Revisiting the map when the business changes is overdue work

4 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

A journey map describes how buyers moved through your business on the day it was drawn. Six months later you have changed a price, added a service, hired somebody who answers the phone differently, or started getting enquiries from a channel that did not exist before. The map still hangs on the wall and it is now describing a business that has partly stopped existing.

This is the quiet failure mode. Nobody declares the map obsolete; it just gradually stops matching, and decisions taken from it start being taken from a picture of the past. The maintenance is small — an hour or two, twice a year — but it has to be triggered by something, because nobody notices drift while it is happening.

1. Revisiting the map when the business changes needs a trigger

The mechanism.

Either a date in the diary or a list of events that force a review. Without one, the review happens when somebody remembers, which in practice means never. Pick the date first and refine the list afterwards.

2. A new service or product is a trigger

The obvious one.

Anything you now sell that you did not sell before has a journey of its own, and it may share very little with the existing one. Buyers of the new thing arrive differently and hesitate about different things. Assume nothing carries over until you have checked.

3. A new enquiry channel is a trigger

The commonest real change.

If a third of enquiries now arrive somewhere the map does not show, the map is wrong at the top and therefore wrong about the volumes everywhere below. Channel mix moves faster than most owners expect. Check the source data before assuming the shape is stable.

4. A change in who does the work is a trigger

The one nobody counts.

When the person who handled enquiries leaves, the experience changes even if the process document does not. Response times, tone and the questions asked all shift. The map described the person as much as the process.

5. A price change is a trigger

The obvious commercial one.

Price alters who enquires, how long they deliberate and what objections arrive, which changes the shape of the middle of the journey. The effect shows up a month or two later. Revisit after the lag, not immediately.

6. Look at the numbers before the discussion

The method.

Pull the same counts you used originally, and only then talk about what changed. Coming to the review with opinions produces a map that reflects the last argument. Evidence first keeps the revision honest.

7. Update rather than redraw

The efficiency point.

Most of the map is still right, and starting again wastes the hardest part of the original effort. Mark what changed and leave the rest. A revision that takes a week will not happen twice.

8. Keep the old version

The discipline nobody follows.

Comparing this year's map with last year's shows you what actually moved, which is more informative than either map alone. Date every version. It costs nothing and makes the third revision far more useful than the second.

9. Re-check the fixes you made

The loop closing.

If the map produced a change, the revision is where you find out whether it held. Fixes decay when nobody owns them. This is the only reliable moment to notice that.

Be careful about revising the map because it feels stale rather than because something changed. A map that still matches is a map that does not need work, and rewriting it for its own sake produces churn that people learn to ignore.

Conclusion

Put a date in the diary and list the events that force an early review.

Treat a new service, a new enquiry channel, a change in who handles customers and a price change as triggers, pull the underlying numbers before anybody offers an opinion, update the existing document instead of redrawing it, keep and date the old versions so you can see what moved, and use the revision to check whether the fixes from the last one actually held.