After you’ve completed your customer research and created personas, the next activity in our methodology is mapping the customer journey. But before you start creating a future state journey, it’s imperative to document and analyze the current state customer journey. After all, if your ultimate goal is to create a world-class customer experience, you will be creating it by understanding from what you have today and then transforming into whatever that future vision is.

The steps of current state journey mapping are as follows:

Current State Journey Mapping Step 1: Define Experience Stages
First, map out your customer’s current experience is to break it down into a workable number of “stages.”

Current State Journey Mapping Step 2: Research the Experience
Once we have blocked out these large stages, it’s time to map our customer’s current experiences in each of them. Apply the same tools that you used for customer research, but answer questions like:

• How are customers finding your company today?
• What steps are they going through to make a decision about whether to do business with you (or someone else)?
• How do they determine exactly which product or level of service to order?

Current State Journey Mapping Step 3: Document the Current Journey
Current state journeys can be documented in various ways. Possible methods include process flows, a set of narrative stories with your user personas as the protagonists, or a "pain map.” This is a banner divided into the stages of the customer journey, and it lists the top points of pain you discovered for each stage.

Current State Journey Mapping Step 4: Prioritize
Your current state map will highlight many opportunities for you to improve, but you won’t be able to fix every problem and pursue every avenue for customer delight all at once. So, prioritize according to the three criteria of 

• Severity
• Frequency
• Segment Value

Once you complete the activities in this chapter, you should have a much clearer perspective on the current experience of your various customer segments as they move through the defined stages of your customer journey.