Nobody told the customer about the customer journey
Designers love a good customer journey map. I know we do.
All those lovely touchpoints. The neatly plotted stages. The colour-coded emotions. And of course, the arrows. So many arrows.
There’s just something so satisfying zooming out in a Miro board to admire one’s handiwork.
It’s a thing of beauty. A perfectly choreographed experience, guiding customers (or interested parties) from awareness to consideration to purchase to retention and, in a perfect world, advocacy or brand loyalty.
There’s just one small problem.
Nobody told the customer.
Customers—I have to concede—have the audacity to behave like actual human beings. They get distracted. They change their minds; ask their partners; forget their passwords; switch devices; abandon their carts and occasionally, they even pick up the phone.
The nerve.
And in Canada’s emerging Endurance Economy, where financial uncertainty is changing how people make decisions, the journey is getting even less predictable. People are comparing more, committing less, and taking detours that have absolutely no respect for our carefully arranged sticky notes.
An Ipsos Study released in July underscored that “Canada is not moving through a typical recovery cycle. It is operating in a period of sustained constraint.”
But here’s the thing. These are not necessarily broken customer journeys. They are real ones.
We’re big believers in journey mapping. It’s a powerful way to uncover pain points, understand experiences and identify opportunities for better design and more productive outcomes.
The trouble starts when we confuse the map with the territory.
Because real experiences don’t happen in tidy stages. They happen in complicated lives, within equally complicated systems. And understanding those lives means getting beyond the workshop whiteboard or Miro Board. It means talking to people; observing behaviour; inviting different perspectives and questioning our assumptions.
Sometimes it means discovering that the problem isn’t where we thought it was. Or that the customer has found a workaround that puts our beautifully designed process to shame.
The best customer journey maps don’t tell us how people should behave. They help us understand how people actually do.
And that helps us design accordingly.
Because the customer isn’t going off script.
They never read the script in the first place.