Customer journey maps and process maps are both useful tools to understand an organisation, however they view the organisation from different perspectives.

A customer journey map takes a customer-centric perspective to diagrammatically represent the customer’s interactions with the organisation by capturing all the customer’s experiences and emotions at each touchpoint. As customer journey maps use the customer’s own language and experiences, it is an extremely useful way to introduce the ‘voice of the customer’ into the organisation and helps to design with the end-user in mind.

A process map takes an organisation’s perspective to depict the end-to-end flow of inputs transformated into outputs and shows the higher-level steps or activities required to carry these steps out. Process maps describe an organisation’s internal processes using terminology specific to that organisation. These maps are often developed by subject matter experts and utilised by people in their team to perform and optimise their everyday roles. Process maps are key tools in providing clarity and accountability to staff within an organisation.

Both customer journey maps and process maps are important and provide complementary benefits to each other. Whether you are after a better understanding of how customers interact with your organisation, or a greater understanding of how functions are performed within the organisation, these two mapping tools can help identify improvements to customer experience and internal processes.