Burn the Map

Journey mapping has become a routine part of customer service operations and a big money spinner for various "CX" consultancies. It survives, largely, out of habit. But things have changed since its inception, and now, that habit is hurting us. It's time to #burnthemap

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Sometimes we hang on to the ideas of the past. We build teams around them and debate their finer points at conferences. A few even become a guru, complete with a furrowed brow and a book deal. We double and triple down, cloaking ourselves in the familiarity of the idea. We suspend critical thought.

Such is the troubled case of journey mapping.

The wider concept of the ‘customer journey’ is very powerful. It’s a wonderful way to express specific customer perspectives to those who are a long way from the operational front lines of a business, such as its board of directors, and to better explore customer episodes, or apply powerful principles like the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework.

Rightfully, in the last twenty years, the concept of customer journey management has become a mainstream function in all?service design teams and the poorly named, 'customer experience' department. Very poorly named actually, though that's another article altogether.

But what also became central to this embrace of all things journey, is our ongoing use of the now redundant practice called 'journey mapping'.

Why Redundant?

Journey mapping became popular in 2002. It has evolved methodologically over time but is largely based on a seemingly ever-green premise, that we can dictate or drive customers to desired outcomes, such as a purchase. Colin Shaw’s excellent work in the field was ground-breaking at the time, and he is largely credited for its popularisation.

Today, many organisations run studies to better understand customer pain points and their jobs to be done, in order to then design interactions and their flows. That's the theory anyway, and the thinking is right. It's certainly far superior to a great many companies that don’t bother to do either.

In practice though, it's outcomes are manifest in process management - and that's the problem in today's world.

A process map works well for machinery or production lines, not so much for human behaviour. Journeys are non-linear, subject to individual psychology, their sociological and anthropological influences, their intent (JTBD), and the context of the moment. Moreover, and unlike processes, journeys are owned and managed by the customer – not the company.

Still, the process model worked in the early 2000s and companies grew from them. And then it didn't.

Things Changed

In the intervening 20-plus years since 2002, we have seen the wholesale rise of the Internet from 1 billion users in 2007 to 4.5 billion users in 2019, the arrival of smartphones which became our “1st screen” in 2015, and the resultant rise of social media platforms to 3 billion users in 2018.

In parallel, cloud computing became mainstream in 2012 and began powering all manner of brand-to-consumer interactions (e.g., Google!), and device proliferation occurred across the world as manufacturers met the exploding market.

So, what did this mean for customer journeys?

Firstly, consumers now engage with brands in a truly omnichannel way. Back in 2002 when journey mapping became popular, companies were managing no more than 2 or 3 channels, and they were largely one-way: from brand to consumer. Today, a brand can be managing literally hundreds or thousands of touchpoints across 50, 80, or even 100 channels, with many are now bi-directional in nature.

Secondly, all of this additional choice and connectivity has resulted in the mass evolution of consumerism, at least in the way that service operates. We have become “accidental narcissists”, and customer expectations for seamless and frictionless interactions with their chosen brands have become universal; a now macro reality that spares no category.

Whereas once, we could legitimately dictate a customer’s path across a handful of one-way channels, such a task is literally impossible today, and for two inescapable reasons:

a)????Customer journeys are diverse, sometimes independent and sometimes inter-dependant, highly complex, inconsistent, and occurring in real-time across a multitude of touchpoints both physical and digital, sometimes simultaneously, and often on a series of whims.

b)???The customer journey is the customer’s, not the brand's.

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What a nightmare. What to do?

One could argue that business has responded in shorthand, through three common approaches.

VoC

The first was to create voice-of-customer (VoC) programs, asking customers for their reasons for doing things, their wants and needs, their sentiment, and so on. Such programs are both highly valuable – and inherently limited by themselves. Self-reported data is not the richest nor the most reliable source of information to start with, and it often requires an interruption of a person’s journey to obtain it. This in itself is at odds with that macro expectation for low friction interaction with brands.

Consider also the “observer effect” of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Borrowing from physics, this teaches that the act of taking a measurement changes the thing that we are trying to measure. Notably, when studied against customer experience, Roger Dooley found that:

“The mere act of trying to measure customer experience changes that experience, almost always for the worse”.

Still, there is great value in VoC when it is properly understood and designed correctly as part of a wider customer program – but it doesn't solve the customer journey challenges of today.

The Double Down

The second approach has been to double down on journey mapping by investing more time and effort (and dollars) into the research aspects. More focus groups. More surveys. More persona development. More this. More that. But unlike VoC which offers value, this really just compounds the error because the same route problem exists: Humans are not linear and journeys are not processes.

