Customer Journey Mapping Consulting

Customer journey mapping sets out how customers move across channels, touchpoints and companies in pursuit of a goal. Customer journey consulting goes one step further than the artifact: the map is the input, and the output is a ranked set of interactions to build, strengthen or stop funding. Vivaldi has done this work for companies including Vistaprint, Bosch, Marriott, Vodafone, Bank of America and McGraw-Hill.

Customer journey clients include

• Since 1999customer, demand and experience strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• The Interaction Fieldwritten by our founder

When companies bring us in

Customer journey mapping is usually bought by a CX lead, CMO or chief customer officer in a business where several functions each hold a partial view of the same customer. The trigger is almost always one of these.

• Before a platform or CX investment. Where to spend has become an argument nobody can settle with the evidence available.
• After a map that changed nothing. The organization has commissioned a journey map before and watched the economics stay where they were.
• When the funnel no longer describes the customer. People are buying across channels, categories and companies you do not control, often several at once.
• When experience spend cannot be defended. Satisfaction scores are up and the CFO is asking what changed about return on invested capital.

Why journey mapping on its own does not move the economics

The artifact does real work, and that is worth conceding first. A wall of stages, touchpoints and frictions, argued over by six functions, creates alignment that did not exist the week before. It exposes handoffs nobody owned. It gives product, service, marketing and commercial teams one description of a customer they had each been describing differently. That is worth buying, and we build them.

Then it goes on the wall, and the economics do not move.

That is not a failure of craft. It is what description does. Put the map in front of a CFO and the question comes back immediately: what does this change about return on invested capital?

Most journey programs answer with friction. Fewer steps to checkout, fewer calls to resolve, fewer reasons to leave. All of it is worth having and none of it is a growth story. It is supply-side work, and the market prices supply-side work as harvesting. Worse, friction removal inside your own funnel is copyable. A competitor matches a smoother checkout in a quarter, so it earns no preference premium and does not survive in the price you can charge.

The demand-side questions are the ones a stage-based map never asks. What is this customer trying to get done, across every company involved and not only yours? Which demand space does that put them in? Who else already creates value there? And which interactions, if they existed, would make the next interaction more valuable to somebody other than you?

What our customer journey mapping services include

Four bodies of work. Most engagements use all four, in this order.

1. Mapping activities rather than stages

Customers do not move through your funnel. They perform activities in pursuit of a goal, across channels, categories and companies you do not control. The argument is set out in full in Forget the Journey: Win with Customer Activities.

• Stages describe the seller's process. Activities describe the customer's work.
• Demand spaces are built out of activities, which is why an activity-based map finds growth a stage-based map cannot see.
• The valuable activity usually sits adjacent to the category you organize around, and belongs to nobody yet.

2. Naming every participant in the field

The map you commissioned almost certainly drew its boundary at your own org chart. A field-level map does not.

• Customers, partners, retailers, developers, communities, regulators and often competitors
• What each one contributes to the outcome and what each one takes out
• Where value is created between participants rather than delivered to them by you

3. Prioritizing the moments that carry the value

A journey has hundreds of touchpoints and a handful that decide the outcome. Finding the handful is the part that changes where money goes.

• Triggers and decision points identified from research rather than from the process diagram, which is how Vistaprint's 21 priority triggers became seven moments that matter
• Segment-level differences, because the moment that decides the outcome is rarely the same for every customer type
• The revenue and share impact modeled per moment, so the shortlist can be defended with numbers

4. Deciding which interactions should exist

This is what makes the engagement a decision rather than a deliverable: which interactions to build, which to strengthen, which to remove.

• The test is whether an interaction makes the next one better for someone else in the field
• If it does, it belongs in the Compound Economic Profit Loop, which runs from demand understood, to right to win, to price, volume and capital efficiency, and ends at return on invested capital above the cost of capital
• If it only makes one transaction marginally cheaper, it is maintenance and should be funded as maintenance

How a customer journey mapping engagement works

1. Diagnose. Customer and non-customer research, behavioral and transaction data, and interviews across the functions that each own part of the journey. The output is what customers are actually trying to get done, in their words rather than your stages.
2. Map. An activity-based map of the demand space and a participant model of the field around it, including the partners, platforms and competitors your current map leaves out.
3. Prioritize. The moments that carry the value, by segment, with the revenue and share impact modeled so the shortlist survives a budget meeting.
4. Decide. A ranked set of interactions to build, strengthen or stop funding, separated into the ones that compound and the ones that only reduce cost to serve.

