“Our CSAT is 90+ at each touchpoint—but overall, it’s 70. Why?”

For years, companies have defined “excellent customer service” by how well they did at each touchpoint that a customer experienced: Did the customer respond to the text message warning of a suspicious charge on her card? Was she greeted when she walked in the front door? Did she press 5 for “definitely” when asked if she would hire the call-center rep who just served her?    

Getting these small interactions right is still important. But an article by several of my colleagues discussing recent McKinsey research confirms that touchpoints are only a small part of the story. Today’s customers judge companies based on their entire experience in accomplishing their goal, for everything from buying coffee to financing a new business. And because the paths customers follow nowadays are far more complex—cutting across any and all channels at every stage of the buying process—making sure the entire journey goes well is a much a taller order than it was even five years ago.

Does that resonate with you? On a personal level, it does for me. Greeting me at the front door won’t help much if the only reason I'm stopping by is to finish something that I thought I could do online—but discovered I couldn’t. Or take the example of a large home media company: If opening an account requires nine separate phone calls, great service in the call center would stop mattering for me after about call number three.

Companies typically don’t see their processes this way. In the article, there’s a short video in which I talk about how silos mean that companies see, and measure, only touchpoints—leaving them blind to how the touchpoints add up to a customer-experience journey. Developing a customer-back perspective on what journeys should entail is crucial. And hard.

But getting these customer journeys right can lead to a big payoff. A 2015 McKinsey survey of US consumers found that across industries, performance on journeys correlated much more significantly than performance on touchpoints with regards to critical business outcomes such as revenue, churn, and repeat purchase. And companies are indeed getting it right: the local unit of a global insurer increased the customer-experience score for one of its customer journeys by 15 percentage points, while a European utility raised one of its scores by 50 percent—all while reducing costs by 15 percent and increasing employee satisfaction.

The article provides more detail on how the companies re-imagined customer journeys to make them better for customers and for their business. What are some of the customer journeys that you wish were smoother—either from the customer’s point of view or the company’s? Where are the next opportunities to make the experience faster, easier, more predictable?