Journey-centric transformation: a conversation with Joana de Quintanilha
Explore the foundational elements of implementing a roadmap for journey-centric transformation, including triggering transformation, finding your allies, and measuring success.
Have you embraced journey-centric transformation yet? To achieve the true customer obsession needed to deliver business results, organizations must be ready to adopt a journey-centric mindset — and put the right operational models in place to facilitate this change.
In our latest webinar, Theydo CEO and co-founder Jochem van der Veer sits down with Joana de Quintanilha, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, to discuss all things journey-centricity. Credited for bringing ‘journey-centricity’ into the world, no one is better positioned than Joana, who has a wealth of experience in CX and journey-centric transformation, to share their advice on successfully embracing journey-centricity.
Using the famed Forrester journey atlas and several real-world examples, Joana shares how to implement a roadmap for journey-centric transformation, from picking the right time to begin an organization-wide transformation to choosing the right metrics to measure success. Low on time? Here are our key takeaways from the webinar.
Creating a roadmap for transformation
Working towards customer-centricity is all about enabling customer goals, says Joana. That means adopting an operational model that provides a journey-focused way of doing business. Joana’s example below breaks down into six key ‘operational levers’ and three stages of transformation that organizations need to consider if they want to join the ranks of the highly successful customer-obsessed companies that have come before them.
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The six levers include Structure, People, Processes, Metrics, Culture, and Technology, covering everything from the foundational elements that will determine how journeys are prioritized to the technology that will act as a catalyst for transformation.
Sounds simple enough, right? Here, Joana reminds us that transformation isn’t a one-off project. In reality, she says, “Companies tend to go through phases of transformation. It doesn't happen overnight. It isn't a one-off project. This is a way of doing business. And so it's an ongoing multi-year transformation.”
This process follows three key phases:
Activate. Every transformation needs what Joana calls “activation energy.” The process typically starts with the CX team, but it’s important they collaborate with other parts of the organization to drive momentum for the transformation.
Connect. Other silos, stakeholders, and deeper layers in the organization are brought into the transformation process.
Extend. This process extends further into the ecosystem, reaching the organization’s partners.
It’s important to remember that not all businesses move through this process smoothly or even at the same pace. What’s important is that they start.
Triggering transformation
So, what triggers an organization to go all-in on customer-centricity? Joana says there’s no cookie-cutter model for journey-centricity, and companies are inspired to begin a journey of transformation for many different reasons, from external factors like regulatory change to internal factors like high churn rates.
As for where this change is driven from, this can be separated into two broad categories: those that demand a top-down approach and those that take a bottom-up approach.
A top-down approach can occur when, as Joana says, there is an “epiphany at the top” that indicates a need for change. This may be borne of declining revenue, a need for digital transformation, or the business's poor reputation for customer service, among many other things.
A bottom-up approach, on the other hand, may be triggered when a customer service, marketing, or operations team identifies a particularly painful customer journey, which then creates momentum for transformation.
Using the journey atlas
Joana recommends using a journey atlas, a tool that helps businesses move from chaos to clarity. As Joana points out, “It’s not a pretty picture, it is a decision-making tool” for companies that want to take a more strategic approach to improving journeys.
A potentially powerful catalyst for transformation, the journey atlas gives teams a bird's-eye view of the journeys that matter to their customers, laying everything out in an easy-to-absorb way. This allows businesses to:
understand how journeys that run in parallel could impact each other
prioritize their journeys using the traffic light system
create a story that is articulated in customer terms for their executive sponsor
start building buy-in within the organization.
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Here’s how your journey atlas can look when set up with Theydo:
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In terms of putting these plans into action, Joana answered two key questions:
How do you use journey metrics? When measuring customer journeys, it’s important to start simple, utilizing existing data to understand journey health. Journey-centric companies can then progressively build more robust measurement frameworks using hybrid metrics like Net Promoter Score, journey duration, and employee effort.
How do you define key roles and responsibilities? “We're not here to create beautiful artifacts. We're here to drive action,” Joana says. That means having the right teams set up and for everyone to be clear about their responsibilities, including identifying an executive sponsor who can own the customer journey and a journey team that can own the delivery of the road map.
