by Margaret-Anne Heyland
One of the most effective tools you have as an Experience Owner is Journey Mapping.
I’ll admit it—I love journey mapping. It’s one of the most powerful ways to understand how customers truly interact with your company and, just as importantly, to see where they don’t. Those gaps can be just as revealing as the touchpoints we already know. They often highlight missed opportunities, moments where customers should be engaging with us but aren’t, simply because the experience hasn’t been designed to support them.
Why Journey Mapping Matters
The customer journey doesn’t start when someone walks into your store, clicks on your website, or calls your service center. In reality, most journeys begin long before a company even knows a customer exists. A spark of curiosity, a problem they need solved, a recommendation from a friend—these early moments quietly shape perceptions and influence decisions.
If we only focus on the “visible” part of the journey—interactions within our own walls—we miss the bigger picture. We risk losing customers before they ever reach us. Journey mapping gives us the opportunity to step outside our internal perspective and walk in our customers’ shoes, uncovering both the friction points that create frustration and the opportunities to create delight.
Beyond Start to Finish
It’s also important to recognize that journeys don’t always end where we assume they do. For many organizations, the journey is considered complete once a sale is made or a service is delivered. But for customers, the experience continues—living with the product, using the service, sharing their story with others, and deciding whether to return.
A strong journey map reveals that continuum. It connects the dots between acquisition, usage, support, and loyalty. And it’s in those connections that businesses earn trust, foster lasting relationships, and unlock sustainable growth.
The Power of Visibility
When you bring cross-functional teams together to map the journey, you create shared visibility. Suddenly, marketing sees how their messaging aligns—or doesn’t—with service interactions. Product teams see how small design choices ripple into frustration or delight. Leaders see where investments should be prioritized.
Journey mapping transforms customer experience from something abstract into something tangible, actionable, and deeply human.
Closing Thoughts
At its core, journey mapping is about empathy. It’s about seeing your business through your customers’ eyes- not just where they engage with you, but also where they hesitate, struggle, or walk away.
If you want to truly own the experience you deliver, start by mapping the journey. Then, take it one step further: layer in your communications, projects, or use cases. The insights you uncover may surprise you, but they’ll always point you toward better outcomes—for your customers and your business.
👉 What about you? Have you tried layering communications into your journey maps? What’s the biggest gap—or overlap—you discovered?
Contact Evolv Consulting to learn how we help organizations bring their journey maps to life.
Margaret-Anne is a Delivery Manager at evolv Consulting and has over 3 decades in the Financial Services Industry. As a passionate CX Leader, she spent 20 + years at USAA and helped evolve and build award-winning experiences for Investments, Retirement and Financial Health. In previous roles she was the CX Officer at American National Bank of TX and Head of Participant Experience at MassMutual. Her passion is understanding the needs and expectations of customers and looking for opportunities to improve their experiences by incorporating technology, data, empathy and understanding emotion at every customer touchpoint.
