Common Customer Journey #fails

Common Customer Journey #fails

Helge Tennø
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

An organizations is a conscious single-purpose organism engineered to efficiently produce a set of narrowly defined outcomes. A customer is human being. An arbitrary individual designed for inefficiency, serendipity and progress (not outcome). A Customer Journey in all of this is an often insufficient method to try to match these two universes in order to give the impression that the company is best designed to fit its customers.

This creates a situation where the Customer Journey, solving a Herculean task, is prone to mistakes. The following is a list of challenges that Customer Journey design easily can run into:

1. Customer Journeys can end up focusing on perfecting the steps in a process and pay too little attention the transactions between steps. This is because organizations are silos designed to solve their individual tasks with perfection and a transaction between tasks is an inefficient distribution of resources. Unfortunately it is the transactions that keep the customer moving through the process and are the whole journey’s most important parts.

(This is found to be true both in regards to Customer-Jobs-To-Be-Done-Theory and fundamental business theory)

2. Customers Journeys replicate how the organizations is designed and works to fit the customer to the organization’s processes. In effect creating a beautiful visual representation of something that doesn’t exist.

b. Customer Journeys work hard to improve operational excellence, but forget that it is customer excellence which is needed to improve the customer relationship and stand out in a digital economy.

c. Creating an as-is version of the Customer Journey to map the current state risks anchoring the company in the old version, forcing only small iterations going forward (which might undershoot the need and the ambition of the project)

d. Google and Shopper Science studied 3000 customers and found 3000 different journeys. So the whole concept of a unified Customer Journey is an illusion, begging for a change in how we think and design Customer Journeys.

e. A static Customer Journey is outdated the day after it is designed. Similar to a book being a parking space for an idea, instead of a living breathing organism. A well designed rigid Customer Journey might as well become outdated within the first week of its completion. And the Customer Journey only becomes one more tool convincing the organization that the world around it doesn’t change.

Even if I’m being overly picky and dramatic regarding Customer Journeys the reason is that I see a tool with such good intentions that too easily can end up killing the patient it was supposed to do surgery on.

My personal take is that journeys much more need to resemble systems maps (link) and take on a completely different format (this is a very interesting approach by Kunde), new types of content and rethink how it can become a living breathing guide for the organization.

Only then will it have the capacity to solve real world problems as opposed to merely mimicking what the organization already thinks of itself.

Everything New Is Dangerous

A Collection of Short Form Ideas

Helge Tennø

Written by

Founder and Principal at Jokull AS | www.jokull.io

Everything New Is Dangerous

A Collection of Short Form Ideas

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