Journey Mapping
You can’t fix an experience you don’t fully understand.
Every team has a theory about where the customer experience breaks down. Sales has one. Support has another. Product has a third. Journey Mapping gives you the actual picture, built from research, not internal debate.
Who it’s for
Built for the moment before you commit to fixing it.
Most teams have already run an internal workshop to map this themselves. It feels productive, but it’s built on assumptions, not evidence. This works best when you need an honest outside read before committing serious resources to a redesign, technology investment, or service change.
How it works
Research where the experience actually happens.
01
Scope the journey
Where it starts, where it ends, who’s involved, and what decisions the map needs to inform. This surfaces the riskiest internal assumptions.
02
Design & recruit
I design the research approach and recruit customers, employees, and partners across the full journey.
03
Conduct the research
Interviews, observation, and contextual inquiry where the experience actually happens, not where it’s documented.
04
Map & recommend
A clear picture of every stage, where friction lives, and specific recommendations prioritized by impact, not a list of everything that’s broken.
A real example
A national telecom’s business customers were frustrated, and nobody agreed on why. Sales had a theory. Support had another. Product had a third. Nobody had talked to customers directly, across multiple markets, with enough structure to separate a product problem from a process problem from a communication one.
Over six months I ran 32 in-person interviews across five markets and facilitated eight employee workshops. One of the most useful findings was a billing segmentation: three distinct small business payment behaviors, each with different needs. Nobody inside the organization had named that distinction before.
The deliverables were service blueprints tying customer needs directly to internal processes and technology requirements. Execution teams used them to build against.
See the full case study: Service Design and Journey Mapping for a National Telecom →32
in-person interviews across 5 markets
8
employee workshops for future-state blueprints
FAQ
About the Journey Mapping engagement
What is research-based journey mapping?
It means doing real customer or employee research, interviews, observation, contextual inquiry, and using that to build an accurate map of the experience. Workshop-based mapping reflects what your team assumes. This reflects what people actually go through.
How is journey mapping different from discovery research?
Discovery research figures out who you’re building for before anything exists. Journey mapping looks at an experience that already exists: where it breaks down, why, and what to fix. Teams often use both, in that order.
How long does a journey mapping engagement take?
A focused, single-audience engagement usually takes six to eight weeks. Multi-audience or ecosystem-level work runs longer, sometimes three to six months, depending on complexity.
Who typically commissions journey mapping research?
COOs, CPOs, VPs of Customer Experience, and operations leaders. Usually triggered by rising complaints, a planned tech investment, a new leadership role, or a merger where two operating models need to be understood before combining them.
What is the difference between journey mapping and service blueprinting?
A journey map shows what a customer experiences at each stage. A service blueprint goes deeper, mapping the internal processes and systems behind that experience. Journey mapping research often produces both, since you can’t fix the customer experience without understanding what’s happening behind it.
Ready when you are
Not sure what scope is right? Let’s figure it out.
Most engagements start with a short conversation about the journey you need to map and what decisions it needs to inform.
Atlanta-based, other places as needed