Why your customer journey probably isn’t working
These days, everyone wants to do something with “the customer journey.” But let’s be honest: most of those journeys just don’t make sense. They hang on the marketing team’s wall as a glossy infographic, or sit in a PowerPoint presentation for senior management — but have little to do with what customers actually experience.
And that’s exactly the problem.
In our podcast, we discuss why most journey maps remain too abstract, why they’re often designed from the inside out, and what it really takes to create a journey that works.
Listen to the episode here!
The Pitfall of the Perfect Picture
Many organizations think from the inside out. We design a journey that follows our own processes:
campaign → website → form → contact → quote → customer.
Sounds logical, right? Except: that’s not how it works for the customer. A real customer journey starts long before someone visits your website. Think: an internal issue, a chat by the coffee machine, a Google search, or a tip from a colleague.
If you ignore that context, you miss why people even started looking — and why they do or don’t end up choosing you.
Journeys without behavior are fiction
A common mistake: building a journey based on assumptions or on how you hope things go. But without real behavioral data, you simply don’t know.
Pageviews aren’t clicks. Downloads don’t equal intent. Without context, data means little.
What you do need: behavioral insights, customer interviews (including the ones you lost!), and tools like Higem, Hotjar, or Clarity to see what’s really happening.
In the podcast, we explain why data isn’t the goal — it’s a tool to understand behavior and intent.
Customer Journey aren’t just a marketing thing
Another big misconception: that the journey stops at marketing. In reality, customer journeys span multiple departments — sales, support, customer success, product development.
If you leave ownership with marketing alone, you’ll end up with a fragmented view and a disjointed customer experience.
So what does work?
A working customer journey:
- is based on real behavioral data and qualitative insights;
- starts with customer needs, not your touchpoints;
- is tailored to the different roles in the DMU (in B2B);
- and is shared ownership across multiple teams.
Or, as we say in the podcast:
“The perfect customer journey doesn’t exist. But you can work towards a version that truly fits your customer’s needs.”
Curious what that looks like in practice?
👉 Listen to the first episode Podcast Demystified.
