Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That's right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don't have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don't include the customer's emotional journey in them.

Emotional journeys are the "squishy stuff" associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer's feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations tend to leave them off. However, the result is a customer process, not a journey map.

After all, without this information, how can you expect to predict and anticipate customer behavior? Moreover, how can you design an experience that is so well positioned for customers' needs that they come back for more (and more)?

In this episode— and at the behest of a very complimentary listener who says we actually taught them something (!!)—we explore how you can integrate customer behavior, and the emotions that drive that behavior, into your journey maps. We show you how all the things we talk about on this podcast apply in a practical way and can produce practical results, like an ROI.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

• 04:10 We explain how we will demonstrate the application of behavioral sciences concepts to a standard Journey Map that we made up about booking a hotel online.
• 12:15 We go through each of the ten concepts we agreed upon before the show, and then Colin adds a bonus one at the end, catching Ryan off guard.
• 21:29 Using the checklist of (now) 11 concepts, we begin taking you through the process of applying each one to the booking a hotel online journey map, starting with Customer Segmentation, and so on through the list.
• 27:05 Ryan points out that many times, changes in how organizations serve customers can have an inadvertent effect on how an experience ends, which is detrimental to the emotional journey.
• 32:58 Colin shares a personal story of how a rental car company bamboozled him into getting a car he couldn't afford after a long-haul flight across the pond, and it cost the company money as a result.
• 37:00 We share our final tips and key takeaways from this exercise and how it should help you have a more complete picture of the customer journey.

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