The most powerful tool for journey-centric transformation
Imagine you’re flying high above a bustling city. From this altitude, you can see everything at a glance: roads, neighborhoods, parks, and landmarks. Now imagine diving down to street level, where every alleyway, storefront, and hidden café comes into sharp focus. This shift in view—from a broad overview to intricate detail—is akin to viewing the customer experience through the lens of an overarching journey framework versus a single journey map. For any organization striving to become truly customer-obsessed, mastering this dual perspective is not just beneficial; it’s essential.
In this follow-up to our latest webinar with VP Principal Analyst at Forrester Joana de Quintanilha, we dive deeper into the concept of the journey atlas as a way of structuring and organizing journeys, and explain how you can build a similar journey framework in TheyDo. Are you pushing for change toward customer obsession in your organization? Here’s how organizing your journeys in a framework can help you zoom in and out and get that bird’s-eye view you need.
The Journey atlas
Joining the ranks of highly successful customer-obsessed companies means adopting a journey-focused way of doing business. Joana presented the famed Forrester journey atlas concept as a way for businesses to move from chaos to clarity on the road to journey-centric transformation. She talked participants through the main differences between a journey map and the larger journey atlas, describing a journey atlas as a comprehensive “catalog of all the important journeys across the customer lifecycle.” This allows organizations to see the big picture and identify the strategic touch points that are critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Much like the high-altitude view of a city, you can think of a journey atlas as an overarching map of the entire customer experience landscape. As Joana points out, though, “It’s not a pretty picture; it’s a decision-making tool,” especially for companies that want to take a strategic approach to improving journeys. It's not just about plotting points on a map but rather understanding how journeys interconnect and contribute to the broader customer experience.
With a journey atlas, everything is laid out in an easy-to-understand way, allowing businesses to:
Understand how journeys running in parallel can impact each other
Prioritize journeys using a traffic light system
Create a story articulated in customer terms
Start building buy-in within the organization
)
Journey maps: diving into the details
While the journey atlas gives you a bird's-eye view, journey maps zoom in on individual journeys. These maps are more detailed, showing the individual steps a customer takes, the emotions they feel, the thoughts they have, and what they do. They reveal pain points and opportunities at a granular level, offering insights that are crucial for operational improvements and customer-centric innovations.
Joana explains that in a journey map, "you're capturing what the customer does, sees, thinks, feels. You might be capturing the ecosystem—the people, processes, and technology—that support each step in that journey." This level of detail is crucial for identifying the root causes of customer pain points and uncovering opportunities for enhancing the customer experience.
The journey framework: how this works in TheyDo
Like Forrester’s journey atlas, TheyDo lets you connect journeys of all shapes and sizes—from strategic, high-level overviews to detailed, specific experiences—so you can optimize every part of the customer experience without losing sight of the overall picture.
TheyDo is the tool for building a fully functioning framework for Journey Management, allowing you to easily ‘nest’ journeys within each other and build more detailed journey maps at specific stages or components within larger journeys. With a simple click, you can switch from the broad view of the top level of the framework (showing the end-to-end phases of the total Customer Experience) to those macro and micro journeys nested within it.
This ensures that you have a complete understanding of the customer experience, from big strategies to small details, so you can delve into the nuances of particular touch points and address issues that impact the overall experience. It also helps maintain clarity and cohesion across the board, enabling all stakeholders to see how their work fits into the bigger picture.
See the journey atlas in TheyDo:
)
Every customer-obsessed organization needs a journey framework
Whether you're using Forrester’s journey atlas model or creating a journey framework in TheyDo, having a holistic and strategic overview of the customer experience that also delivers detailed, actionable insights into specific customer journeys is the key to leveling up. For any business truly committed to prioritizing its customers’ needs, this journey-centric approach is a surefire way to go above and beyond. By integrating Journey Management into daily operations and getting a dual perspective, companies can create a culture and way of working that is truly centered around the customer.