Making a data-driven business case for journeys: a conversation with Maxie Schmidt
In this webinar with Maxie Schmidt, we discuss how to introduce journey-centricity into your organization, from making a business case for customer journeys, to using journeys to map decision-making in your organization.
Proving the value of journeys isn’t as hard as you think – at least, not if you have the right frameworks and processes in place when making your case.
In this fascinating session with Maxie Schmidt, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, TheyDo co-founder and CEO Jochem van der Veer explores how to discuss journeys with stakeholders, how to show the value of journeys internally, and how to make sure customer-centricity is always a factor when it comes to making major business decisions.
Forrester is a leading research firm providing cutting-edge analysis and advisory services for businesses to unlock growth through customer-centricity. Maxie has worked with organizations across a wide array of industries to transform their businesses through CX, and is an expert in demonstrating the ROI of customer experience.
Here, Maxie shares several actionable steps you can take to be an effective journey advocate, as well as detailed frameworks and templates you can use when making your own business case to stakeholders.
Key takeaways from the webinar
What a customer journey is and what it is not
Maxie defines the customer journey as “A customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal.” In order to move forward with journeys, she adds, the journey must have:
A singular definition across the entire organization
A goal defined in the customer’s point of view. For example, “buying a home” instead of “closing a deal.”
On the other hand, a journey is NOT:
The customer lifecycle. There are many journeys across the lifecycle.
Processes, channels, or business goals, such as “conversion” or “a roadmap”.
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How to build the business case for journeys
Building a business case for journeys starts with identifying the key journeys for your business and analyzing them. This allows you to actually experiment with a journey-centric way of working and discover the specific benefits of improving those journeys.
True to her journey-centric focus, Maxie identifies a few steps along the path of making journeys a key part of business decisions:
Create a portfolio of journeys: Gather all your journeys in one place and place them in a hierarchy of levels. Categorize each journey as micro, mini, medium, or macro.
Prioritize which journeys to work on: Score your journeys based on feasibility and impact. Rate them on a scale of High/Medium/Low.
Analyze journey benefits: Use journey success and signal metrics to predict the benefits of improving that journey.
How to use journeys to impact business decisions
To actually make an impact, your business case for journeys must be supported by rigorous processes and proven results. In other words, you have to test out your journey hypotheses.
Maxie and Jochem suggest following these steps to bolster your case and influence decision-makers:
Test journey hypotheses: Implement changes to journeys and measure the impact.
Create a journey atlas: Present all of your company’s journeys in one document, including journey stage, journey level, journey health, and journey metrics.
Communicate journey success: Gather success stories and data from stakeholders and present them to relevant decision-makers.
“We see the people who make the case for journeys don’t do it at a theoretical, conceptual level,” Maxie says. “They show that, by using customer-centricity principles, journey-centricity, and tools and the frameworks, they can actually identify improvements to a journey that are good for the business and for the customer.”
Once you have had success with transforming one journey, do it again. If the results are repeatable, executives and stakeholders will be more eager to implement change across the entire organization.
“You need to show that you have a repeatable approach and that you have shown results.”
Finally, discipline and consistency is key. “One of the big challenges we see is that people think about how to make the case, but then afterwards, they don’t measure,” Maxie says. She emphasizes the discipline required to follow through with measurement, and to communicate results at the right times, to the right people.
She suggests spending 1-2 hours each week to follow the progress of projects you have implemented.
What is covered in the webinar
We highly recommend viewing the webinar to gain all of Maxie’s insights and frameworks. To skip around to segments of the webinar that are most relevant to you, click on the timestamps below.
00:00 Webinar start
01:14 Welcome and Maxie Schmidt’s introduction
02:55 ‘Don’t Let Customer Journeys Be Misunderstood’, article by Maxie Schmidt and Joana de Quintanilha: A customer journey is not the complete customer lifecycle. A journey is shown from the customer’s point of view, and is not told from the perspective of business goals and processes, such as “a conversion journey.” Organizations must agree on the definition of customer journey in order to be customer-centric, not company-centric.
04:49 Defining the Customer Journey: “A customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal.”
07:36 Journeys at different levels: Maxie breaks down journeys into a 4-level hierarchy: Macro journeys, Medium journeys, Mini journeys, and Micro journeys. Each journey is associated with a different business goal.
11:10 How to start building a business case for journeys in your organization: After you define your journeys, you have to start prioritizing them. Maxie compares journey prioritization to cleaning out a closet, in which you pull some items out and make them sparkle. The prioritization process doesn’t have to be complicated; you just need to categorize journeys in terms of low/medium/high. Maxie suggests choosing which journeys to focus on based on impact and feasibility. High impact/high feasibility is a good place to start in terms of making changes to customer journeys.
