How to Use Customer Journey Maps: Exercises for Immersion, Ideation & Prioritization
A customer journey map only creates value if teams actually use it. The best way to activate a customer journey map is to run structured team exercises in three phases: immersion (build empathy for the customer), ideation (turn insights into ideas), and prioritization (decide what to act on first).
What Is a Customer Journey Map, and Why Does Activation Matter?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points a customer experiences as they interact with your brand: from initial awareness through purchase and beyond. It’s a strategic tool used in customer experience (CX) and innovation work to identify where a business is meeting customer needs and where there are gaps.
But a customer journey map isn’t the end goal. It’s a starting point. “Activating” a customer journey map means building it into your team’s ongoing workflow through repeatable exercises, rather than treating it as a static artifact. Teams that activate their customer journey maps are far more likely to turn customer insights into real product, service, and experience improvements.
Putting a Customer Journey Map into Action
Building a customer journey map is only half the work. The real return on investment comes from what your teams do with it afterward. Too many customer journey maps end up as a one-time deliverable; a polished PDF that gets presented once and then filed away.
One way to ensure your organization gets ongoing value out of a journey mapping effort is to equip teams with a toolkit of exercises they can use, individually or as a group, to identify opportunities and turn a customer journey map into action. These exercises make engaging with the map fun, focused, and outcome-driven, which increases the likelihood that the map becomes part of how your team works, not just something you built once and forgot.
We rely on a range of exercises with our clients and often build custom ones to fit a specific customer journey map or business challenge. As a starting point, we recommend equipping teams with at least one exercise for each stage: immersion, ideation, and prioritization. Here are a few of our favorites.
Immersion Exercises: Build Empathy Before You Act on the Customer Journey Map
The first step in activating a customer journey map is getting teams immersed in the customer’s experience so they can build genuine empathy. This immersion is the foundation for every exercise that follows. You can’t ideate meaningfully around a customer journey map you don’t understand at a gut level.
Gallery Walk
This is one of our go-to exercises for immersing teams in a customer journey map, and it works both in person and remotely.
- In-person: Print poster-sized versions of the customer journey map and display them around a conference room or open space, gallery-style.
- Remote: Set up a virtual gallery using a tool like Miro or Mural, where digital versions of the customer journey map are posted for teams to explore at their own pace.
Alongside the gallery, we prepare a simple workbook that prompts teams to jot down what surprised them about the customer journey and where they see areas of opportunity. This keeps immersion active rather than passive.
Ideation Exercises: Turn Customer Journey Map Insights into Ideas
Once teams are immersed in the customer journey map, the next step is channeling what they’ve learned about the customer into concrete ideas.
10 in 10
A fast, energizing ideation exercise that clears the “obvious” ideas off everyone’s mind so the group can get to more original thinking. After teams have spent time with the customer journey map, give them 10 minutes to generate 10 ideas. Each idea gets a short headline that captures the concept, with a few bullet points of supporting detail. Ideally, each idea fits on a single sticky note.
Amplify and Flip
This exercise works individually or in groups. Using the customer journey map, teams identify what is and isn’t working in the customer’s experience:
- Amplify: For what’s working, teams brainstorm strategies to make it even better for both the customer and the organization.
- Flip: For what isn’t working, teams brainstorm strategies to turn the pain point into a positive.
We like using two flip charts (physical or virtual): one for Amplifies, one for Flips. Have teams capture ideas on sticky notes as they go.
The Award
A forward-looking visioning exercise that asks teams to imagine a future where they’ve implemented a strategy based on an opportunity surfaced in the customer journey map and won an award for it. Teams fill out a flip chart explaining why they won the (fictional) award and the steps they took to get there, which naturally produces a concrete set of ideas and strategies. We’ve put together a free downloadable worksheet and instructions for this exercise.
Prioritization Exercises: Decide What to Act on First
After teams have immersed themselves in the customer journey map and generated a strong pool of ideas, the final step is prioritization: deciding which ideas are worth taking to the next stage.
Effort and Impact
An approachable exercise that’s easy for teams to tackle together. Set up a 2×2 matrix with axes for business effort and customer impact. Teams place their sticky-note ideas into the appropriate quadrant, then focus discussion on the highest-impact, lowest-effort ideas as logical next steps.
Bringing It All Together
These are just a handful of the exercises we use to help teams activate a customer journey map. We have many more, and we regularly design custom exercises tailored to a client’s specific map and goals. A customer journey map is most valuable when it becomes a living tool your teams return to again and again, not a one-time report.
If you’d like to talk through how to put your customer journey map to work with your teams, reach out to Clearworks. We’re always happy to share more exercises and ideas.
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FAQ: Activating a Customer Journey Map
What does it mean to “activate” a customer journey map? Activating a customer journey map means turning it from a static, one-time deliverable into a tool your teams use on an ongoing basis — typically through structured exercises for immersion, ideation, and prioritization that translate customer insights into action.
Why do so many customer journey maps go unused after they’re created? Most customer journey maps are built, presented once, and then archived because teams aren’t given a clear, repeatable process for engaging with them afterward. Without dedicated exercises and ownership, insights from the map rarely make it into day-to-day decisions.
What’s the difference between immersion, ideation, and prioritization exercises? Immersion exercises (like a Gallery Walk) build team empathy for the customer. Ideation exercises (like 10 in 10 or Amplify and Flip) turn that empathy into concrete ideas. Prioritization exercises (like Effort and Impact) help teams decide which ideas to act on first.
How often should a team revisit its customer journey map? There’s no fixed cadence, but many organizations revisit their customer journey map quarterly, or whenever there’s a significant shift in customer behavior, product offering, or business strategy, to keep the map (and the exercises built around it) relevant.
Can these customer journey map exercises be done remotely? Yes. Tools like Miro and Mural work well for virtual Gallery Walks, digital sticky notes, and remote 2×2 prioritization matrices, making all of the exercises above adaptable to distributed teams.
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