Scaling customer-centricity with journey management

You're probably here because you're facing an uphill battle trying to implement a customer-centric agenda in your organisation. Or maybe you're part of a team that has successfully executed customer-centric projects, and you're curious about how to extend that culture throughout your entire organisation. Whichever boat you're in, you've come to the right place.

The Illusion of "Pockets of Success"

In many large organisations, there exists what I call "pockets of success"—these are small, dedicated teams that have embraced customer-centricity in their projects. These teams talk to customers regularly, validate their product/service offerings with real customer data, and are generally doing everything right. The question is, why isn't everyone else doing the same?

Having a single team or a few teams working in a customer-centric manner is excellent but not sufficient. It's like having a powerful engine in an old, rundown car—it might make some noise and even look impressive, but it doesn't make the car go faster as a whole.

The Challenge of Scaling from the Bottom-Up

If you've ever tried taking a successful project model and scaling it across an organisation, you know how daunting that task can be. You're not just battling logistical issues; you're fighting an established culture, predefined norms, and resistance to change. Often, one team's ability to impact an organisation is limited because of structural or psychological barriers.

The Solution: Embracing Customer Journey Management

Moving from pockets of customer-centric projects to a customer-centric organisation involves a seismic shift—a shift from fragmented initiatives to a holistic journey management approach.

Here's how it works:

1. Explain the concept

Begin by teaching your organisation the difference between journey experience and product/service experience. In journey experience, you look at the entire lifecycle of your customer's interaction with your brand—from before they even know you exist to the moment they decide to part ways.

2. Establish the Scaffoldings

Next, set up a framework for organising your journeys logically. Usually, this starts with the customer lifecycle as the top layer, ensuring that both business-centric and customer-centric perspectives are well-represented.

3. Conduct an Asset Inventory

Take stock of what you already have—existing customer journeys, insights, research data, etc. Knowing your assets will help you identify gaps and redundancies.

4. Gather Requirements

Talk to different departments and roles within the organisation to understand who could benefit from a journey-centric approach and what their specific needs are.

5. Initiate the Mapping

With a small but core team, start the journey mapping process. Be detailed, be thorough, and most importantly, be customer-centric.

6. Become the Journey Evangelist

Begin to share early successes within your network. Nothing builds appetite like success, especially when it can be translated into tangible business outcomes.

7. Launch JourneyOps

Once your journeys are mapped and aligned with your framework, it's time to establish JourneyOps. This is the governance model that enables cross-organisational management of your customer journeys.

8. Enjoy the Ride

This is where you step back and see the organisation begin to change, where customer-centricity moves from being a departmental practice to an organisational mantra.

A Call to Action

If you're part of these "pockets of excellence" in customer-centricity within your large organisation, it's time to amplify that excellence. I want to connect with you. I want to hear about your successes and challenges, and most importantly, I want to discuss how to scale your achievements to transform the entire organisation.

The transformation to a customer-centric organisation isn't a sprint; it's a marathon. And like any marathon, it requires stamina, strategy, and, most importantly, team effort. Let's begin this journey together.

Share this article with those who can benefit from it, and let's ignite a customer-centric revolution in our organisations.

Get in touch, and let's talk about how to get started.