How Customer Journey Mapping Failed Its Promises in Multi-Product Sales
Customer journey mapping was once hailed as a powerful tool for improving customer experience and driving growth. It promised to make businesses customer-centric by helping them understand every step their customers take—from awareness to loyalty. Companies expected clearer insights, better engagement, and smarter prioritization of improvements.
And for single-product or single-service businesses, journey mapping can still deliver value.
But when it comes to multi-product sales, especially in businesses offering hundreds or thousands of products, customer journey mapping has failed to deliver on its promises.
There Is No Single Customer Journey
The core flaw in traditional journey mapping is its assumption that a business can chart one coherent journey for a customer. But in reality, each product has its own unique journey—and customers may engage with multiple products simultaneously.
For example:
- A customer may be buying toothpaste, a laptop, and a car insurance policy from the same company.
- Each of these purchases has a completely different context, emotional weight, research process, and post-sale engagement.
- The journey for a toothbrush may last 5 minutes, while buying a car may take weeks or months.
Mapping a single journey for such a customer is not only impractical—it’s misleading.
Multiple Journeys, Multiple Stages — All at Once
In a multi-product environment, your customer is not in one stage of the journey. They are likely in several stages at the same time:
- Considering product A
- Buying product B
- Using product C
- Returning product D
- Seeking support for product E
Traditional journey maps can’t handle this complexity. Trying to merge product-based journeys into a unified experience leads to oversimplification or irrelevance. The context, goals, and expectations vary too much between products.
Why This Matters
When customer journey maps fail to reflect reality, they lead to:
- Misguided priorities: Efforts are focused on the “average” journey that no one actually takes.
- Generic experiences: Personalization suffers because you treat all products—and customers—the same.
- Blind spots: You miss opportunities to improve product-specific pain points because they get lost in the noise.
Product-Specific Experience Management
Instead of forcing a unified journey, businesses need to fundamentally change their approach. The solution lies in two key strategies:
Option 1: Implement Product-Journey Tracking Technology Deploy tools that can track and analyze customer journeys on a per-product basis. These platforms maintain separate journey maps for each product category while still providing a unified view of the customer across all touchpoints. This allows you to understand both the micro-level product experience and the macro-level customer relationship.
Each step in the product journey can be tied to specific product searches and behaviors, enabling automation to personalize the experience at every touchpoint. For example, if a customer is researching laptops, the system can automatically highlight relevant technical specifications during the consideration phase, or present only compatible accessories during the purchase phase. This approach ensures customers see relevant product substitutes and features based on their exact position in that specific product’s journey, rather than generic recommendations.
Option 2: Focus on Experience Gap Analysis Shift from journey stages to experience quality measurement. Instead of tracking where customers are in a theoretical funnel, identify and prioritize the specific moments where customer experience breaks down across different products. This approach focuses resources on fixing actual problems rather than optimizing theoretical pathways.
The most effective approach often combines both strategies—using technology to track product-specific journeys while maintaining a relentless focus on closing experience gaps wherever they occur.
Wrap-up
Customer journey mapping promised a lot—but in the world of multi-product sales, it’s fundamentally broken. Even for single-product companies, journey maps often provide some initial insights before becoming static diagrams that gather dust on walls and in PowerPoint decks. But for businesses selling multiple products, the approach isn’t just ineffective—it’s misleading.
Customers don’t live in neat linear journeys. They live in a tangle of product-specific experiences, and it’s time our strategies caught up.