Terry Green writes for business2community:

...we all talk about customer journey mapping but how many of us have actually done it? No I don’t mean sitting listening to a boring presentation about the subject whilst fiddling with my mobile phone or making a half arsed attempt at it with no commitment – I mean really done it like we meant it?

I’ve always said that the key to getting any customer oriented change programme though an organisation is to get the business leaders to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. Cliched? Yes but no longer enough. The challenge now is to get everyone inside your organisation to see themselves from the customer’s perspective and to understand how it makes them feel to interact with you.

What better way than customer journey mapping?

It is so important for organizations to do this mapping, but I agree with Green, it never seems to resonate with a larger team. I feel because people going through this exercise tend to treat this as a transactional exercise instead of an emotional one. What I mean by emotional is customers have an emotional attachment to their journey, they don't feel like what they are doing is a transaction.

I believe one person should own the customer journey and bring people into the process for specific parts of the journey. Journey mapping is a very overwhelming experience, but when broken up into pieces it could generate great conversations from the entire organizations. When taken into pieces, the organization can concentrate on the emotion of a specific piece of the journey without having to get overwhelmed by the entire journey itself.

It’s only when you have got your people to stop thinking like vendors and truly moved them into the customer’s headspace that you can start their journey towards customer centricity.