The second shortcoming was worse, and more pernicious. The consultant had cooked up “enhancements” to the methodology, that were embedded on the Mapping template they proposed.

On this template, the customer’s thoughts and feelings were relegated to keywords haphazardly attached to their tasks and activities. Customer goals were named “needs and opportunities”, a strange deviation from norm, that conflagrates what customers want with what the business wants from them. And touchpoints, likewise, were renamed “touchpoints and channels”, a weird junk drawer seemingly meant to help every silo find a place for itself on the map.

Worse yet, there was no clarity as to whether the map was supposed to represent the current state (what customers want and do today) or the future state (how our products and services would change their experience). When we pressed the consultants on this, we were encouraged to do both.

This made the map a murky document: Neither an accurate representation of the customer’s perspective, nor an honest inventory of our riskiest assumptions, nor a compelling vision for our future direction.

Trying to be all things to all people, it failed in all aspects.

What should you put on your customer experience journey map? More to the point, what should you leave out?

Let’s be clear: The point of a Customer Experience Journey Map is to help you be fully, completely, uncomfortably customer centric. Customer centricity is uncomfortable, because in the customer’s world, you don’t matter. They don’t actually want what you’re selling. All they want is the value they get from it. If they could get that value without you, they’d be perfectly happy.

And let’s be honest: The reason you need to map your Customer Experience is that you’re human, and as such, you’re prone to hundreds of biases that make you ignore what customers want, assume the wrong goals on their part, and recast their experience in terms of what you know well.

All of this is to say that Customer Experience Journey Mapping is supposed to be torture. It should uncover your profound ignorance. It should reveal your inadequacies. It should shine a bright light on all your mistakes. It should make it abundantly clear that you are but a hair’s breadth away from being completely insignificant.

If it feels good, you’re doing it wrong.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with putting your channels, your products, and your activities at the bottom of the experience journey map. But when I’ve led startups as well as large companies in Customer Experience Mapping, I always leave these parts out, at least for a while.

At first, you should map the customer’s current state, and you should leave your fat ass out of it. Map the journey as if your company didn’t exist. For a lot of your customers, it doesn’t. So forget yourself for a minute. Really, deeply care about the customer, and the customer’s problem. Your products and services don’t neatly cover their needs. Your channels and activities are not what gives their existence meaning.

If you want your company, its value propositions, its departments and silos and processes, to have a place in the customer’s journey, then this place will have to be earned. And to earn it, you have to start from a place of humility, and respect.

Map the experience of the humans you wish to serve. Build it up to such a level of detail that you feel crushed by the awe-inspiring humanity of it all. Then and only then, when you are humbled, when your empathy is fully engaged, then you may begin to look for ways your company can help.