Transforming customer journeys to enhance experience and business growth

The impact of customer demands and the speed of disruption of digital technology and artificial intelligence challenge top managers to better understand customers, enable their organizations to meet customer expectations and deliver an expectational customer experience.

The practice of customer experience has existed for a while, and its main disciplines are constantly evolving, but two recent reports from Forrester and Qualtrics painted a grim picture of how customers and managers perceive the value of this practice. One of the underlying challenges is in regard to the delivery of siloed experiences by organizations that result in customers receiving fragmented experiences.

In this article, we will explore the journey management approach, which is one of the pillars of CX practice, and how it can help organizations deliver on their promises. But let’s start by defining what journey management means to an organization.

According to Florian Vollmer, an expert in journey management and instructor at Georgia Institute of Technology, “it is the practice of documenting, designing and iterating customer journeys over time with an agile, continuous improvement mindset—based on systematic journey insights and business objectives. It gives practitioners tools and methods to drive execution, specifically at the management level.”

The evolution from journey mapping to journey management

Today, virtually all customer experience, marketing and operations leaders have embraced the need to map customer journeys across touchpoints and channels, segment their customers and optimize their frontline training and communications to deliver personalized experiences. But we find more often than not, these initiatives don’t pay off because many of those projects don’t move from maps and charts on the walls to actionable delivery.

Challenge: Traditional journey mapping limitations

Journey maps are often static, fragmented and non-actionable artifacts. While traditional mapping, driven by designers, excels in creating exceptional experiences, it often fails to translate these designs into actionable steps for operationalization. This disconnect means that the journey mapping exercise does not effectively transition into practical applications, limiting its impact.

Moreover, journey mapping initiatives often generate initial excitement with visually appealing concepts but fail to drive lasting change. They are frequently forgotten, leading to wasted resources, duplicated efforts and disjointed innovation processes. Journey mapping is not inherently actionable and typically lacks ongoing ownership, which hampers the accumulation of insights and sustained improvements.

Marc Stickdorn, founder and CEO of Smaply, says: “One of the biggest misconceptions about journey maps is thinking that current-state maps accurately describe reality. Think about maps in geography; they do not represent reality accurately. They reduce complexity to make the intangible visible, graspable and understandable. Maps reduce information so that we can see things in a way that we could not see before.”

Approach: Journey management as a scaled practice

One of the main successes in journey management is operationalized journey mapping, which establishes an ongoing practice that:

1. Translates the concepts and visual ideas.
2. Diagnoses the experiences.
3. Designs, develops and delivers customer experiences at scale.

According to Stickdorn, another misconception of journey maps “is that we use them to script an experience”.

He adds: “That's not what we use them for. You cannot script something with so many unknown and constantly evolving variables. We use journey maps to understand what can possibly go wrong and ask ourselves if the organization is prepared to handle these different scenarios.”

This involves establishing methods and tools to capture, translate, document, design and interconnect journeys and sub-journeys and iterate customer journeys over time with an agile mindset.

This approach provides a systematic method for integrating journey insights with business objectives and facilitating ongoing CX improvement. It creates a comprehensive business blueprint of an organization’s interactions with customers, enabling a unified and actionable approach that drives sustained improvements and aligns with business goals.

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Transforming customer experience practice with journey management

Organizing teams around journeys

Designing an organization around a customer journey centers on putting the customer first and requires a mindset shift. This ongoing, multifaceted practice bridges siloed departments to help your organization become "fit for your customer" and make it easy to deliver a great experience. After identifying your customers, identity and capabilities, redesign the organization by changing decision rights, roles and teams, and aligning incentives. This may involve rewiring your organizational DNA to support your preferred customer segments and value proposition.

Establish multidisciplinary teams focused on specific customer journeys. Have an owner who is responsible and accountable for executing the end-to-end customer journey. They are the single point of accountability, and they lead the functional team that drives the delivery and implementation of the product or service journey and is responsible for journey strategy, design, detailing and on-time implementation of the customer journey.

In addition, this owner works with other journey owners and stakeholders to ensure all touchpoints interact with other journey touchpoints, to create an experience that customers perceive as seamless.

Operationalizing journey management

Part of operationalizing journey management is building a foundation that incorporates a framework, standards, taxonomy and a clear CX vision to guide journey management efforts. This is critical to ensuring the execution of any new journey mapping or new product or service introduced to customers.

Operationalizing the journey management means democratizing the practice across the organization and aligning it with its business objectives and outcomes. It requires scaling and standardizing existing customer experience practices, transitioning to a continuous way of working and implementing alignment processes. This involves developing a shared approach, playbook and toolkit for journey management throughout the organization.

Part of operationalization is translating static and visual maps into actions and scenario-based tasks that reflect real-time customer insights and changes. Embedding journey management into the decision-making process aligns it with the overall customer experience strategy.

Setting and measuring journey performance

To measure success, set up performance metrics aligned with journey outcomes to ensure accountability and continuous improvement. Implement tools and methods to measure journey performance and identify areas for improvement. Use journey analytics tools to track the customer feedback, insights, behavior, reactions and attitudes that reflect their experiences across touchpoints and journeys.

Understanding the types of experiences your customers go through is critical to developing a metric system that enables you to apply the right metric—customer, operations, or financial—to the experience.

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success with Jim Tincher

Benefits and impact of journey management

Adopting a customer journey management approach offers significant benefits that can transform both CX and business outcomes. According to Optimizely, it also increases employee engagement by 25 percent as employees are more aligned with the organization’s CX strategy and its objectives.

Here are three of these benefits:

1. Cultivating loyalty and advocacy

Customers who experience a well-managed journey are more likely to become loyal advocates, promoting the brand and contributing to long-term growth

• Deliver hyper-personalized experiences by understanding and addressing individual customer needs and preferences.
• Foster long-term relationships and loyalty through consistent and seamless experiences across multiple touchpoints, journeys and channels over the lifetime of the customer. This is crucial for retaining customers and boosting business growth.

2. Enhanced scale and speed of CX improvements

• Deliver connected experiences at scale by leveraging cross-journey data and insights to make informed decisions and enable value-driven prioritization of improvement opportunities across different journeys and experiences.
• Accelerate CX improvements by maintaining a continuous feedback loop and agile iteration process.

3. Improved alignment and efficiency

• Streamline internal processes and resource allocation by bridging silos and fostering cross-functional collaboration, which leads to more cohesive and efficient operations.
• Drive cost efficiencies through better coordination and elimination of duplicated efforts, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience.

Conclusion

Journey management represents a significant advancement in CX practices. By addressing the limitations of traditional journey mapping and fostering organization-wide alignment, journey management enables companies to deliver superior customer experiences and drive business growth. It transforms customer experience initiatives from isolated projects into a strategic, ongoing process that continually adapts to meet evolving needs and expectations.

Through journey management, organizations can ensure that every customer interaction is optimized, leading to increased satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately, business success.

In summary, journey management is not just about understanding customer journeys but actively managing and optimizing them to create exceptional, seamless experiences that drive long-term business growth.

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