Journey maps are an effective tool to evaluate a customer’s experience with a brand to identify issues and opportunities that drive toward revenue growth, profitability, and market share. However, focusing on just the customer experience misses half of the story. Uniting customer and employee experiences provides a holistic view critical to identifying and prioritizing areas of focus. Employee satisfaction is the leading indicator to customer experience — simply put, if your employees are happy and engaged, they will create better experiences, which translates to happier customers.

Working as a group, map the experience of the people your company serves across the customer lifecycle. Include customer behaviors, touchpoints, attitudes, and emotions. Next, map the experience of the employees engaged in facilitating and delivering the customer experience. Include internal processes, teams/groups, systems/tools, and pain points.

Evaluate the map to identify critical moments in the journey for innovation. Understand the root cause of customer pain points by evaluating inefficiencies in the employee experience.