Webinar highlights
This summary only skims the surface of all the incredible insights Joana has shared. To dive deeper, watch the complete webinar or navigate to a specific segment by clicking on the timestamp.
Watch the complete webinar to access all of Steven's valuable insights. Navigate to specific segments of the webinar that interest you by clicking on the timestamps provided below.
02:00 Introducing Joana de Quintanilha
05:30 Journey-centric transformation
Joana introduces what journey-centricity means to her. She walks through the six levers that guide transformation and the three phases businesses go through when embarking on a journey of transformation and embedding new ways of working in the organization. She emphasizes that this change won’t happen overnight, and every business will approach this process slightly differently.
10:30 Triggers for journey-centric transformation
Jochem asks how Joana thinks about top-down and bottom-up triggers that kick-start this type of work. She shares a range of examples of businesses that have begun a journey-centric transformation, from E-on to The Economist, each having experienced a different trigger. Joana explains that no matter whether the change is driven from the top or the bottom, all roads lead to the same place.
19:00 Advice for companies struggling with organizational structure
Joana gives advice on how to overcome one of the most common challenges with journey-centricity: becoming too focused on organizational structure. Joana gives some great advice on focusing on creating transformation success stories instead. As they don’t need to win over the entire executive team, she cautions against going in too hard. Instead, she suggests businesses start with easy-to-measure, low-hanging fruit, as they only need to find one executive sponsor.
22:00 The journey atlas
Joana explains the journey atlas and its benefits, including how it provides a holistic bird's-eye view of all a business’s customer journeys and provides the information to win organizational buy-in and support from executives. She provides an example of how this helped the Bank of Montreal realize that an issue with password reset was impacting the completion of mortgage journeys.
30:13 Using journey metrics
When asked how she begins measuring the health of journeys, Joana shares the best customer and business metrics to use. She offers advice on selecting the most appropriate metrics to measure and demonstrate the value of journey centricity, including the cost of the journey, conversion rate, business resilience, and money savings.
41:00 Difference between the journey atlas and an end-to-end journey
Joana defines the difference between the journey atlas and an end-to-end journey. She specifies that while a high-level journey can be helpful as an educational tool, businesses need to go into more detail to identify specific pain points. A journey atlas helps capture the ecosystem that supports these journeys and acts as a navigational tool—especially when it’s interactive, as it can be when built using a platform like Theydo.
29:37 Unpacking Steven’s presentation and Q&A
Despite enthusiasm to implement customer-centric strategies immediately, the process may take time. It’s important to ensure that every aspect of the journey meets standards, even while pursuing grand initiatives.
45:00 Roles and responsibilities
Joana is asked about defining responsibilities and creating accountability. Her answer emphasizes the importance of being pragmatic, having an executive sponsor who can own the customer journey and a journey team that can own the delivery of the road map and drive the action.
52:00 Rituals around journey-centricity
Joana agrees that rituals are really important and highlights the importance of helping people see their work through a journey-centric lens by connecting new processes to their existing ways of working, such as by using Agile backlogs to manage journeys.
39:10 The importance of language in companies
Language in companies is pivotal; for instance, rephrasing terms like ‘frontline staff’ to more positive alternatives can boost morale, while shifting focus to loyalty to customers rather than expecting loyalty from them promotes a customer-centric approach.
55:00 Teams to partner up with in your organization
Joana discusses which teams tend to be the most supportive of this transformation. Joana says that in addition to the customer experience team, it's important to get buy-in from the teams that will provide the resources required for transformation, such as customer service, IT, design, and research teams.
Journey-centricity = customer obsession = better business results
Joana closes this learning-packed webinar with one final insight: “It's about driving business results in a customer-centric way. That's the power of journey centricity.” That is, while journey-centric transformation is about creating a better customer experience, we all want to deliver business results, too.
Businesses like yours can pave the path to better business results by using the tools we’ve shared today, such as the journey atlas, to create a robust roadmap for transformation success. Before we leave you, here are three tips for getting started:
Start small. You don’t have to get everything perfect straight away. Transformation is an iterative process that you can take day by day.
Be measurable. Always start with journeys you already have data on; this will allow you to measure results and create effective success stories.
Find your allies. Achieving transformation is much easier when you have a team around you. Make sure to find those in the organization who will support your initiatives.