Journey, journey, journey! Going from theory to reality.

Remember when inspirational posters hung in every boardroom? Words like ambition and success were accompanied by pictures of cliff divers or a daisy bursting forth from a crack in the asphalt?

And then there was journey, a pretty big idea often summed up with a pithy quote like this: 

In the customer experience (CX) world, we like to talk about the “journey, journey, journey” (as if we’re summoning Beetlejuice), but are we taking a hard look beyond the poster? Today’s CX consists of so many touch-points that the journey has become increasingly complex and fraught with peril – and filled with opportunity.

This isn’t about fixing the fringes of the customer experience.

What leads to reduced customer satisfaction? A failure to focus on the totality of multiple experiences at various touchpoints, across numerous channels, over time.

We keep reading that customer journeys are the answer. And, absolutely, customer journeys are powerful tools to address the challenges brands face and aid in delivering on the essential Three Vs of Marketing Strategy: valued customer, value proposition, value network. But with so many potential variations on any given journey, what’s presented can often sound good in theory, but prove to be too complicated in practice. How do you wrap your mind – and keep your arms – around it?

I’d like to share a four-step process that’s proven effective for some organizations.

This is no small task. It requires both top-down, judgment-driven evaluations and bottom-up, data-driven analysis. Pain points need to be put under the microscope to identify moments of truth among key journeys.

Here’s one example of a key journey: a customer’s online credit increase request is denied.

By following this specific path, a brand can focus on a specific key detractor impacting the experience versus a more generic journey that a standard customer demographic might take. 

At this point, the integrated CX team “pops the hood” on the existing journey and creates a proposed future state.

One of the best examples I’ve seen isn’t marketing-based, it’s medical. It’s how GE brought human-centered thinking to the journey involved with having an MRI scan. The GE team witnessed firsthand the anxiety and fear MRI machines caused with young patients. As many as 80% of children required sedation beforehand and, in many cases, the scans had to be postponed, creating more stress for the patients and their families.

They decided to look at the problem through the eyes of a child. And here’s what they saw: a big, scary machine, one you have to go inside all alone. The team applied a human-centered design approach to get to really understand their patients. What they found is that these children were missing a sense of adventure. So, they set out to create an adventure experience that the children were craving. The solution: GE’s Adventure Series.

This initiative led to an entire redesign of the face of imaging equipment (MRI, X-ray and CT machines) to portray a pirate theme. Working with the technicians who built the machines, they transformed the experience into an adventure story, including scripting for the technicians to guide the kids through the experience while they were perfectly still inside the MRI. Best of all, its success was achieved within the stiff regulations of the healthcare industry. What a tremendous delivery of the three Vs. 

With the key customer journeys now re-envisioned, it’s time to work beyond the fringes.

Remember, there may be valid reasons why the value chain and current customer experience exist as they are today. So, does the whole value chain need to be rethought? Are the economics of the business getting in the way? These are questions to confront and hurdles to overcome. But it can happen.

One European telecom, Telenor, provided one of the best overall customer experiences in the industry. This was true for most of their customer journeys, except for the journey the customer went through when their phone was broken. That experience measured at -70.

After fully redesigning this journey, Telenor achieved an unheard-of +100 improvement on that specific journey. How on earth did that happen? They took the major step of entirely restructuring the incentive system and the value chain to deliver on the desired experience. This entailed taking a hard look at the roles and engagement of all players at every touchpoint, including the phone service outlets, the telco itself, phone manufacturers, phone retailers' logistics companies, etc.

The result was that customers got their repaired phone back within 24–48 hours in over 70% of the cases. The verbatim comments from the customers who picked up their phone a day after they dropped it off included, “I do not believe this. It can’t be my phone, or if it is there is no way it went to the service and back. You probably never sent it.” That is how good the experience was: it beat any of the existing customer expectations.

Another example comes from BMO Financial Group. Canadian consumers used to dread opening a bank account. It took half a day and many pages of paperwork. Recently, BMO redesigned that experience from beginning to end, allowing customers to open the account from their mobile phones in just minutes. Imagine that: opening an account went from taking half a day in the bank to five to 10 minutes on your phone from anywhere! That is a major shift and deserves the “I can’t believe it!” response it is getting from customers.

Now that the experience has been redesigned, the journey has been synched up with the value chain, and the company is set to deliver on it, it’s time to let the world know.

T-Mobile is one brand doing this on a consistent basis. For them, their CX is such a differentiator that they actively promote it, dubbing themselves the “Un-carrier.” Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to chest-thump a little, especially when something’s gone so right.

Have you had a CX journey that’s impressed you? Or have you been involved in a revelatory CX journey creation? Please leave a comment below – I’d love to hear about it!