Customer experience journeys in digital transformation
Customer success is the best outcome for any digital transformation, but how to approach it from a customer-focused lens?
March 2022
This article discusses how to approach a customer-centric digital transformation, and the pivotal role that customer experience journeys and business metrics play in transforming how we function in the digital age.
The pivotal role of customer experience journeys in digital transformation
What are Customer Experience Journeys?
The first question that comes to mind is, what exactly are Customer Experience Journeys? and why do we need them?
Customer Experience Journey mapping is a modeling approach that allows businesses to define the interactions with customers into various phases of their journeys, as they engage with the brand for its products or services. It helps businesses visualize and monitor the interactions with the customer throughout the customer’s life cycle, to find opportunities, to optimize business processes and operations where these interactions take place.
For any large enterprise business brand, their customers can be of any or all four groups,
- Individual consumers or
- Other large or medium businesses, or
- Partners through which they provide extended services to customers
- Partners through which they may have extended relationship to partner’s customer or market.
These customer groups go through a series of phases or sub-phases as they interact with a business brand to explore, buy or use its product or services. These phases or sub-phases are also referred to as Customer Journeys or macro or micro journeys. Each customer group may have their distinctively different journeys due to varying product offerings and line of business operating models.
Customer journeys move from one phase to another phase; from brand awareness, brand education, exploring products or services, going through buying experience, to using the product/service, and finally ending their relationship.
Each phase of the customer journey is defined as a Journey Stage. For instance, a business may define them as,
- Awareness (a pre-sale journey stage)
- Consideration (pre-sale)
- Purchase (sale, upgrades, downgrades)
- Service & Usage (post-sale)
- Loyalty & Retention & Advocate
Each business organizes its customer journeys according to its unique business. However, most journey maps have common or similar themes. Additionally, each industry segment defines its lexicons to identify various stages of customer journeys depending on their product offerings and the market they operate in. Furthermore, enterprises may develop their unique lexicons to support their desired operating model.
Journey stages are further broken down into a smaller set of experiences, also referred to as macro journeys or micro journeys. A macro journey is an aggregate set of activities that need to be completed for it to be finished. Within a macro journey, there are a set of connected experiences (but not always linear) that takes customers step by step to complete their journey. These experiences may be independently delivered in different places. For instance, if we take “Digital Check-in” in the travel industry as a macro journey, it involves many experiences within it. E.g., getting notified for check-in reminders, check-in digitally (web or mobile), dropping luggage, etc. Each of these “experiences” is independent Micro Journeys and delivered at different places and times. Here “check-in reminder” experience ensures the passengers are kept updated with check-in reminders in the lead-up to flight.
Micro Journey experience is purposely kept small within a bound of a particular interaction, so it can be managed as an independent non-linear experience. It has a (clearly) marked start and endpoint, and it can trigger from or connect to another entry point in the macro journey.
Why do we need customer journeys in digital transformation?
In a traditional organization, the customer experience was often an afterthought resulting in poor customer satisfaction, and low adoption of the digital channel. In a digital age, the customer experience journey is co-created with customers. This ensures that the brand delivers based on “what customer wants”. A compelling customer experience will always attempt to deliver a customer value important to the customer. This in return improves customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It is a continuous process to learn and improve journeys as customer expectations keep evolving, and so as the technology. A continuous loopback with the customer during the discovery, design, build, use cycle ensures the product team delivers on customer expectations. This also involves market research to understand the brand, customer insights, define various customer personas, demographics, market segmentation, conduct user testing, A/B testing, and rapid prototyping to get early feedback from actual customers that interacts and engages with the brand.
For traditionalists, this may seem a slower approach than a well-defined waterfall program with known objectives and certainty on timelines. However, this approach is more suitable for today’s digital markets, and it allows product teams to adapt, test & learn, fail fast, and maintain a laser-sharp customer focus.
This continuous process for conducting brand research and customer feedback at various stages of the product design allows product teams to evolve their thinking, reprioritize their backlogs, and often change their product features to meet customer expectations. In a waterfall approach, it would be incredibly difficult to rally large stakeholders to shift their objectives, as their objectives generally become part of larger organizational budgets, shareholder expectations, and communication. In addition, this provides much more authenticity and delegation of authority to product teams, which enables them to develop an emotional experience with their customer and become a customer-value champions.
Product Design Approach
Another approach that is used in product development is the dream and design approach. This approach allows phenomenal flexibility to customer journey experience product owners to up the ante. Instead of following an assembly line pattern, dream and design create two inter-linked cycles for product development, where both cycles can adapt and evolve in changing circumstances. You can think of it as a bicycle with two wheels. The front-wheel drives the direction, and the back wheel paddles the bike forward.
The first cycle is Product NorthStar vision which attempts to develop a future vision or NorthStar following a zero-based design approach. This allows them to reimagine end-to-end customer journey experience without being constrained by an existing process or policy, hence the word zero-based or starting at ground zero. It opens a free-flowing stream of innovation and ideas, as they conduct workshops to ideate. These workshops bring together stakeholders from all interaction channels and lines of business, as well as customer feedback. This creates a better outcome than traditional ad-hoc optimization within the context of the channel or line of business. In addition, it enables the incremental MVP approach to build toward a common NorthStar that has strong customer value benefits.
