Interested in journey maps but not sure if it’s worth the time and effort? Learn how different teams (experience, marketing, and more) use journey maps to achieve business objectives.
Why is journey mapping important?
At Cast & Hue, we use journey maps to paint a clear picture of an experience. By nature, this work helps teams find critical friction points and moments that leave more to be desired.
But customer, patient, and employee journey maps are more than just experience audits.
Beyond highlighting what’s going wrong, they also reveal:
- What’s going right: the defining moments that drive customer, patient, and employee retention (and differentiate one organization from another)
- What people want: insights into human needs, expectations, and emotions
- What will move the needle: the priorities that deserve investment and will deliver ROI
Insights from journey maps provide a clearer, more human view of how it feels to interact with your brand as a customer or employee.
Learn how journey maps help a range of teams — including experience, marketing, innovation, operations, and people departments — make human-centered decisions.
1. Mapping the journey helps teams understand the true experience
One of the clearest benefits of journey maps — and a reason why they’re helpful experience design tools — is their ability to show exactly what an experience feels like.
It’s easy to let internal assumptions shape your thinking about where an experience excels or lacks. Teams can also be swayed by customer surveys and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) that offer surface-level data.
Gut checks and black-and-white metrics can’t reveal:
- What’s really happening at every touchpoint from the customer, patient, or employee’s point of view
- The reasons why certain touchpoints are working well or aren’t meeting expectations
- How people feel at specific moments and which ones leave a lasting impression (good or bad)
- The relationship between touchpoints and how they make for a streamlined or disjointed journey
Basic journey maps provide in-depth snapshots of each moment and a vivid picture of what the entire experience feels like. Great journey maps take this a step further, uncovering insights about human needs and emotions that experience designers can act on.
What might that look like? See an example customer journey map we created for a leading healthcare organization:
2. Journey maps drive CX, PX, and EX improvements
Journey maps are most useful when you create them with the right people — the end users of an experience (your customers, patients, or employees). This is how we facilitate journey mapping at Cast & Hue.
By taking a holistic view of a journey from the end user’s perspective, you can:
- Fix what’s breaking down: Identify root causes of issues that lead to customer churn, patient referral leakage, or employee turnover.
- Amplify your wins: Discover the key positive moments that win people over — and find ways to build from that success.
- Prioritize next steps: Determine which touchpoints offer the greatest opportunities for meaningful improvements. (These are the ones you’ll want to invest in first.)
Journey mapping shows you where to focus your experience design efforts by pinpointing the places that shape the experience most — the moments that offer ROI.
What might be causing a breakdown in your customer experience? Read the most common causes behind experiences that miss the mark.
3. Journey mapping strengthens empathy
Journey mapping helps teams think about the people on the receiving end of experiences, which inherently builds empathy. At Cast & Hue, we use co-creation (developing maps in partnership with end users) to amplify this benefit.
By bringing the right people around the same table, project teams and leaders:
- Listen to key voices: They get the (sometimes rare) opportunity to hear directly from the people who are impacted by their decisions.
- Think person-first: Whether tackling employee retention issues or customer complaints, teams learn to frame problems around the human perspective.
- Open their minds: Human-centered design helps people overcome biases and start thinking differently about challenges.
The journey stops looking like a series of transactions and starts looking like what it really is: emotional, personal, and — in industries like healthcare — often vulnerable.
With practice, this mindset shift gets embedded into business operations. Teams start filtering decisions through a human-centered lens, asking, “Is this what people need from us?” The ideal journey becomes a north star, giving departments a shared understanding and goals to align around.
4. Journey mapping grounds innovation in human needs
Customer and patient journey maps uncover gaps where the journey falls short of expectations. Closing those gaps helps teams also spark new ideas for innovations that are likely to succeed, because they’re built around what people want. We call this empathy-led innovation.
By pairing journey mapping with empathy-driven frameworks, teams dig deeper into needs and brainstorm with customers, leading to breakthroughs. These frameworks include Jobs-to-be-Done and design thinking.
This process de-risks innovation by ensuring you’re investing into ideas that are not only viable and feasible for the business, but desirable to end users.
5. Maps inform marketing with consumer insights
In many organizations, teams are unintentionally siloed. Marketing and technology departments don’t always get to see what the experience team is working on and vice versa.
Sometimes, this results in messaging that diverts from the reality of an experience. Campaigns make promises that the customer journey can’t fulfill, customers are let down, and revenue sees the impact of lost trust.
Journey mapping helps bridge the gap by:
- Aligning messaging with experience: So what you say matches what people encounter.
- Informing content strategy: Journey maps give marketers clarity on what messages will resonate most at different touchpoints.
- Adding color to personas: Collaborative mapping uncovers not just functional needs, but also emotional and social drivers that make marketing more human and compelling.
When customer journey maps inform digital marketing, teams can create campaigns that connect with their audience and strengthen the brand promise (rather than overpromising).
These benefits also apply to employer branding.
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Learn more about journey mapping with Cast & Hue
Journey maps are multipurpose tools that experience designers, marketers, business strategists, ops teams, and just about every department can put to good use.
We maximize the benefits of journey mapping by co-creating them with the people who are impacted by the experience — which leads to deeper insights and stronger solutions.
Learn more about our journey mapping approach and receive our monthly newsletters to see the benefits in action.
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