point where people decide to go elsewhere, or the one sitting right at the end, colouring everything they remember.