What's the Difference Between Current and Future State Journeys?
Current state journeys describe how customers experience you today—with all the friction, gaps, and workarounds. Future state journeys articulate the experience you want to deliver—aligned to strategy, data, and revenue goals. The real power comes from treating them as a connected system: diagnose reality, design the target, then close the gap.
A current state journey is a fact-based map of how customers actually move through your experience today—what they do, feel, and encounter across channels, systems, and teams. It reveals friction, handoff failures, and internal complexity from the customer’s point of view. A future state journey is a designed, desired experience that shows how you want customers to move through that same lifecycle once you’ve fixed gaps, aligned teams, and modernized technology. The key difference: current state is diagnostic and descriptive; future state is aspirational and prescriptive. You need both to prioritize investment, align stakeholders, and prove impact on revenue and customer experience.
Current State vs. Future State: Key Differences
Current and future state journeys are two lenses on the same customer lifecycle. Clarifying how they differ prevents “pretty diagrams” from replacing real change.
From Current State Insight to Future State Design
Treat journey work as a continuous capability: understand today, design tomorrow, and build a clear roadmap between the two. This playbook helps you move from static diagrams to operational change.
Current-to-Future Journey Workflow
Connect the “as-is” experience to a funded, executable “to-be” roadmap.
- Choose the journey and outcome. Start with a high-impact moment (onboarding, renewal, expansion, support) and define what success looks like in customer and revenue terms.
- Map the current state with customers and frontline teams. Capture real steps, emotions, channels, systems, and handoffs. Use data (CSAT, NPS, drop-off rates, time-to-value) to validate the story.
- Identify pain points and root causes. Cluster friction around themes: misaligned goals, missing data, manual work, policy constraints, or tech gaps.
- Define design principles for the future state. Agree on non-negotiables like “personalized by segment,” “channel-agnostic,” “data-complete by stage,” or “self-service first, human when it matters.”
- Sketch the future state journey. Redraw the flow to remove friction, simplify steps, and align messaging, offers, and handoffs to your principles. Highlight where automation, AI, or new roles are needed.
- Translate gaps into a roadmap. Turn differences between current and future state into prioritized work: process changes, tech integrations, content, enablement, and measurement improvements.
- Operationalize and measure. Embed the future state in playbooks, workflows, SLAs, and dashboards. Track a focused set of KPIs to show progress and inform the next iteration.
Journey Mapping Maturity Matrix
| Capability | From (Ad Hoc) | To (Operationalized) | Owner | Primary KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current State Journeys | One-off workshops, outdated diagrams | Evidence-based maps for key journeys, refreshed on a regular cadence | Customer Experience / RevOps | Coverage of priority journeys |
| Future State Design | Unrealistic “ideal” slides | Future journeys aligned to strategy, segmented by customer and value | CX, Marketing, Product | Approved journey blueprints per segment |
| Data & Insight | Anecdotes drive decisions | Quant + qual insight feeding journey work (CSAT, NPS, funnels, VOC) | Analytics / Insights | Journeys with data-backed baselines |
| Execution & Orchestration | Journeys live in decks only | Journeys operationalized in campaigns, workflows, and playbooks | Marketing & Sales / CS Ops | Cycle time, conversion, and retention lift |
| Governance & Funding | Projects compete informally | Prioritized roadmap linking journey gaps to investment and OKRs | Revenue Leadership | Percent of budget tied to journeys |
| Continuous Improvement | Set-and-forget maps | Regular journey reviews with test-and-learn experiments | CX Council / RevOps | Validated journey experiments per quarter |
Client Snapshot: Aligning Journeys to Revenue Outcomes
A B2B services company had dozens of siloed “ideal” journeys, but no shared view of how customers were actually buying. By grounding teams in a single set of current state journeys, they surfaced major friction in onboarding and renewal: confusing handoffs, inconsistent messaging, and unclear ownership.
They co-created future state journeys for their top segments, tied each improvement to a KPI, and built a cross-functional roadmap. Within 12 months, they reduced time-to-value, improved onboarding CSAT, and increased expansion revenue from their best-fit accounts.
When you connect current and future state journeys, you move beyond “posters on the wall” to a disciplined engine for prioritizing investments, orchestrating experiences, and proving impact on revenue and loyalty.
Frequently Asked Questions About Current vs. Future State Journeys
Turn Journey Maps Into Measurable Change
We help you capture current state journeys, design future state experiences, and translate the gap into a prioritized roadmap that aligns marketing, sales, service, and operations to shared outcomes.