Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a product and service design method that is widely used by design researchers and practitioners. It tracks the customer's or user's interactions with products and services during experiences and maps out significant changes in those experiences. While CJM has been praised for its ability to understand customer experiences from their perspectives (i.e., empathy building), it suffers from limitations such as limited sample sizes and cognitive biases, mostly due to its reliance on traditional ethnographic methods such as interviews, observations, and surveys. To address these issues, this article presents an approach to performing CJM with mobile applications (apps) and quantitatively analyzing the gathered data. By dividing CJM into data collection and analytics stages, challenges in each stage are tackled separately. In the data collection stage, a custom-built mobile app is designed to gather information on customer experiences. Then, a two-step data analysis approach is developed to gain insights into those experiences. To demonstrate the approach's effectiveness in tracking customer experiences, it was applied to the errand experiences of students during the pandemic, and the results were compared with those from a parallel study using traditional CJM approaches. The findings demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach in performing CJM and showed that additional insights can be obtained through the proposed approach. This work provides a more effective and objective CJM approach for designers to understand their customers, thereby contributing toward the broader effort to develop reliable empathy-building design methods.