Where this page stops and the system starts

Two capabilities, in sequence, and it is worth being plain about which you need. This page diagnoses how the journey currently works and turns that into a set of interactions worth designing: an activity-based demand map, a participant model of the field, a shortlist to build and a shorter list to stop funding.

Dynamic customer journey strategy builds the live system that keeps responding to where a customer actually is: data, triggers, orchestration, feedback. One is a map, the other is navigation.

Most organizations need both, in that order. Mapping is faster and cheaper, so start there if you have not done it. Buying the second without the first produces a fast system pointed at the wrong moments.

Customer journey mapping results

Vistaprint: 21 triggers reduced to seven moments that matter

Vistaprint served a vast and diverse small business customer base, and its customer experience investment was spread too broadly to make a difference anywhere. We mapped the small business journey in depth, identified 21 priority customer triggers and distilled them into seven moments that matter: the touchpoints with the highest leverage on retention and revenue. The seven-moment framework became the foundation of Vistaprint's customer experience strategy, aligning product, marketing and service investment to the highest-value points in the journey. Read the full story: How Vivaldi identified seven moments that matter in Vistaprint's customer journey.

Hartmann: a journey-led plan to reverse a share decline

Hartmann was losing revenue and share in the German incontinence category, squeezed between premium competitors and price-focused brands. We built a customer journey map, prioritized target groups, defined marketing actions at specific touchpoints and modeled the revenue and share impact of each. The resulting action plan was projected to drive a 7.2% CAGR increase in sell-in and a 14 percentage point increase in market share, which gave Hartmann an evidence-backed roadmap rather than a diagram. Read the full story: How Vivaldi reversed Hartmann's decline in the German incontinence market.

McGraw-Hill: six instructor personas that directed platform investment

McGraw-Hill needed to re-evaluate its instructor segmentation after the post-COVID shift in higher education, and specifically to understand how different instructor types were using digital course materials. We ran a three-phase approach across qualitative research, quantitative segmentation and opportunity prioritization, producing six distinct instructor personas and identifying the digital platforms and learning experiences that would drive the highest growth and adoption in each. The six personas let McGraw-Hill prioritize digital platform investment rather than spread it. Read the full story: How Vivaldi segmented McGraw-Hill's learners to drive product innovation.

Customer journey mapping by industry

Why companies choose Vivaldi for customer journey work

• The map ends in a capital allocation decision. Every engagement produces a ranked list of interactions to build, strengthen or stop funding, with the impact modeled, rather than a diagram and a workshop.
• We map the field, not the funnel. Partners, platforms, communities and competitors appear on the map, because the activity that creates the most value usually sits outside the boundary your org chart drew.
• We separate compounding from maintenance. Friction removal is worth doing and it is not growth. We price the two differently so your board is not shown maintenance wearing a growth label.

How to evaluate a customer journey consulting firm

Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what the deliverable changes. If the engagement ends at a diagram and a workshop, you have bought alignment. That is real value, and it is not a capital allocation decision.
• Ask whether they map stages or activities. A stage-based map cannot find growth outside the boundary your funnel drew, because it never looks there.
• Ask who appears on the map besides you and the customer. A firm that leaves out partners, platforms and competitors is describing your org chart.
• Ask how the recommendation is priced. A firm that cannot separate interactions that compound from interactions that only reduce cost to serve will present maintenance to your board as growth.
• Ask what happens after the map. Mapping and orchestration are different purchases, and a firm that blurs them will sell you a system pointed at the wrong moments.

Journey map, journey orchestration or an interaction field?

Related work

• Dynamic customer journey strategy for the live system that responds to where a customer is now, once the map exists.
• Interaction field modelling for the participant model underneath an activity-based map.
• Demand landscape mapping if the prior question is where demand will pool and where you have a right to win.
• Customer experience strategy if the whole system around the brand is in question rather than one journey.

This work sits inside our Brand, Innovation & Experience practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Customer journey consulting in the US and worldwide

Our customer journey work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Journeys rarely stop at a border: the same customer activity is served by different participants in different markets, which is why a map built in one country and translated into another usually misses the moment that matters most. We run the research market by market and reconcile the map at the activity level, where the behavior is comparable even when the channel estate is not.