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What Is a Journey Framework?

Learn how a journey-centric hierarchy helps you to manage customer experience.


Hierarchy


What is a journey framework?

The journey framework breaks down the customer experience into three ‘zoom levels’: The framework view, journey boards, and journeys. This helps you to keep an overview. Opportunities and solutions intersect these elements as well, tying everything together.


Introducing the essential framework elements

To structure your journeys, TheyDo uses a framework that is organized using the following structures:

Journey Framework

  • Journey Framework: this is the top level of the hierarchy and is a structure made out of boards.

  • Journey Boards: define the main chapters in your framework. Every board consists of any number of journeys, organized using stages and lanes.

    • Stages: are used to split up your boards into smaller experience parts. For example, an ‘onboarding’ board can be split into ‘creating an account’, ‘payment’, and ‘first use’ as stages.

    • Lanes: help you to organize and compare different variations of journeys. For example, to compare an ‘online’ buying journey as compared to an ‘in-store’ buying journey.

  • Journeys: are the building blocks for the entire framework. You can use them on one or multiple boards at the same time (i.e. if you are a large bank, the journey ‘I identify online’ also influences the customer lifecycle for ‘mortgages’ ‘personal banking’ and ‘loans’).

This structure of boards and stages can be used to ‘split up’ the customer lifecycle into smaller, manageable parts. These parts form a solid, unchanging framework that you can use to connect all your journeys and their different variations.

If we use a parking analogy: If your framework is a parking complex, the boards are different parking areas in that complex, while stages are the different parking spots in which you can ultimately park your journeys. Micro journeys (normal cars) fit within a single stage (parking spot), while macro journeys (vans and trailers) might overlap several of them.

If that’s all a little too briefly explained, read our in-depth guide on TheyDo hierarchy.


How a journey framework helps to manage your CX

As the number of journeys, opportunities, and solutions increases, the journey framework will help you to do three things:

  • Keep overview: The framework view provides you with a a birds-eye overview of the full lifecycle with all its journeys, opportunities, and solutions. From this overview, you can easily zoom in to individual journeys and insights. It also helps you to identify blind spots; you might realize that your journeys don’t actually cover the full customer lifecycle yet. The lifecycle gives you the opportunity to pick your next area to research strategically instead of by gut feel.

  • Promote collaboration and prevent double work: The lifecycle provides you with a solid structure to keep track of all your journeys. Boards and stages help you to place journeys at the right moment in the lifecycle, while board lanes help you keep track of different journey variations. This helps your teams to connect all their journeys in the right place, which prevents double work and promotes collaboration. Anyone can easily have a look to see what’s already there, use it as inspiration, and add their own insights.

  • Effective project management: The framework view provides a quick overview of the performance of all your journeys. This in turn helps to pinpoint where improvement is needed most. Furthermore, it also shows the progress being made on any opportunities or solutions within journey boards. This in turn helps you to pinpoint how work is progressing to improve journeys, as well as helping to identify opportunities or solutions to pick up next.

Kaspar explains what CX Management and TheyDo allows you to do, creating an overview of all these different journeys and connecting them.


Ready to get started?

To get started, first read our in-depth guide on the different hierarchy levels, and the overall guidelines for creating frameworks. After that, our practical setup guide will have you set up your own framework in no time!