Customer Experience Journey Mapping

Customer Experience Journey Mapping for the "THREE EXPERIENCE PILLARS"

This is a strategic process that defines end-to-end customer journeys in detail, identifies customer-centric pain points, and delivers actionable improvements to enhance engagement, elevate buying, boost satisfaction, and drive loyalty.

Where should you focus your journey mapping efforts? Greg Randall, Founder of Comma Consulting, has identified the "Three Experience Pillars” that, when perfected, create a growth ripple effect throughout the entire business:

End-to-end digital buying journeys
Post-sale experiences (delivery, click and collect, returns)
The customer support function (providing seamless support across the above two pillars)

Master these three pillars, and you establish a strong loyalty foundation.

Why are these pillars so crucial? Research indicates that the primary source of customer dissatisfaction in retail stems from experiences within these areas. Consider this verified research from 2025:

91% of consumers report encountering frustrating digital buying issues.
Poor digital journeys have caused 50% of consumers to switch to competitors.
79% of consumers would be deterred from purchasing again after a negative post-purchase experience, such as a bad delivery experience or confusing returns process.
89% of customers cease doing business with a company due to poor customer service.

Physical Retail - the 4TH PILLAR

The levels of customer dissatisfaction in physical retail are significantly lower than the figures above.

Physical retail experiences, the 4th pillar, remain a vital touchpoint. After years/decades of focus, most retailers excel in this area.

While there is always room for improvement, research shows that strengthening the three pillars naturally enhances the physical retail experience. For instance, improving the click-and-collect journey positively influences customer perceptions of physical retail.

Enhancing these three "Experience Pillars" represents a retailer's low-hanging fruit.

A "Journey Mapping Project" enables a strategic planning process that visualises the journeys that humans want from you. Once you can see it, bringing it to life is easier.

Ready to grow? Let’s go!

Read on to learn more about the three pillars and what this mapping process looks like.

Experience Pillar #1 - Journey Mapping End-to-End Digital Journeys:

Seamless digital experiences from discovery through to purchase are foundational. Comma Consulting optimises the end-to-end digital information gathering and online buying journeys to ensure customers enjoy frictionless interactions at every step.

This journey is mapped with a mix of wireframes and commentary that defines the broader flow of content as well as a deep layer of detail describing the functional behaviours of specific pages.

It is this layer of detail that separates average experiences from amazing ones. This process of digital journey mapping is also referred to as UX (user experience) Design.

Experience Pillar #2 - Journey Mapping Post-Sale Experiences

Research proves the foundation to building trust and loyalty in customers comes from delivering a high standard of post-sale experiences: delivery, pickup, and hassle-free returns. When you take money from a customer, you are essentially making a promise. Now its time to keep that promise.

This has been Amazon's strategy for three decades, and they now control the largest and most profitable loyalty system in history.

Before considering what software systems must look like to support this experience pillar, a mapping process must happen to define these journeys from your customer's perspective.

Only then can a plan be put in place that utilises fit-for-purpose software solutions.

Experience Pillar #3 - Journey Mapping Customer Support

Responsive live chat, knowledgeable support teams, accessibility of these teams, and efficient, customer-centric issue resolution are vital for driving sales and boosting satisfaction.

When customers feel supported and valued, they are more likely to remain loyal, continue purchasing, and recommend the brand, creating a virtuous cycle of retention and acquisition.

This mapping process elevates customer support from a sunk cost to a business function that plays a key role in new customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty. And this mapping process sets this up to scale sustainably.

How Customer Experience Journey Mapping works

”There is both an art and science to journey mapping”

Learn how Greg Randall fuses customer-centric first-party data, your business strategy, and proven best practices to create customer journey maps that are easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to implement.

Below is a high-level summary of core mapping activities...

Customer-Centric Research and Data Analysis

Greg Randall from Comma Consulting rolls up his sleeves and analyses customer-centric data to uncover insights into customer needs, emotions, and behaviours.

A wide array of datasets are reviewed to ensure a comprehensive perspective of the customer is captured. This process ensures the voice of the customer is heard and leveraged.

This process identifies pain points and journey blockers, forming the foundation for targeted improvements.

Customer Centric Journey Mapping

Detailed digital customer experience journey maps are created to visualise and optimise customer experiences across the primary digital assets: websites , APPs, and other digital channels. The process of mapping these journeys is via wireframes (as mentioned above).

Workflow and resource management optimisation is captured in workflow diagrams and written commentary, and is linked to the digital customer experience journey maps mentioned above.

This is because, from the customer's perspective, they don't see "digital" as being separate from "customer support". They see a single experience where they have needs that must be met.

So we must construct journey maps in the same way. The maps are designed and built from the customer's perspective. The importance of this methodology cannot be understated.

Only once this is complete can we reverse-engineer these journey maps and translate them into a project scope for accurate implementation.

Customer Service Blueprinting - "Service Design"

Specific effort is put into designing a customer support function to provide a particular type of assistance when customers need it. This can be during a digital buying journey, post-sale, or organising a return.

This is also known as "Service Design".

This does not mean that an employee must always be on standby. There are multiple methods to build "support" capabilities that meet customer needs, including a mix of employee accessibility, access to informative content libraries, and AI systems.

Another part of this mapping process is challenging current policies to simplify conflict resolution at the coalface. This is part of the scale function of support.

Journey Map Measurement Plan

Monitoring systems and custom dashboards are also planned and designed to give the business a transparent view of all journey mapping and touchpoint optimisations.

This layer of data capture achieves two key outcomes...

Monitoring new journeys to determine business performance impacts - what does ROI look like?
A new layer of first-party data capture is introduced to define new customer behaviours and inform the business on experience enhancements needed in future phases of work.

Why Choose Comma Consulting?

Greg Randall, founder of Comma Consulting, helps you understand, visualise, and optimise every stage of the new customer journeys that must be brought to life.

From research and mapping to actionable improvements, Greg drives customer satisfaction to new levels where impact is most significant.

Greg is also an experienced implementer of customer experience journey map plans. Greg can help you see your future and help you bring it to life.

Ready to transform your customer experience journey and unlock new growth opportunities?

Contact Greg from Comma Consulting today to start mapping a better future for your business and your customers.