The value of working from the customer journey is widely acknowledged across organizations. Most understand that this approach effectively reveals critical gaps, pain points, or untapped potential to enhance business outcomes. Therefore, when initiating journey-based working, establishing a dedicated team is a logical next step.
However, a common challenge arises with the placement of these teams. They are often embedded within a single department, frequently under an executive who champions the new methodology.
While well-intentioned, this departmental confinement often leads to limited success. Journey teams, by their very nature, require multidisciplinary collaboration to effect real change. When capacity and input from other departments are crucial, but those departments have competing priorities, the journey team’s efforts can stall, preventing them from achieving their full potential.
the inherent challenge: journey teams versus traditional structures
Organizations are typically structured into departments, each built around specific disciplines like operations, marketing, sales, or customer service. Modern structures also frequently include product teams, often focusing on a particular channel, especially digital ones. This departmental and product-centric approach effectively concentrates skills and fosters expertise within specialized areas. However, this structure inherently overlooks how customers genuinely experience interactions with a brand across these various touchpoints.
When the need arises to manage experiences from a cohesive journey perspective, integrating this new way of working into an already complex organizational chart presents a significant challenge. Nobody aims to further complicate existing structures, yet the belief in journey-based working demands a different approach. While a customer-centric or customer experience (CX) team might seem like an ideal home for journey management, this can also become a pitfall. If a CX team operates under marketing, for example, its influence might be limited to marketing initiatives, even if the primary experience gaps lie within operations. Their departmental placement restricts their reach, despite the customer’s journey extending far beyond any single department.
common scenarios and their limitations
If you recognize the challenges described earlier concerning journey teams and traditional organizational structures, you might find yourself in one of these three common situations:
• You have the ambition to set up a journey team, but it is difficult to decide which leaders should be convinced to run the first experiment. This often occurs because no single executive is directly responsible for the entire customer experience.
• You are a journey owner or a customer experience specialist, but you are hidden away in a department like digital or customer service. This significantly limits your capacity to influence the end-to-end customer journey across the organization.
• You are a journey owner, but you are located within a product domain. This makes it impossible to tackle experience journeys that extend beyond the specific tasks achievable within that product. For example, if you are focused solely on the website, you cannot effectively address the “i orient myself” phase, which often includes interactions on social media and other channels.
These scenarios illustrate the practical limitations that arise when journey teams are not (yet) strategically positioned to match their cross-functional mandate.
the importance of horizontal integration and breaking silos
The limitations observed in departmentally confined journey teams underline a critical truth: for these teams to truly thrive, horizontal integration is not just beneficial, but essential.
Traditional vertical silos, while effective for discipline-specific expertise, fundamentally prevent a holistic view and action across the customer journey. When journey teams are enabled to operate horizontally, they gain the crucial ability to address the customer experience precisely where it matters most. They can identify and resolve gaps that no single department could solve independently.
This cross-functional reach allows them to connect disparate parts of the organization, ensuring that proposed changes and improvements are implemented comprehensively, delivering a coherent and genuinely enhanced experience for the customer.
how to structure for success: principles for effective journey teams
To effectively address customer experiences and break down departmental silos, journey teams require a distinct organizational placement and operating model. Firstly, these teams should exist above or across traditional departments and product teams, rather than being embedded within any single one. This positioning grants them the necessary overview and independence.
Secondly, journey experts within these teams should lead virtual teams. These virtual teams comprise individuals from various departments who contribute to defining and delivering specific aspects of the customer experience. This matrix structure ensures that specialized expertise from across the organization is directly channeled into journey improvement efforts, without permanently pulling resources from their home departments. Furthermore, organizations can structure journey teams per customer segment. This allows for deep specialization in understanding diverse customer needs within a specific segment, though close collaboration between these segment-focused teams is vital if touchpoints overlap significantly.
Finally, for true impact, these horizontally integrated journey teams must have a meaningful voice in quarterly planning cycles. This ensures alignment with departmental objectives, preventing conflicting priorities and boosting the collective impact on the customer experience.
navigating the organizational landscape
Understanding these principles does not result in the power to simply redraw the organizational chart to place a journey team at the top. So, what pragmatic actions can you take?
A highly effective approach is to find room for experimentation within a transformational program. These programs are inherently detached from rigid departmental structures and often benefit from direct leadership oversight. This provides an ideal environment to pilot journey-based working, build internal buy-in, and lay the groundwork for your first truly integrated journey team.
If a transformational program is not immediately available, you can still initiate change from your current position. Begin by convincing your direct leader of the value of a multidisciplinary experiment. Work together to secure the support of their co-leaders, enabling you to form and lead a virtual team. Critically, ensure that implementation capacity from relevant departments is included from the very beginning. This foresight prevents the frustration of developing excellent ideas only to encounter resistance or a lack of resources when it comes to execution.
need help?
Need help navigating these first steps and shaping your initial journey teams for success? Let’s connect. Schedule a call with us to discuss how we can help your organization embed effective journey teams that drive real impact.
