The Seven Cs of Journey Management

While there are many new software tools which can help with Journey Management across the organisation, it’s important to remember that Journey Management isn't a software exercise, it's a design exercise and a mindset change. There are many risks to not managing your Journeys well and, likewise, opportunities to doing this - but software is only a fraction of the opportunity and challenge. 

Frequently, businesses encounter disjointed journeys, both technical and design debt, duplicated efforts, and escalating costs. In order to be a successful organisation, it’s crucial to avoid the pitfalls that exist here. 

While customer journey mapping is a powerful tool in optimising experiences both for customers and internally, these can quickly spiral out of control leading to rework, inefficiency and ‘lost’ journeys.

At Spotless we know that:

• A customer-centric lens should apply across all facets of the organisation.
• It’s important to guard against isolated and disjointed journey maps. Customer journeys do not and cannot live in isolation, siloed away from one another.
• Like all documentation within a business, journey maps should be living artefacts, which need to be updated and aligned as new insights emerge, and as priorities change.
• There needs to be a continuous process of journey improvement, rather than journeys being mapped and improved on a project-basis. Ongoing stewardship is needed to accumulate insights, as well as measure and learn over time.

We have already given a short introduction to Customer Journey Management‍ and now we’d like to give you seven principles to help you navigate this complex terrain, which we call the 7 Cs of Journey Management:

• Connected Journeys
• Collaborating Efficiently
• Communication Transparently
• Consistency of Experience
• Continuous Improvement
• Curation
• Centre of Excellence

Let's take a look.

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Connected Journeys

Connection is about fostering an ecosystem where different services within a business can communicate and enhance each other, and help to create a cohesive and holistic experience for customers. This not only supports user retention but also enhances the overall value proposition of the service ecosystem. 

Tips:

• Leverage cross-channel strategies to ensure that different services and touchpoints within your ecosystem are interconnected. 
• Use service blueprints to visualise and plan how different services interact and support each other.

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Collaborating Efficiently

Journey Management is inherently cross functional and across areas of the business. Conflicting priorities and siloed teams often operate in a politically charged environment, where team and product funding is fought over - and leaders need a clear vision of where effort is best focused.  

By fostering a culture of teamwork, organisations can break down silos and ensure a unified approach to improving customer journeys. As well as this, independent teams such as Spotless can add value by bringing evidence and best practices to the situation, de-escalating the political nature.

Tips: 

• Establish cross-functional teams dedicated to journey management projects. 
• Encourage regular communication and collaboration through workshops, brainstorming sessions, and shared digital platforms. 

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Communicating Transparently 

Good communication is essential to ensuring that journeys are managed well, and don’t develop into isolated silos. Many organisations are now adopting visual tools like TheyDo and Smaply to illustrate complex ecosystems and make information accessible to all team members. Transparency builds trust and ensures everyone is aligned with the organisation's journey management goals.

Tips:

• Establish frequent knowledge sharing of changes to the journey ecosystem, disseminating up-to-date knowledge across teams and functions.
• Utilise tools such as TheyDo and Smaply for more complex journey ecosystems to ensure a single point of truth.

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Consistency of Experience

Journeys can easily (and even with the best of intentions) develop their own eccentricities of interaction and experience. However, from a journey management point of view it’s crucial to develop and enforce standardised processes and guidelines for customer interactions. Use journey management to identify and address inconsistencies across the customer journeys. Spotless helps organisations design and implement these standards and ensure they are adhered to across all customer touchpoints.

Tips:

• Conduct regular reviews across the journey ecosystem to ensure consistency of design, implementation, experience and language.
• Regularly review and update standards as new best practices emerge throughout the organisation.

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Continuous Improvement

Journey management is an ongoing process. Continuous improvement is about regularly measuring, analysing, and refining journeys, and journey connections, to enhance performance and satisfaction. 

New insights or improvement effects should continuously feed back in, changing the view and priorities of the journey. 

Activities can involve gathering user feedback, monitoring usage patterns, and implementing iterative changes. By embracing a culture of continuous improvement, businesses can stay ahead of user needs and expectations.

Tips:

• Establish an ongoing practice of user testing, user research, and expert review to ensure that journeys across the organisation are always meeting the changing needs of customers and users.
• Track improvements over time using metrics and KPIs, to ensure that they are working as expected.

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Curation

Effective journey management also involves strategic curation - pruning unnecessary or inefficient journeys while promoting those that deliver the most value. This means continuously evaluating the user experience and business outcomes of each journey. 

For instance, if a particular user path is consistently underperforming or generating negative feedback, it may be time to refine or retire it. Conversely, high-performing journeys should be highlighted and optimised further. Curation ensures that resources are focused on enhancing the most impactful aspects of the user experience and customer journey.

Tips:

• As part of managing the journeys, work with teams and stakeholders to remove deprioritised or non-functional journeys.
• Journeys which don’t meet the up-to-date standards of the organisation need to be updated or removed in order to ensure a consistent experience across the ecosystem.

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Centre of Excellence

Centralised governance becomes more and more important as organisations grow larger and more complex. Develop a dedicated team or department focused on journey management. This Centre of Excellence (CoE) should be responsible for setting standards, providing training, and driving strategic initiatives. Spotless works with organisations as an independent mediator to define best fit solutions in situations where departments may have conflicting interests.

Tips:

• Key members of the CoE can be existing members of staff across functions such as:
  • Creative Directors
  • Senior Product Owners
  • Design Research Leads
  • Lead Designers
• This team should meet on a regular basis and work to ensure standards and practices are being met through a journey management process.