Photo by Maxime Horlaville on Unsplash

Clarifying Misconceptions About Journey Management

4 facts you never knew (and probably should!)

Samantha Manns — Director of Journey Management

If you’ve decided to read this article, I expect you’re either interested in dispelling any preconceived notions about journey management… or you’re wondering what the heck I’m even talking about. Both are fair reactions, considering the historical customer experience industry chatter has primarily been on journey mapping functions alone.

At Prudential, the Journey Management Team has been tasked with ensuring that the behavioral needs, wants, challenges and motivators of our customers are considered as it relates to their end-to-end experience within all phases of a customer journey. So, what exactly does that entail and how does it fit into the larger customer experience ecosystem?

1. It’s not just journey mapping.

We support stakeholders in the creation of a long-term customer centric strategy and aid in optimizing experiences, products and solutions that will provide value to our customers. We accomplish this goal through using an arsenal of tools, including:

• Psychographic analysis
• Behavioral research and analysis
• Development of customer personas
• Journey assessment sessions
• Experience gap analysis
• Ideation and solution prioritization
• Identifying customer trends
• Creating experience blueprints

This visual from Pointillist illustrates the delicate intricacies of these various activities and how ongoing end-to-end journey management is not possible without all elements.

2. You won’t find our exact protocols anywhere else because the practice was built to uniquely suit the way Prudential does business.

We break up the aforementioned activities into 7-week cycles for each body of work. We chunk this out into a 2-week Discovery Phase, a 3-week Assessment Phase, and a 2-week Solution Phase. Stakeholders can expect to receive the standard deliverables indicated in the white boxes while only committing about 5% of their direct time during the seven weeks.

Prudential Journey Management Team’s 7-week cyclical process with deliverables of each phase indicated in white boxes.

Through this framework, Prudential’s Journey Management Team conducted more than 100 workshops, identified more than 250 misalignments, and made more than 500 recommendations to our stakeholders in 2022.

3. Journey Management works alongside the Voice of the Customer and UX Design teams to guide customer strategies by product lines.

All three teams sit under the Experience Design (XD) umbrella, bringing together leaders in Product, Technology, Research, Marketing and more to guide them through creating ideal experiences for their various customer cohorts. With customer-obsessed XDers at the helm of strategy inception, these business unit-aligned stakeholders can flex their expertise in a way that generates fresh ideas to improve existing pain points, meet previously unidentified needs proactively and even have a bit of fun in creative workshops that contrast from their everyday jobs.

4. You can’t get a degree in Journey Management, however, there are backgrounds that set you up for success.

You may be wondering how someone determines themselves qualified to lead this kind of work. At Prudential, our team is made up of a variety of talented individuals with contrasting job histories, but what they have in common is:

• Art or science degree — Journalism, PR, design, advertising, sociology, psychology
• Strong ability to empathize — Being able to remove your company hat and act as customers by proxy is crucial to removing any biases and truly thinking outside-in.
• Humility — Sometimes the solution to an identified misalignment is as simple as a color change, other times you may be pitching the build of an entirely new dashboard. As customer needs vary, so do the potential responses, so being comfortable that you won’t be breaking barriers every day is essential for goal and expectation setting.
• Using data in your writing — Sometimes stakeholders are ready and willing to think totally outside the box, while other times they want to poke holes in all your recommendations. Writing narratives that incorporate real-time data from your behavioral research and analysis separates those who suggest improvements, and those who spearhead them into execution.

As the Journey Management discipline continues to gain traction in the customer experience industry, the team at Prudential is constantly evolving our best practices. Let us know in the comments if anything surprised you, and we look forward to diving deeper into some of these concepts in future posts!