The ‘customer journey’ is not a (real) customer’s journey

Sometimes, there still is. It was a fantastically useful exercise in getting into the banal, everyday lives of our clients’ customers. A part-imagined, part-evidenced narrative of what their lives were like, the pressures they might be under, the jobs they did, how they traveled there… you get the gist.

It allowed us to imagine how our clients’ products and services might fit into their lives, and perhaps resolve some of the speedbumps. It also gave us some clues as to how to reach and engage them. Of course, there’s an inherent flaw in this: the flaw of agency-people imagining they are every-kinda-people. We still come (on the whole and disappointingly) from a fairly narrow demographic and cultural pool, one which doesn’t lend itself naturally to the inexhaustible range and variation of people’s lives.

It’s at this point that data becomes useful. It can tell us where people come from, what their likely life outlook might be, and can they afford your products? It also (increasingly) tells us what they get up to. Their behavior is captured like never before, because they spend more time online than ever before. And occasionally, we get some proof (or at least some supporting evidence) for why they do what they do and buy what they buy.

This growing pool of data is what’s used to build a customer journey. But is it a customer’s journey?

This is more than a semantic, apostrophe-placing question. It’s a question of ownership. Whether or not walking a mile in their shoes is a core part of customer planning, the net result is the same: the resulting journey isn’t the customer’s. It's fueled by what the brand wants the customer to do, what fits its vision of its customers’ lives.

Is CX actually improving?

Does any of this matter?

Well, yes. A huge amount of work is done across research, behavioral data capture, insight gathering, systems integration, responsive and triggered campaign planning, algorithmic cleverness, and so on. The resulting 'journey' can be a thing of beauty, supported by inescapable logic and campaigns to engage the customer on their path towards some sort of engagement. But if the focus is this one-sided, it must be flawed. The lack of what the customer really thinks is the sand in the gears.

An estimated $641bn was spent on customer experience (CX) last year. Billions. That’s a lot of investment, and the stakes are high. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, a good experience is a major differentiator, so this trumpeted focus on the customer and an entire industry called ‘customer experience’ is understandable.

And yet there’s little evidence that the experience is improving. In fact, there’s quite a lot of noise suggesting that it’s going in the other direction. The ICS UK Customer Satisfaction Index 2022 revealed that increased complaint handling is costing businesses more than £9bn a month. Even this blunt, agricultural comparison suggests a major negative impact, and one which doesn’t have a ‘yes, but’ response shaped from even anecdotal success stories.

Adding the apostrophe

If the evidence isn’t readily available that the experience is getting better as a result of all these tools, all this advancing technology, all those invested dollars, then two scenarios seem most plausible. Either we’re not very good at recognizing the evidence, or we’re looking in the wrong places.

I would hypothesize that it’s a little of both. The strategic planning and execution of CX is still measured against a set of behavioral metrics; essentially: how did they respond? Journeys are planned along a series of behavioral milestones and triggers. They opened this, so let’s take them here; they clicked on that, so they must be interested in all of these…

Instead of being a considered journey, built on a customer-driven vision of what they did and what they expect to do in the future, it’s a series of short-term events which are constantly on the verge of careering off the desired path.

So, what would make it the customer’s journey? Simply put, the key lies in engaging customers to share their vision of the future. Building an understanding of how customers want and intend to engage with your brand gives the best (perhaps the only) benchmark for a good journey, one which goes back to walking a mile in their shoes and uses this shared insight to understand and match their expectations as customers.