Organizing Around Journeys, Not Touchpoints

As the world, economy, and market evolve, brands need to be ready to react at the moment to make the most of the opportunities and weather the storms. One of the ways that brands can differentiate and gain a competitive advantage is to organize around providing a great experience. And that means leading with journeys, not touchpoints.

The imperative to lead with journeys

Before we get too far, let's align on a couple of terms.

Brand: the total experience someone has with a company that includes the intangible (a customer's emotions and degree of satisfaction about you) and the tangible (how your product or service solves their problem)

Touchpoint: a single point of contact or interaction between a business and an individual (e.g., website, mobile app, customer service call, etc.)

Journey: the complete set of experiences and interactions an individual has with an organization’s brand, product and services

The stakes have never been higher for delivering great end-to-end experiences that resonate across a customer's journey. Every day, customers expect more unified, personal, and meaningful interactions at every stage of their journey. And if you cannot deliver, even your most loyal fans and followers will leave for the competition—quickly. According to the future of CX report, PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. And 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. Note these aren't people who casually affiliate with a brand...these are people who claim they ”love” a brand, yet are abandoning it after as little as one bad experience. One.

Focusing internally vs. externally

At this point, you probably expect me to talk about how design can help identify and align the individual touchpoints. It can, but I'd like to take a different angle and look inward instead of outward. I want to discuss the importance of reorienting your culture around journeys, not touchpoints. Because unless an organization is set up internally to think and work in a holistic, journey-driven way, providing customers with a seamless experience will never happen, no matter how much you spend on software or outside design support.

The problem: customers think in journeys, but businesses are set up for touchpoints. By and large, the vast majority of companies' processes, cultures, and strategies are structured to promote siloed thinking and working using an organizational model set up long ago and likely by someone who doesn’t even work for the company. An irrelevant or outdated organizational model doesn't necessarily translate to developing new solutions that impact the entire customer journey. (Don't believe me? When I say the words "org chart," what visual comes to mind? If it's a hierarchical triangular-shaped diagram with one person at the top, fanning out into more and more people, you get my point. That model isn't wrong, but when companies adopt it, by default, they often adopt all the organizational and cultural debt that usually comes with it, which...you guessed it...drive touchpoint thinking and working.) Touchpoint thinking is reinforced when people and teams are incentivized to be specialists: focused, efficient, and to perform a narrow set of tasks as perfectly as possible. Touchpoint thinking is reinforced when the highest-paid person in the room selects all new ideas to proceed with. Touchpoint thinking is reinforced when people are overly motivated to focus on the short term. Touchpoint thinking is reinforced when people say, "we can't do that; we’ve always done it this way."

As I shared in a previous post, many people and companies operate as nearsighted as they overly focus on short-term results like daily active users, weekly CSAT scores, quarterly sales goals, etc., and neglect longer-term strategic pursuits. Often, people in customer-facing roles, especially go-to-market departments (sales, marketing, customer service), are focused on bettering the outcomes of their department—and their department alone. This doesn't allow space for journey-driven thinking and working. Operating under the belief that bettering each touchpoint will improve the overall experience is false. According to McKinsey, having great touchpoints alone isn't enough. Companies whose individual departments are operating at high levels of customer satisfaction still score low for overall customer satisfaction. Why? Delivering great experiences requires a cross-disciplinary group of people invested in affecting change beyond their department and across the entire customer journey.

Cultivating your culture

So, how do you do that? It requires a shift in mindset, values, incentives, attitudes, etc. And to be fair, this blog post is not the place to expound on all the intricacies of organization design as books upon books have been written and we’re not going to solve that in a BuzzFeed style “5 Tips to Transform Your Culture” list. But at a mindset level, it’s moving from relying solely on experience, an expert mindset, and the belief that failure is not an option, to one that creates space to also allow a beginner’s mindset, not knowing, but searching for a solution, and that not every idea is going to work.

In conjunction with the mindset, it’s looking inward at your organization and getting real about the desired outcomes you hope to achieve, what behaviors will allow you to achieve those outcomes, and what enables you or blocks you from your goals. Author and entrepreneur Dave Gray likens designing and cultivating your organization to tending a garden across three aspects.

• Outcomes: The things you want to achieve or "harvest" from your garden.

• Behaviors: The positive or negative actions people perform daily that will result in a good or bad harvest.

• Enablers & blockers: The elements that allow your garden to flourish (or not). Some are under your control (e.g., the amount of fertilizer), while others are not (e.g., the weather).

Only when you begin to cultivate a culture and organization that breaks down internal silos and encourages cross-disciplinary thinking and working will you be able to make significant strides in not only applying journey-centric thinking and working to external audiences, but also to reap its benefits.

Providing a better end-to-end experience increases customer loyalty and satisfaction. It also contributes to your bottom line as you can cross-sell or upsell products to customers eager for more. By organizing around journeys, not touchpoints, you are actively building more meaningful relationships with your customers over the long term and using design to give you a competitive advantage. Brands that embrace journeys and deliver a great experience will be labeled as “must-haves,” as customers recognize and appreciate that you care enough to meet and support them at every step of their journey.

If this resonates with you and you'd like to discuss how to reorient your organization around the customer journey, drop me a note.