Friction within your customer experience can have potentially significant consequences for your brand. More than half (59%) of customers in the U.S. say they’ll walk away from a brand they love after several bad experiences, while 17% will walk after just one.  

Stress-testing your customer journey map simply means validating it – making sure it reflects reality so your customers have consistent, frictionless experiences at every touchpoint. 

While many brands map out their path to purchase, few do a good job at plotting out every step of the customer’s journey – and even fewer stress-test it.  

“Often internal knowledge trumps the voice of the customer,” says Mike Zeederberg, ADMA instructor and Managing Director and Owner of digital marketing agency, Zuni. “While your people bring invaluable insight, anecdotal evidence should never replace statistical data.” 

Mike says there are two key times when you should stress-test your journey map. First, as part of your development process to validate each stage, then once you start implementing activities to make sure these are having the intended outcomes. 

“For example, the evaluation phase of your journey might indicate that 12% of customers walk into a showroom, and 80% download the brochure and use that to make their decision. In three months’ time, you can look at the ratio of your sales. Are you selling more online or more through the showroom? What does that look like? What are our conversion rates? You can often map data coming out of the live environment onto the journey to see whether what you predicted is actually happening – and adapt your journey to reflect the real world.” 

Once you have developed an empathy map or user personas and mapped out your journey, there are multiple ways to validate it. Here are the top four we recommend. 

1. Conduct interviews and surveys 

If you have the time and resources to interview or survey your customers, it can be a very valuable way to validate your assumptions about their feelings, problems and decisions at each stage.  

Make sure you have mapped out your journey and identified any gaps in internal knowledge before you start your testing – and use these to set the direction of the interviews or survey. 

“Mapping tells us what we already know. But it also tells us things we don't know,” Mike explains. “For example, we know people have certain thoughts at the awareness stage, but we don’t know why. There could be different reasons – so which one is more important? A survey or an interview is your chance to find out.”  

2. Test across all channels  

As customer journeys are naturally omnichannel, make sure you test experiences across all channels and devices. For instance, as a retail store with both a physical and online presence, include your in-store and digital experiences in your testing. 

As a digital leader, Amazon created self-service and e-care capabilities. However its customer journey tests showed people still want to speak to a human over the phone. So the digital giant’s omnichannel customer care strategy still relies heavily on humans handling requests. 

3. Accessibility and usability 

Testing accessibility and usability is critical to creating consistent customer experiences. You need to test your application across various systems and dimensions, such as browsers and devices, making sure it can deliver the experience your customers expect.   

4. Resilience testing 

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to expect (and plan for) the unexpected. Early on in the pandemic, nearly half (49%) of businesses experienced disruption in day-to-day operations – impacting customer interactions and leading to a decline in their revenue.  

When businesses fail the resilience test during a time of disruption, they have to earn back customers’ trust.  

Consider scenarios such as: 

• Will your website be able to handle a significant increase in traffic?  

• How do customers get in touch if your site is down? 

• What happens when there are disruptions to your supply chain? 

Testing your customer journey’s resilience will help you uncover and address previously unforeseen issues and prepare you for the unexpected.