Building valuable relationships with customers has always been critical to success in business.

Today’s service and reward economy — think Starbucks: consistent service and rewarded behavior — has elevated consumer expectations, and that creates a difficult challenge for most organizations.

Creating a customer journey map is a great way to understand and reshape your customer experience. We’ve successfully implemented this process across companies of all sizes in multiple industries, from health insurance to consumer product goods, software and hotels. The following initial three steps will help you chart the full range of touch-points between customers and your company to drive increasingly positive brand experiences, consistently, and across the customer lifecycle.

Step 1: Discovery

In order to seamlessly advance your goals, the discovery process needs to take place across all divisions of your company, from sales and marketing to IT and operations. Gather together to uncover all areas that “touch” the consumer, whether in person or through many possible communications channels, including phone, email, direct mail, and your website. During touch-point analysis with one company, we uncovered that they were communicating with consumers over a hundred times in a year, and the priority messages were getting lost in the shuffle.

Step 2: Insights

Work with as much internal and external data as you can to create a full picture of the customer. You can find many insights with your own internal customer data, but when coupled with industry research, including lifestyle, attitudinal and behavioral dimensions, it creates a richer and more complete picture — and often uncovers surprising, counterintuitive insights.