Scotiabank's strategy starts with journeys

The Experience Edge: Rethinking Silos and Journeys in Enterprise CX

Jennifer Jenkins, Head of CX Design at Scotiabank, offers a fresh perspective on persistent enterprise customer experience challenges. With a background in shaping experiences at Fortune 500 companies and top global consultancies, Jenkins provides pragmatic insights on connecting organizational silos and evolving journey management practices.

Connecting, Not Breaking, Silos

While "breaking silos" has become a CX rallying cry, Jenkins advocates for a more nuanced approach. She reframes silos as necessary structures that bring order and enable efficiency. The key is to strategically connect them:

"I think silos are a form of order; otherwise, we have chaos. We need these subroutines and shortcuts that help us get things done. I think of it more as connecting them. Where are the great connection points where information, work, and processes can flow at the right juncture?"

This perspective shifts the focus from battling structures to identifying critical points of collaboration and information flow. For CX leaders, it's about working with existing structures rather than against them.

Service as the Connective Tissue

Jenkins sees service design as the bridge between organizational silos. By starting with the desired customer experience and working backward to determine organizational needs, CX teams can proactively address gaps and overlaps:

"I think about what kind of experience we want to create and then what needs to be true to make that happen, whether that's how the organization is structured, how we're delivering this, and what systems and technology we need."

This approach allows CX teams to align organizational structure, technology, and processes with desired customer outcomes.

Evolving Journey Management

On the topic of customer journeys, Jenkins offers a candid assessment of current practices and opportunities for improvement:

1. Cross-functional pods: Scotiabank organizes cross-functional teams into "pods" that converge around customer problems, bringing together diverse expertise to solve issues holistically.

2. Balancing quantitative and qualitative: Jenkins emphasizes the power of combining quantitative data to identify and size issues with qualitative insights to understand the "why" and design solutions.

3. Non-linear thinking: While praising the value of journey mapping, Jenkins challenges the industry to evolve beyond linear representations: "Journeys often get explained or designed in a very linear way, and truthfully they're very nonlinear. I would love to think about tools that can describe a journey in a more nonlinear way."

4. Beyond the happy path: She stresses the importance of mapping unhappy paths and potential dead ends to create more comprehensive journey maps.

For CX leaders wrestling with organizational complexity, Jenkins' insights offer a roadmap to more effective collaboration and customer-centricity. By reframing silos as necessary structures to be connected rather than broken, leveraging service design as an organizational bridge, and evolving journey management practices, enterprises can create more seamless, impactful customer experiences—even within legacy structures.

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