Most organizations nowadays are familiar with mapping customer journeys. We often see that in many organizations individuals or teams are starting their own initiatives to map their part of the overall customer journey. While we can only applaud that companies are increasingly improving from a customer perspective, it also creates a new problem. In this article we introduce the journey framework as a solution to this problem.
all customer journeys in one overview
All these individuals and teams are looking at the customer journey from their own perspective, there is no overview, and nobody knows how all individual journeys relate to each other. This makes it hard to achieve a consistent customer experience and manage this experience. Central CX teams are often tasked with streamlining this and making the departments working with customer journeys work more uniformly; we call this journey management. An important element of journey management is to create one clear overview of all the journeys that customers are experiencing.
This overview, in which all customer journeys are structured and the mutual hierarchy and coherence is shown, is what we call a journey framework. In this respect, a journey framework is different from a journey map. It contains only the name of the customer journey and not the experiences, needs and emotions. It is a bit like the table of contents of your entire service.
A journey framework provides direction to the organization and encourages a joint approach to improve customer experiences. It improves collaboration between different teams to work on the same ambition to improve the total customer experience.
update: Journey Management webinars
Starting to create a journey framework requires knowledge and skills. To support you as much as possible, we regularly organise webinars and events in which we help both beginners and experts to take the next step in customer-oriented working. Please sign up below for our events update. We will then keep you informed on upcoming webinars and events!
what is the structure of a journey framework
A journey framework consists of at least three levels
- The lowest level contains the customer journeys that a customer can experience. For example: I receive my invoice, I gain insight into my invoice, etc. Our advice is to limit yourself to the essence of the relevant journey; no scenarios (happy flow or unhappy flow) and no channel variants of the same journey.
- The next step is to group the journeys that belong to the same theme in customer journey clusters. For example: all journeys that deal with receiving and paying the invoice are grouped under the journey cluster ‘I receive and pay the invoice’
- The journey clusters are grouped at the highest level under the correct customer life cycle phases: the main steps that a customer experiences. For example: Not a customer, become a customer, be a customer and remain a customer.
how do you build a successful framework
A successful journey framework is a journey framework that is used in practice. To achieve this, we advise to take the following points into consideration:
- Building a journey framework is a joint exercise. A journey framework acts as a shared image of reality and can therefore only be made in collaboration with the rest of the organization.
- A journey framework is flexible. As the services or products change, a framework should be altered to accommodate these changes. The structure of the framework remains intact as much as possible, but the content may change.
- A journey framework also serves a common terminology. It is important to jointly determine the definitions of, for example, a customer journey or life cycle.
these are the benefits of having a journey framework
The biggest benefit of having a journey framework is that it encourages a collaborative approach to working on customer journeys. Everyone has the same image of reality and works on the same customer journey ambition to improve the total customer experience. This improves cooperation within journey or proposition teams and with the (agile) development teams.
Other benefits of having a journey framework include:
- It creates insight in the order of journeys. When a certain customer journey is always followed by another journey, it can be useful to design these journeys in parallel, so that the experience becomes more consistent. For example, purchasing a subscription and the onboarding that follows. These are two separate journeys but should feel like a consistent experience.
- It increases the impact of improvements. When an improvement opportunity is relevant in multiple journeys, it has a greater impact than if you only view it from the perspective of one single journey.
- It prevents double work. When it is clear what everyone works on, you prevent situations where the same problem is worked on by multiple people.
- It is easier to prioritize. When you connect data and customer feedback to the journey framework, it provides a good foundation for data driven prioritization of improvements initiatives.
would you also like to create a journey framework?
Starting to create a journey framework requires knowledge and skills. To support you in this as much as possible, we regularly organize webinars and events in which we help both beginners and experts to take the next step in customer-oriented working. Sign up directly below for our events update. We will then keep you informed on upcoming webinars and events. Would you rather contact one of our experts directly? Click here to get in touch with us.
