This post originally appeared on Beagle Research Group, LLC's blog and was written by Denis Pombriant.

The journey map and the tools used to make one might be the sleeper part of CRM in the year or two in front of us. The reason is simple, journey maps enable you to figure out your processes and they are useful in much more than just marketing.

Recently in this column I've discussed the emerging science of the customer, which is probably not the term that will ultimately stick in anyone's head. But the key element of the idea is that the random and highly reactive approach to front office business is rapidly being eliminated because big data and analytics are showing us where the opportunity clusters are and where we shouldn't spend our precious time.

There is a virtuous circle nature to this. We need better processes because our analytics tell us rather convincingly what our customers think is a waste of effort and those things that we really ought to pay attention to. But knowing the things is not understanding process. A customer might want an end result but it's the vendor's obligation to deliver all the things that lead up to the result a.k.a. the processes.

Take customer onboarding as an example. It's an idea familiar to a lot of us but how many of us take responsibility for it? There's glamour in sales, less in marketing and once the customer crosses what we consider the finish line, too often that's it. But customer onboarding is the most important part of the whole relationship, other than securing the John Hancock because it builds the relationship.

Onboarding can include everything from getting the product out of the box and registered to correctly entering your metadata. The point is that every business has a set of rituals that must be observed but too often there's no high priest. Maybe there should be since onboarding is one of the key moments of truth that a vendor-customer relationship has.

Not to get too far down a single path, but onboarding is just one example of a customer journey that looks like a dotted line dirt road on your map and that's where journey mapping becomes important. There should be zero dirt roads and vendors need journey mapping to plan out all of the possible ways a customer can take a wrong turn so that they can make the situation right well before frustration sets in and bad things follow.

So journey maps are really important in marketing because we want to establish an absolutely fool-proof path from interest to closed deal just as we want to get the product out of the box and a smile on the customer face. You might recall when I introduced the idea of customer science that I likened it to a form of sociology whose major point of interest is how societies erect structures for people to work within. In sociology the opposite of structure is agency as in taking responsibility for going it alone. When customers carve their own paths too often bad things like attrition are the result that's why structure is so important.

So you can look at the journey map and its supporting tools as the business' structure making socio-customer-science effort to keep revenues flowing in one direction and customer happiness percolating in the other and that would be a good thing.

Journey maps will be found all over your business in a few years, starting with marketing's effort to corral customers to sales' attempt to get them branded, but there's more. We've looked at onboarding already but I think the biggest impact journey maps will have will be in service and support. Currently too many businesses have one or maybe a small handful of service and support processes and few specialists. That's about all you can have with manual processes or dirt roads in this parlance.

But at worst, a business ought to be able to segment services and support into maybe 8 or 10 service processes each with its own specialists and SLA. A how-to request might come into the same place as a request for enhancement but the two ought to take very different trajectories from there. Currently that's too manual and mapping these separately might be the first step to speed up both and deliver greater satisfaction.

In doing that mapping, we're finally able to concretely describe the engagement we want in ways that don't sound like an ad for a new vitamin. Better still, and this is huge, we can ensure that the end result of the engagement is not an accidental hang-up or worse.

Some people might say, well, that doesn't happen any more but if you think that, you're just not getting involved in the vendor-customer give and take enough. I got thinking about all this recently when I called my local gas and electric utility to report a dead tree hanging off some power lines like a barfly on a barstool. I made the unwitting mistake of getting to the gas side of the house rather than the sparks.

The very nice and efficient person on the line told me she couldn't help me and couldn't even transfer me. Worse, the website behaved as if it was designed by whoever built Fort Knox and I repeatedly bounced off. All I could do was send a DM to what I thought was their hash tag along with an editorial comment on the efficacy of their service solutions. This being Twitter I had to compress it all into one word.

Had this energy company thought through its moments of truth and built its journey maps rather than operating a very efficient customer service site circa 1995, things could have been different. The point is that we've trained customers to reach out to vendors in various ways but we are still receiving in manual mode. Time to create journey maps that will take us to the next level.

Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of CRM market research firm and consultancy Beagle Research Group, has been writing about CRM since 2000 and was the first analyst to specialize in on-demand computing. His 2004 white paper, "The New Garage," laid the blueprint for cloud computing. He can be reached via email (denis@beagleresearch.com) or Twitter (@denispombriant).