Common Mistakes in Customer Journey Analysis

🚨 Journey Maps Gone Wrong: Top Mistakes Even CX Pros Still Make 🚨 Customer Journey Mapping is supposed to unlock insight, empathy, and action. But too often, it becomes just another poster on the wall — beautifully designed and strategically useless. 💥 Here are the top errors I see (again and again) in CX journey mapping initiatives: 🔶 1. Mapping the Ideal, Not the Real Too many maps are sanitized versions of what should happen — not what actually happens. That’s not a journey map; that’s wishful thinking. 🔶 2. Mistaking Internal Process for Customer Experience Listing internal handoffs isn’t a customer journey. If your map doesn’t reflect what the customer sees, feels, and does — it’s not about the customer. 🔶 3. Ignoring Emotional Peaks and Valleys Experience lives in emotion. A journey map without emotional highs and lows is just a flowchart. 🔶 4. Creating a Map, Then Doing... Nothing The map is not the outcome — action is. If your journey map doesn’t lead to change, it’s a storytelling exercise, not a transformation tool. 🔶 5. Leaving Out Frontline Input You can’t map the experience from a boardroom. Your contact center, field reps, and service agents hold the richest insights. Use them. 🔶 6. One Journey Fits All? Nope. Different segments have very different journeys. If you’re mapping just one version of the truth, you’re missing the rest of the story. 🧠 What would you add? Which of these mistakes have you seen in the wild — or made yourself? Let’s build better journeys, starting with more honest mapping. #CustomerExperience #JourneyMapping #CXStrategy #VoiceOfCustomer #CXLeadership #CustomerInsight #ServiceDesign #CustomerCentricity

We're designing customer journeys backward. I've seen it countless times: Companies map out elaborate customer journeys that look perfect in boardroom presentations. Every touchpoint is accounted for. Every interaction has an owner. Every milestone has a metric. There's just one problem. The entire journey was designed around what the business can measure, not what the customer actually needs. This approach shows up everywhere: --> Mandatory NPS surveys at arbitrary intervals --> Onboarding checklists that track activity, not value realization --> QBRs scheduled quarterly because... well, that's what the "Q" stands for --> Success plans built around product features, not customer outcomes We're essentially telling customers: "Follow our journey so we can measure your progress." No wonder adoption is a struggle. The most successful companies I've worked with flip this model completely: --> They design the optimal customer experience first (based on how customers naturally work) --> They identify the true moments that matter in that journey THEN they build measurement and reporting around those moments When you obsess less about tracking every customer interaction and focus more on removing friction, the metrics improve naturally. Design for the customer first. Measure second. Your KPIs will thank you.

I audited 70 dtc e-commerce klaviyo accounts last year and they all had the same issues with their customer journey. Make sure you avoid these common mistakes and ensure your messages align with the customer's journey: ▸ Welcome Email 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who have started checkout or placed their order after starting the flow. ▸ Browse Abandonment 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who have started checkout or placed their order after starting the flow. ▸ Abandoned Checkout 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who placed their orders after starting the flow. ▸ First and Repeat Customer Thank You 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who placed their orders, started a checkout, or canceled the order after starting the flow. ▸ Replenishment 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who placed their orders or started a checkout after starting the flow. ▸ Post Purchase 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who placed their orders, started a checkout, or canceled the order after starting the flow. ▸ Winback 🔹Fix: Remove recipients who placed their orders or started a checkout after starting the flow. There are other exit conditions you can add to email and sms flows for better messaging and experience, but these are the most common issues I see. You need to consider the number of times a user can receive a particular flow and whether a subscription customer should or shouldn't enter specific flows (assuming you have a subscription program). Sending relevant messages to your audience helps improve the customer experience and nudges them to take the right action at the right time. What are the other flow filters you would like to add? #emailmarketing #ecommerce

After analyzing data from 1,000s of eCom brands in the past decade. There’s 1 thing I’m convinced of… A VAST majority of brands have their customer journey wrong. They think it looks like this: Ad → Click → Purchase. When in reality… It’s more like a chaotic mess of touchpoints. A prospect might: → See a Facebook ad → Notice a friend using the product → Read about it in a newsletter → Catch an influencer post Then, finally visit the site… and leave 20 seconds later. And you might sit there and ask, why?? Well, there’s only 1 explanation. SOMETHING during the journey broke their trust. It could have been: → A broken link → A checkout page that doesn’t match the ad → A product page with inconsistent branding → A last-minute surprise (e.g., unexpected $12 shipping) And the second a buyer hesitates, you’ve lost. This is what I call the "Gator vs. Judge" problem. (cc @DylanAnder) The Gator Brain buys impulsively. The Judge Brain hesitates, second-guesses, and walks away. Your entire job as a marketer is to make sure the Judge never wakes up. The Fix: 1️⃣ Audit every touchpoint. Click every link. Check every email. Ensure every step is seamless and congruent. 2️⃣ Stop relying on "hacks." Most brands try to brute force revenue with cheap tricks. Instead, build a real system that doesn’t collapse when trends shift. 3️⃣ Think like a customer experience scientist. If a single issue is costing you even 2% of conversions. That’s millions of dollars in lost revenue over a year. Most brands won’t do this work… but if you hate wasting money on ads that don’t turn into buyers - you will. Give it a shot and I bet you’ll dig up something valuable.

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric