Journey Management 101

Here at Spotless we are well versed in the need for alignment across separate areas of organisations. We have prepared a short piece to help educate you about what Journey Management is, what this would mean for your business and how Spotless positions itself to best help organisations to create further alignment. Our Director Ben has written previously on the need for an operational lens on Journey Mapping, and the need for Journey Management at scale.

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What is Journey Management?

Journey Management is not a new concept, as organisations have always looked for ways to streamline their business activities. 

The recent resurgence of this topic across the industry serves as a timely reminder for organisations to examine how they can improve their processes. 

We can appreciate that the output of Journey Mapping has its limitations from a long term perspective; these maps can often be static, not updated or worse they sit in an online folder gathering digital dust. 

Therefore, the management of Customer Journeys is the continuous practice of allowing differing Customer Experience (CX) teams to know what work is being done where and to make sure journeys are consistent, relevant and timely for your customers.

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Benefits and Barriers (So What?!)

The primary motivation behind the use of the Journey Management process is to improve organisations' ability to deliver continued value to their customers. 

One of the keys to success in Journey Management is having a single source of truth (SSOT).

A single source of truth can come in many forms, such as a singular Miro/Figma board with all journeys, with the goal intended to mitigate risk of duplication and redundancy of outputs, through to more involved tools like Theydo and Smaply.

The organisation benefits that Journey Management can bring include:

• Unified business and customer goals 
• Continuous measurement and tracking 
• Continued customer engagement with the marketing pipeline 

Adopting a streamlined journey management approach ultimately ensures the marriage of business outcomes alongside customer goals.

You should consider that there are differing barriers to adopting a Journey Management approach, including:

• Obtaining organisational buy-in and stakeholder engagement 
• Scale of the organisation, the pace of adopting new tools and ways of working within the organisation
• Unaligned business goals and/or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

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Spotless says

Here at Spotless, we believe that Journey Management truly succeeds when you properly educate, communicate and onboard employees about Journey Management processes. 

The key to success in implementation is through organisational culture. 

Spotless suggests three tenants to successful implementation and ongoing usage of Journey Management: the alignment of customer needs, setting up your organisational culture and how team members communicate with one another. 

• 1) Customer Needs Alignment:
  • Effective management of journeys needs to have strategic business objectives closely aligned with customer performance metrics.
  • This is to ensure successful delivery against objectives, providing further stakeholder engagement and investment. 
  • Ideally these goals should be easily accessible and understood to employees and tied back to a single source of truth to work against.
    
    
• 2) Organisational Culture:
  • Establish via senior leadership the importance of design spaces (e.g. critiques) and rituals (e.g. lessons learned) for alignment amongst silos.
  • This in turn will provide clear ownership and accountability from Business Analysts to Product Owners and Research/Design individuals.
    
    
• 3) Openness and Communication:
  • Cadence of communication between journey mapping teams is crucial to success. 
  • This can be achieved through organisational initiatives to discuss any updates to journeys and potential knock-on effect.