15:06 “[When] making a business case for journey improvements, it’s much easier to make a case for the customer experience overall.” It’s not easy to prove that improving one journey will impact NPS overall. Instead, you can measure NPS of each mini- and micro-journey and then add those together to make a compelling case.
16:46 How to measure the impact and feasibility of journeys: Create a portfolio of journeys [see slide] and, for each journey, analyze impact via customers, employees, business goals, other journeys, and brand differentiation; and feasibility via internal support and awareness, investment and measurability, complexity, organizational resources, and CX team skills and resources. The analysis doesn’t have to be complex; again it can be a simple assessment of low/medium/high. The goal is to avoid journeys that aren’t helpful, and also ones that an individual stakeholder may be pushing for that won’t help move the business forward.
21:04 How to estimate the benefits and measure progress of journey improvements: Use journey success and signal metrics:
Success metrics — Define success for that journey (for the customer AND the company) and the metrics you will measure, e.g. cost to sell, conversion, ease and speed.
Signal metrics — Where in the journey would you need to see a change to increase chances of success?
Journey measurement is all about testing out a hypothesis about journey improvement, and then using data to show its success (or failure).
24:40 Creating discipline in your company to enact lasting change: “To be as disciplined as defining, very specifically, ‘Which success metrics do I want to affect? What are the signals I’d have to see early on, and how would the change affect that?’...That kind of discipline is not often in place. It requires deliberation. That’s always what measurement does, it requires you to be more precise, and truly define what you mean.”
27:57 Tip: Look at across journeys to maximize impact: Maxie suggests looking at micro journeys to find cross-journey impact. She cites the example of a password reset journey, which affects customers in different areas across products and services.
29:23 What is the trigger to start going deeper into the macro journey? How journey levels work together to create a full context of the customer experience. “Many of these micro journeys are part of bigger journeys, and unless you understand not just which micro journeys are part of your journey, but also where other journeys are that use these micro journeys, you’ll probably underestimate the impact.” Jochem agrees, citing banking examples where customers go through different journeys for the same process. Not fixing problems with micro journeys can lead to collateral damage. For example, a bad password reset journey can affect a larger journey such as taking out a loan.
30:58 Showing the bigger picture to execs: The Journey Atlas (Framework) explained: Executives don’t need the detail of each micro journey, they just need to get a sense of the amount of journeys in their organizational ecosystem, which can be done by showing a Journey Atlas, or Journey Framework.
This kind of document helps bring execs on board because they can see the interconnectedness of journeys, which journeys are most effective, which journeys are repeated, and journey health. Jochem adds that the journey framework in TheyDo also shows journey metrics.
36:49 Mapping the internal stakeholders’ decision-making journey: To successfully make a case for journeys, consider the journey of the stakeholders you’re presenting to. How can you make it easier/faster/less painful to allow internal stakeholders to use information you’re sharing about journeys to make decisions? For instance:
Where are stakeholders currently using customer data?
Where are the missed opportunities where they could be using customer data?
You can map out the decision-making journey just like your customer journeys. Evaluate the journey path, participants, and their perceptions.
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39:40 Timing is everything. Maxie compares timing your presentation to presenting a recipe for a cake. “If I tell you how to make an awesome cake just before you bake it, it’s more likely that you’ll bake an awesome cake. You need to find out when people are baking their cakes — making their decisions — so you can then inform them at the right moment.”
45:34 Template for building journey business cases: Maxie shares a detailed template for building a structured business case for using journeys. It starts with identifying the challenge and urgency, then moves on to proposed changes, then finally to owners and metrics. All in all, it includes 13 boxes for you to fill out before making your case to decision-makers.
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48:28 Final Q&A
48:40 How do you make the case before you have any journeys? How do you crack open that discussion?
50:20 How do you avoid getting stuck on who owns the journey?
53:48 What’s the best way to communicate progress?
55:30 How do you know when journey work is done?
57:58 Wrap-up and goodbye
Building trust in journeys
“People internally mostly want to know they can trust you. They want to know that you have a good idea of what success metrics you will affect, how they might move, and that you’ve actually checked whether that’s true.”
If we can sum up Maxie’s advice for building a business case for journeys, we might say this: it relies on deliberate analysis, based on clear metrics, and communicated at the right time to the right people.
If you can connect journeys to business goals, customer goals, and to each other, you’ve already got a strong starting point for journey success. Continuing to test journey hypotheses, ship improvements, and gather results will only result in your business case getting stronger.
Once you’ve proven the effectiveness of journeys a few times, you’ll gain the trust you need to go forward and make journeys a pillar of your organization, delighting customers and stakeholders in the process.
Show notes
“Don’t Let Customer Journeys Be Misunderstood,” by Maxie Schmidt and Joana de Quintanilha, Forrester, 2024
“Journey Centricity at E.ON: Part 1,” The CX Cast, Forrester, 2024
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