In fact, the behaviours of most value, occur at the individual level, not in segments. These are dynamic. Perpetually so.

The interaction choices that a customer takes today, can be entirely different tomorrow, even when fulfilling the same "job". Static journey maps pinned to a wall simply don’t cope with that.

Equally, journeys – as the basis of engagement - occur over time, and not in isolated channels. For instance, a customer’s journey does not start when the phone rings in the contact centre, nor when they enter a website or a store. Siloed channel management folks like to think so. Customers beg to differ.

Data. Data. Data.

The third and possibly the noisiest in the industry today is the use of data and analytics. It's an area that promises much and is already delivering much. But the big problem with big data is that it lacks big power without big context...

And to be clear customer context is not market context. Aggregate statistics are powerful for the latter, but individual nuance in each customer must be met by equally nuanced brand interactions in service of that individual.

Only when data has a solid foundation of context and intent does it become most useful. Most have simply skipped the first step (context) and understandably, given that it was very hard to illicit for so long. But not any longer, and context trumps attributes, every time.

So if journey mapping is a failed model, if data and analytics are just floating zeros and ones until customer context is applied, and if VoC isn’t nearly adequate by itself, what else?

Personalisation Failed

I am what you might call a "triple threat": Practitioner, researcher-advisor, and technology professional. It's miracle I don't have a dissociative personality disorder. Or maybe we do.

Anyway, through that body of work, I eventually formed a strong belief some years ago that we needed to adopt what I used to refer to as, “Personalisation 4.0”. I even wrote about it in ZDNet. The premise was simple. Personalisation had failed. What had started as a means to be more, well, "personal” with actual customers, had turned into a series of marketing hacks.

Some of these had a sound basis in psychology and aren’t in themselves horrible. For instance, by adding a person’s actual name to an email, rather than simply addressing it to “Dear Customer”, it was reported that open rates improved by 28% due to familiarity.

But as marketing plays overtook service goals and the underlying idea of customer proximity, and as digital advertising quite grotesquely abused the concept entirely, the foundational thinking of personalisation was lost.

I thought we needed something else. I called it Personalisation 4.0 on the basis that the previous 3 phases of personalisation had been hijacked. Later, I found that the far better term, and one that I use today, is: “Individualisation”.

Put simply, Individualisation is the transformative force that allows us to leave journey mapping behind and is the core premise behind what should now be among the most critical pillars of consumer service models.

Alongside key concepts from service design, choice architecture, complex economics in general, asset design, and a coherent engagement stack, customer journey orchestration is that key pillar.

Journey Orchestration

First a note of caution: Beware those that use this term without understanding – especially a good many vendors. Ours is not an industry that respects and protects terminology, or professional language. The wild west had nothing on us.

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In short, we now have the capability that graduates the industry from static inside-out mapping to dynamic outside-in orchestration and copes with the realities of delivering omnichannel service to hyper-connected consumers.

To be precise, JO is firstly based on the principle that the customer journey is indeed the customer's and that a company’s job, is to respond coherently and rapidly to the needs of each customer as the customer is expressing them.

Critically, the multiplicity of simultaneous journeys and channel variables that a customer is interacting with, are not accepted prohibitions.

It is the brand's responsibility to be listening – constantly – at every single interaction point that it offers to a customer, no matter how many that it is, and JO makes that possible.

As a result, companies can view all that is being listened to, and actual customer journeys emerge right in front of them. Like watching TV. These are both real-time and real, which means that they can be interrogated and that the insights gained are equally, real.

It is no longer hypothetical, “researched”, constrained by channel or false linearity, nor any of the other multiple issues within journey mapping practice.

Of course, the “O“ in JO (orchestration) then comes into play. Real-time complex decisioning makes it possible to now change the interaction as the customer is having it, mimicking the back and forth of human involvement (not just conversation), and enabling the company to serve the customer in both the customer’s context and in their moment. Combined with relevant asset (re)design and the like, orchestration is the rubber hitting the road.

But without visibility of actual journeys, there is no road.

Step Change

Individualisation - or Personalization 4.0 or whatever else you choose to call it - has restored the values of service and customer proximity that personalisation first promised. But it is the operational implications that every service leader should be invested in.

No matter which of the 3 hats I wear, I simply can't progress my own career, expertise, and guidance by pretending that it's 2002, or 2012 for that matter. And neither can you. In the most practical of terms, JO has provided the step change in day-to-day capability that the industry has long needed.

And so it has come to pass that journey mapping is left to occupy a respected place in the history of customer engagement. It was important in its day, but critical thought and capability advancement demand that we move on.

#burnthemap