Journey Management is an approach to continuous alignment, where business and customer priorities are unified in a journey framework and any team stays aligned working from insight to implementation. 

It is underpinning the ongoing practice of researching, analyzing, and prioritizing journeys in the context of improving the customer experience, working as one to achieve business goals.

In this article, we’ll cover the 3 main aspects of journey management:

• Gaining deep journey insight
• Standardizing journeys in a framework
• Create a journey-centric prioritization workflow

A quick background

During the digital transformation to agile, most businesses experienced a shift in management style and completely forgot about the customer. Today, customer experience is a high strategic priority in most organizations and internal alignment is becoming a huge challenge to overcome. Spending excessive resources and time on internal processes, operations and agile workflows has caused the customer experience to suffer. Now, a renewed interest in the customer journey shows the early signs of a new dawn in business: the journey-centric organization.

Despite this shift, journey maps remain outdated artifacts, used to conclude research or merely live in a whiteboard of endless sticky notes. 

In the journey-centric organization, journeys are managed like products, which  calls for a radically different approach when organizing this at scale. At TheyDo we call this Journey Management.

A great journey-centric organization has mastery over three main aspects of Journey Management:

1. Gaining deep customer journey insight
   The entire team has a deep understanding of how customers experience their journeys and what they need next.
2. Standardizing a journey framework
   Everyone in the organization understands what the customer experience is like and there is a standard process for working with journeys.
3. Create a journey-centric prioritization workflow
   Everyone across the organization prioritizes based on a common set of rules.

“For those companies who take the time and devote the effort to deep dive, what advantages do they enjoy in the marketplace?”
“It’s cost reduction, standardising something that takes a lot of time.”

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1. Gaining deep customer journey insight

You can never have enough qualitative insights – or at least that is what most people assume is true. Yet what journey-centric organizations have figured out is that the context in which the insights are obtained is as important as the insights themselves. 

By using journeys to build a story of how a customer does something, including how it makes her feel and what is keeping her from making progress or allowing her to move forward, companies can create a rich living system for everyone to walk in their customer’s shoes.

While this may seem a daunting task at first, once you start building up the journeys, a beautiful system of truth emerges. The best companies work journey-centric and are able to standardize the way they map, maintain and share journeys across the enterprise.  

Check out our guide to get started making your first TheyDo journey.

2. Standardizing journeys in a framework

Journeys alone don’t give you much overview. Traditionally speaking, a journey used to be a big, complex master file containing every little detail about a potential customer experience. But with TheyDo, we see organizations make journeys smaller and more manageable, and organize them into hierarchies.

Sometimes we see journeys following the customer lifecycle; other times they build up a specific domain (like B2B) made of journeys. The way we see it, journeys are building blocks that exist once, but influence the customer experience in many different ways. 

For example, a large financial institution gives out mortgages, loans and private bank accounts. Although these are different journeys, a subjourney like ‘online identification’ influences the customer experience across the board. Organizations can design their framework in layers, so that there is a single source of truth that can be managed across teams and departments.

There are 3 frameworks we see are being implemented in organizations. Learn how to choose the right framework.

3. Create a journey-centric prioritization workflow

With a standardized approach to mapping – that unified framework pulling in all journeys to create that magical overview you didn’t have before – the last step towards journey management of mastery is opened up, creating a workflow from insight to implementation. 

At TheyDo we’ve created a smart system where teams can capture opportunities in any journey, and then bring them back to one place to compare them across journeys, strategic priorities and teams. This allows them to align the solutions (like which Epic to prioritize or which marketing campaign to run) with the opportunities, which in turn are pegged to the journeys.

Journey Management is connecting the dots by balancing customer and business priorities in a beautiful system where everyone aligns. 

Learn how to plan your workflow with TheyDo.

Let’s get started

If you are serious about delivering a great customer experience, working as one is essential. As the complexity of managing this increases proportionally to the size of the organization, having a great journey-centric approach to management is a game changer for most organizations.

If you are not sure where to start, know that successful organizations all started small.

First you want to set yourself up for success for Journey Management.

Then, head over to the guide on creating a journey framework.

One more thing: Don’t overthink it. Journey Management is a continuous effort to improve the customer experience. Getting set up with just a handful of journeys can be a game changer for the entire organization.