Current vs. future state: The power of practical, positive thinking (no fortune-telling required)

In business, it often feels like we’re straddling two worlds: the chaotic here and now and the shiny, aspirational future we dream of delivering for our customers — and our bottom line. Fortunately, bridging that gap between both doesn’t require a crystal ball or tarot cards — just the right journey management platform.

Exceptional customer experience (CX) drives everything behind a successful business — from customer satisfaction and retention to revenue. Current vs. future state mapping is a powerful tool for identifying gaps, uncovering opportunities, and envisioning a better experience for your customers — and your business.

In this blog, we’ll pull back the curtain on how this approach fits into journey management, helping you create more seamless, personalized, and impactful customer experiences by connecting pain points and insights to tangible improvements across the customer lifecycle.

What is current state vs. future state?

Simple in theory, but when put into practice, current vs. future state mapping is a powerful approach to strategic planning. It involves the current state and the future state, and bridging the gap between both.

Think of the current state as your baseline — the "what is." This is where you uncover inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and pain points in your customer experiences. The goal is to get a clear, objective view of how things actually work — or don’t — by combining both qualitative and quantitative research. 

• Qualitative insights come from customer feedback, interviews, and open-ended survey questions, offering a window into the emotions, frustrations, and expectations behind customer behaviors.

• Quantitative data — like call center volumes, conversion rates, and response times — provides the hard numbers that reveal patterns and trends at scale.

You can’t improve what you don’t understand. But by blending qualitative insights with quantitative data, you gain a comprehensive view of where things are breaking down — and, more importantly, where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie.

The future state is where you get to imagine the possibilities — dreaming big while staying grounded in reality. Start with the fact-based findings of the current state and create opportunities to clarify the gaps. What’s causing the most friction? If it’s cart abandonment, for example, don’t jump straight to solutions like “create a smoother checkout.” Instead, use frameworks like How Might We (HMW) questions to reframe problems into opportunities:

• How might we reduce decision fatigue during the checkout process?

• How might we create a sense of progress and clarity for customers?

• How might we make it easy for customers to return and complete their purchases later?

These opportunity statements guide the development of targeted solutions, which can then be prototyped, tested, and refined based on real user data — ensuring every change is both meaningful and measurable.

Bridging the gap: Turning vision into action (with AI)

Bridging the gap between current and future states requires a clear roadmap — and that’s where the right journey management platform comes in. A powerful tool like TheyDo can help you:

• Prioritize with purpose: Instead of guessing where to start, use fact-based prioritization grounded in a logic chain. This approach helps you rationalize decisions by linking opportunities directly to the insights uncovered during current state mapping. Focus on the touchpoints or processes causing the most friction — and those with the highest potential to improve customer outcomes and business results.

• Collaborate across teams: Journey management is a team sport. Involve stakeholders from marketing, product, customer support, and beyond to ensure alignment on goals and priorities. Cross-functional collaboration brings diverse perspectives, helping to identify blind spots and create more holistic solutions.

TheyDo’s Journey AI supercharges this entire process by analyzing vast amounts of data to generate a "starting point” quickly. It also uncovers hidden patterns, behaviors, and needs that might otherwise go unnoticed. Instead of spending countless hours mapping manually, teams can spend more time on work that really matters — like data collection, validating insights, and pushing actions forward. Rather than a massive, one-time effort, your journeys are continuously updated with real-time data, so your future state designs are grounded in predictive insights — not educated guesses or wishful thinking.

Create the future today with TheyDo

Here’s the reality: Your customers live in the gap between your current and future state every single day. They experience the pain points you've yet to address and notice immediately when something doesn't work as it should. But each time you close one of these gaps, you strengthen trust, loyalty, and advocacy. With every improvement implemented, you instantly see an updated journey enriched with qualitative and quantitative data reflecting the new situation, allowing you to accurately assess — without guessing — how close you are to achieving your desired future state.

TheyDo’s AI-powered journey management platform makes it easier than ever to close that gap  — with everything you need to map your journeys, gather insights, and turn today’s problems into opportunities with real business impact.

Ready to deliver the CX of your dreams and improve your business bottom line? Try TheyDo for free today.