Have you ever had a decent conversation with a customer service rep, only to be passed to someone else? Then it starts again: you verify your information, explain your situation, and hope this person gets to the bottom of it without passing you around.
A relay team can have four fast runners and still lose the race in the exchange. Nothing was wrong with the first rep. The transfer was the problem.
That moment is what I care about most in journey mapping: the handoff, where one page, channel, or team ends, and another begins. It’s what makes or breaks an experience.
Most teams already map their journeys in some form, and one-off maps are incredibly valuable. They surface friction, show where a process can improve, and inspire new features and moments of delight.
But they have a blind spot: who captures the in-between? The lost tracking number. The promise an airline makes at the gate about a delayed flight that never shows up in the app. Or when you’ve started an order online, walk into a store, and the order isn’t ready. These are the cracks where experience slips through; these gaps sit between teams, so no one owns them.
There’s a second problem. When every team maps its own journey, they map it at different levels of detail. That’s an altitude problem. Some teams focus on details; others capture broad swaths of information. Both of these are good approaches.
However, they create a third problem: You can’t compare a journey that needs improvement with one that’s critical when you measure them differently. I’ve often observed that checkout journeys are nearly constantly monitored and improved, but return journeys are ignored or brushed over. Moments in checkout can be frustrating or cumbersome, but if the return journey can seriously impact the relationship with the company, to the tune of “I’ll never buy from them again.” Companies miss key details by not comparing journeys with a score. Distinguishing between “needs improvement” and “critical” is imperative.
That’s where journey management comes in. Journey management is the practice of capturing, scoring, and comparing journeys across the company. When you capture journeys at scale, you can:
Capture the handoffs between journeys, not just the steps inside them
Compare journeys on equal footing, with a score - whether it's a CSAT, CES, or an internal one
Tell apart the pathways customers can tolerate from the ones where they might leave, cancel, and tell their friends to stay away
There’s always room to improve, and endless room to tweak. But the journeys worth fixing first are the ones that make people question their relationship with the company. Those are usually a mix of friction points and terrible handoffs of information.
Every transfer that isn’t seamless costs something: time, trust, and the feeling that your problem will actually get solved.
So map the handoffs. Compare the journeys. Make this a company-wide practice.
What’s the worst handoff you’ve experienced as a customer?