The second cycle is Product MVP, which then develops the product on minimum viability for customer and business value benefits. This value-based innovation and testing of minimal viable products in the market enables the product team to test and learn, fail fast and adapt. They can avoid the traditional pitfall of large technology-focus transformation or boiling the ocean. Rather, first test product adoption and customer acceptance before investing heavily in technology.
There are many other benefits to this approach. This process is much more transparent with all stakeholders including the customer. It avoids the death march of protracted waterfall implementation, rather it emphasizes testing product features in a “real” market with MVP without upfront investment. And it allows pressing many levers at the same time instead of a sequential run, a product team can prioritize different product features. Many of these benefits come from agile development, however, what’s different in this case is NorthStar’s vision and re-imagined end-to-end customer journey maps that precede the MVP cycles.
Some categorize it as five Ds — — Define, Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver. My approach is more pragmatic than what I learned in large enterprises. Though it still has similar ingredients i.e., packing steps to define/discover/dream in the first cycle (NorthStar), and design/deliver in the second cycle (MVP). In real life, the process is not as linear, and in my model, the two forums have the freedom to dream within the bounds of their objectives.
This process (to organize an end-to-end customer journey experience across all channels) often gets stalled due to departmental conflicts and siloed objectives dealing with their interaction channel. In most non-digitally transformed organizations, a traditional channel like an in-person sales channel or call center channel has more authority than a digital channel. But their focus is very different. It is generally more focused on agent-facing engagements that interact with customers, hence, the experience they develop has more suitability for an agent than for a digital customer. Their agent develops that emotional bond with customers, whereas in the digital channel this emotional bond required a completely different approach to delivering an experience. This gets further conflated when lines of businesses have siloed processes to sell or service their product lines. This makes two products of the same brand give a completely different experience to the customer. This triggers incredibly frustrated customers who in their mind are engaging with one brand, but their interactions are completely disjointed.
Another anomaly in many organizations is that they may quickly jump to the agile bandwagon but without fully establishing the first cycle for NorthStar. This creates many wasted agile cycles with untraceable customer value. Often programs are executed to utilize allocated budgets but without long-term purpose and vision. These costs organizations in lost opportunity, low customer engagement, customer churn, etc., but these losses remain untraced as there is no efficient journey management tracking system to highlight the losses.
Customer Experience Journey bundled with dream and design approach provides a common framework where stakeholders (including customers) in large organizations can come together to build connected, compelling, and personalized experiences meeting customer expectations. With well-defined journeys, each macro and the micro journey can find empowered product owners that can steer the evolution of their products ensuring a consistent experience across all channels.
Changing customer expectations in a digital age
However, customer expectation is changing. While a brand develops an experience it needs both internal and external viewpoints. It is the customer’s right to choose the channel in which they wish to interact or engage with the brand. Traditionally, organizations will triage and redirect customers where they can best interact for many reasons. In omnichannel, customers will likely engage with a brand in more than one channel. These channels are growing as digital technology improves and new digital mediums are available to customers. It is the responsibility of the brand to ensure that they facilitate customer journeys across all channels, as a connected experience. Customers may likely start an interaction in one channel and complete it in another channel. This creates new complexities to manage customer journeys, i.e.,
- Customers choose their preferred interaction channel to initiate a journey.
- Customers may start, stop, or resume their journeys, and this could be over many days. This means that the context of where they left off and associated data needs to be stored. This information should be consistently available to all channels if a customer decides to resume in another channel. E.g., from the web to mobile.
- Customers may also go back and forth in their journey in between steps. Hence, the customer journeys can not be linear or rigidly developed.
- Customer journeys may start in another conversation (e.g., exploring with a conversational bot) and may initiate or trigger a completely different interaction (like making a payment for pending order). Both journeys are independent of each other but can interact as one connected experience.
- And many new expectations like these.
In industries like telecom, these concepts are well organized and propagated by industry forums like TM Forum¹. In addition, getting deep customer knowledge is becoming essential to support customer journeys. Today, customers may take three or even four channels to complete a single transaction (a macro journey). Often this may result in more engagement with customer service. As improvements in customer experience occur in many industries, customer expectation is changing well beyond omnichannel interaction.
Many organizations avoid the term “omnichannel”, rather they use the term “multi-channel”. This is to signify those unique needs for each channel to interact with the customer differently. Here it’s important to note that omnichannel doesn’t dictate a unified experience or similar experience in every channel, rather a connected experience from the customer’s perspective. Each channel continues to interact with customers based on their unique requirements. Organizations continue to squabble about the two approaches primarily due to the lack of resources, funding, organizational structure, and technology required to deliver an omnichannel experience. Fact remains that multi-channel experiences are not integrated, and customer engagement is often siloed. It is a status-quo in large, siloed enterprises. A successful digital transformation program can overcome this barrier through various methods we have discussed in this article and shift the focus from internal strategies to a customer or external viewpoint.
