Most journey maps are severely limited in their ability to help us improve customer experiences, because they focus on identifying and communicating the stages of the journey. Why is this a problem?

Because a journey stage is just an arbitrary group of interactions that the customer must perform. It’s at the next layer down — the interaction level — where all the complexity, friction, opportunity and risk is found.

Obviously, if every interaction is perfect, every journey is perfect. But almost nobody models experiences down to the level of these discrete interactions, rendering the whole exercise pretty pointless.

An example. We once analyzed the mortgage application process for a bank, who thought the journey only consisted of a handful of stages, so wasn't that bad. They were shocked when I showed them a spreadsheet of the 190 tasks customers needed to perform — pressing buttons, selecting new fields, entering data, reading blurbs, etc. — many of which could easily be eliminated.

Inattention to detail does a lot to explain why most experiences are so poor. The great news is if you can dig a little deeper you'll strike gold. By getting down to the task layer, you'll be able to craft a customer experience that makes rivals seem amateurish.

See this post on LinkedIn