Near the end of my last post (describing the concept of analytics across the enterprise), I argued that full spectrum analytics would provide “a common understanding throughout the enterprise of who your customers are, what journeys they have, which journeys are easy and which a struggle for each type of customer, detailed and constantly improving profiles of those audiences and those journeys and the decision-making and attitudes that drive them, and a rich understanding of how initiatives and changes at every level of the enterprise have succeeded, failed, or changed those journeys over time.”
By my count, that admittedly too long sentence contains the word journey four times and clearly puts understanding the customer journey at the heart of analytics understanding in the enterprise.
I think that’s right.
If you think about what senior decision-makers in an organization should get from analytics, nothing seems more important than a good understanding of customers and their journeys. That same understanding is powerful and important at every level of the organization. And by creating that shared understanding, the enterprise gains something almost priceless – the ability to converse consistently and intelligently, top-to-bottom, about why programs are being implemented and what they are expected to accomplish.
This focus on the journey isn’t particularly new. It’s been almost five years since I began describing Two-Tiered Segmentation as fundamental to digital; it’s a topic I’ve returned to repeatedly and it’s the central theme of my book. In a Two-Tiered Segmentation, you segment along two dimensions: who visitors are and what they are trying to accomplish in a visit. It’s this second piece – the visit intent segmentation – that begins to capture and describe customer journey.
But if Two-Tiered Segmentation is the start of a measurement framework for customer journey, it isn’t a complete solution. It’s too digitally focused and too rooted in displayed behaviors - meaning it’s defined solely by the functionality provided by the enterprise not by the journeys your customers might actually want to take. It’s also designed to capture the points in a journey – not necessarily to lay out the broader journey in a maximally intelligible fashion.
Traditional journey mapping works from the other end of the spectrum. Starting with customers and using higher-level interview techniques, it’s designed to capture the basic things customers want to accomplish and then map those into more detailed potential touchpoints. It’s exploratory and specifically geared toward identifying gaps in functionality where customers CAN’T do the things they want or can’t do them in the channels they’d prefer.
While traditional journey mapping may feel like the right solution to creating enterprise-wide journey maps, it, too, has some problems. Because the techniques used to create journey maps are very high-level, they provide virtually no ability to segment the audience. This leads to a “one-size-fits-all” mentality that simply isn’t correct. In the real world, different audiences have significantly different journey styles, preferences and maps, and it’s only through behavioral analysis that enough detail can be exhumed about those segments to create accurate maps.
Similarly, this high-level journey mapping leads to a “golden-path” mentality that belies real world experience. When you talk to people in the abstract, it’s perfectly possible to create the ideal path to completion for any given task. But in the real world, customers will always surprise you. They start paths in odd places, go in unexpected directions, and choose channels that may not seem ideal. That doesn’t mean you can’t service them appropriately. It does mean that if you try to force every customer into a rigid "best" path you'll likely create many bad experiences. This myth of the golden path is something we’ve seen repeatedly in traditional web analytics and it’s even more mistaken in omni-channel.
In an omni-channel world, the goal isn’t to create an ideal path to completion. It’s to understand where the customer is in their journey and adapt the immediate Touchpoint to maximize their experience. That’s a fundamentally different mindset – a network approach not a golden-path - and it’s one that isn’t well captured or supported by traditional journey mapping.
There’s one final aspect to traditional journey mapping that I find particularly troublesome – customer experience teams have traditionally approached journey mapping as a one-time, static exercise.
Mistake.
The biggest change digital brings to the enterprise is the move away from traditional project methodologies. This isn’t only an IT issue. It’s not (just) about Agile development vs. Waterfall. It’s about recognition that ALL projects in nearly all their constituent pieces, need to work in iterative fashion. You don’t build once and move on. You build, measure, tune, rebuild, measure, and so on. Continuous improvement comes from iteration. And the implication is that analytics, design, testing, and, yes, development should all be setup to support continuous cycles of improvement.
In the well-designed digital organization, no project ever stops.
This goes for journey mapping too. Instead of one huge comprehensive journey map that never changes and covers every aspect of the enterprise, customer journeys need to be evolved iteratively as part of an experience factory approach. Yes, a high-level journey framework does need to exist to create the shared language and approach that the organization can use. But like branches on a tree, the journey map should constantly be evolved in increasingly fine-grained and detailed views of specific aspects of the journey. If you’ve commissioned a one-time customer experience journey mapping effort, congratulations; you’re already on the road to failure.
The right approach to journey mapping isn’t two-tiered segmentation or traditional customer experience maps; it’s a synthesis of the two that blends a high-level framework driven primarily by VoC and creative techniques with more detailed, measurement and channel-based approaches (like Two-Tiered Segmentation) that deliver highly segmented network-based views of the journey. The detailed approaches never stop developing, but even the high-level pieces should be continuously iterated. It’s not that you need to constantly re-work the whole framework; it’s that in a large enterprise, there are always new journeys, new content, and new opportunities evolving.
More than anything else, this need for continuous iteration is what’s changed in the world and it’s why digital is such a challenge to the large enterprise.
A great digital organization never stops measuring customer experience. It never stops designing customer experience. It never stops imagining customer experience.
That takes a factory, not a project.
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