Today, customers expect that brands know their customers and they have relevant information to personalize the experience. Hence, developing the right customer insights that can drive a very personalized and emotional customer journey is paramount in the future digital world. This will take KYC (Know your customer) to the next level. In any customer-facing channel, this deep customer knowledge will become paramount for customer interactions. This will include many facets
- Firstly, the ability to track and monitor customer journeys end-to-end, and where they are in relevance and in-context to their journey.
- Secondly, have deep customer knowledge and insights, their behavior, and the ability to transform it into actionable “actions” during customer journeys.
- Thirdly, the ability to create a personalized engagement during critical moments of their journeys to have an impactful experience, knowing what is essential for customers in their life.
- Fourthly, the ability to receive signal data and fuse it with customer insights to improve customer-facing processes, mapping human behavior response into a predicted actionable experience.
Journey Management is essential for digitally transformed enterprise
It is then imperative that brands support consistent, connected, and personalized customer journeys, not just in one channel, rather across the spectrum of customer-facing channels including digital or agent-serving or partners. Here, partner channels should not be forgotten, as customers often hop across to the partner’s network to complete a transaction.
This means business needs to first define and operationalize an inter-connected omnichannel journey. For instance, a common industry-supported single sign-on capability becomes mandatory as customers hop to their partner’s network to complete transactions (e.g., making an appointment with a partner’s facility). This is essential to create a seamless experience.
There are three key challenges for large enterprises that impedes them to enable a journey management platform:
- Defining customer journey is complex with siloed lines of businesses and channels, and it can be an exasperating and exhausting exercise. Organizational tensions between departments make it further different. A digital transformation program needs to identify this critical impediment as a “big rock” and create a culture of collaboration in the transformation program to overcome this barrier.
One way of solving this is to organize business capabilities by Customer Journey stages and macro journeys, e.g., “Customer makes payment” or “Digital Registration”. They can appoint a single owner to each capability. It will provide a way for organizations to rationalize their sparse capability for each channel. Consequently, it will allow consistency in delivering experience across all channels. - End to End Journey Management Platform is not as commonly available as many other commodity platforms. Many platforms that provide journey management capability generally support it within marketing campaigns and relevant interactions. They generally don’t have implementation for other journey stages, like onboarding customers. This is primarily because onboarding is complex and involves many different product lines and channels and varies in different industry segments. Most industries handle it within their CRM (customer relationship management) applications. CRM applications often support business process definition and journey mapping. However, a number of these CRM applications are outdated to support omnichannel on digital channels, and its new dimensions of digital experience.
This issue can be resolved by engaging with vendors and evolving the platform to support end-to-end journey experiences. - Traditional organizations found little upfront cost-benefit in implementing journey management platforms. This is primarily because an Omni-experience is mostly non-existent in traditional organizations, and many businesses are still in their early digital age. Their digital focus is to enable customers to engage with the brand, generate leads, provide basic self-service functions, paperless functions and drop certain personalized messages in key moments. Fewer products are available for online purchase. Most of their complex products are sold by agents, and there are complex, red-taped processes in the back office that impede automated straight-through processing. As you will notice, most enablement is due to cost-saving in the back office. In that environment, implementing an end-to-end journey management platform is a hard sell. Digital Transformation will need to find a way to fund this very critical capability to enable customer journeys.
Since Journey management is another core platform for a digital enterprise, it’s worth mentioning some of the key capabilities that it must have to support customer experience journeys.
- Customer journey mapping and visualization provide an ability for business users to visually create customer journey maps and associated journey steps. It allows users to mark key moments in customer journeys and develops a taxonomy for interaction points and milestones. This taxonomy plays a pivotal role later to facilitate integration with various digital experience sub-systems to support customer interactions.
- Integrates with sub-systems to receive data to track journey progress and activate an action during key moments or milestones. This includes systems in all digital channels like web, mobile, IVR, IoT, or agent-facing channels like a call center or sales. It will also receive information from support systems (like CRM, billing systems, network systems, warehouse, shipment systems, marketing campaigns, etc.) if they perform any activity that is part of the customer journey.
- Orchestration customer journeys when customers interact with a brand on their digital or other channels. Each channel platform will pull real-time journey data to support their interaction. This will allow customers to see their journey progress in digital channels as well as other channels (like call centers) to see a similar view of customers’ journey. Hence it will enable a consistent and up-to-date view of customers’ journey progress in all channels. Other systems will also interact with journey management to pull real-time journey data like real-time interaction management or decisioning engines or personalization engines to support guided selling, next best actions, etc.
- Provide customer journey analytics to allow business users to monitor and track the progress of an end-to-end journey. A part of it may rely on business metrics and KPIs analytics platforms. However, business analytics “must” be captured in tandem with customer experience journeys to enable organizations to deliver the greatest impact to customers in their key moments. This will enable them to test journey improvements, identify root causes of poor experience, detect customer behavior changes, and uncover new interactions to personalize the experiences.
Footnotes
- Tele Management Forum (TM Forum) Customer Experience Management Guidebook
The views expressed are my own and do not represent any organization. I aim to have respectful discussions that further positive change as we navigate unprecedented technological transformation. Change is constant, so my perspective may evolve over time through learning, testing, and adapting to new information.
