Every Journey counts: how to recognize and organize journeys at scale in TheyDo
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At TheyDo we’re always innovating to bring you the best practices in Journey Management. Staying true to our ‘Cloaks off’ value of transparency, we’ve gathered insights from 20 of our most successful customers to understand how they’re using journeys, who’s involved, and how often they’re updated. Here’s what we’ve learned.
Every journey matters
Each level of the Journey Framework plays a unique and important role in managing the customer experience:
Framework Journeys (L0): These end-to-end journeys provide a bird’s-eye view of the customer experience. Managed through a set of linked (nested) Journeys, they help establish a shared understanding across departments, and serve as a strategic overview, or ‘journey cockpit’, for management.
Macro Journeys (L1): Offering a more detailed look at customer behavior, these journeys break down the customer experience into specific interactions with your brand, product, and touch points. Forrester also recognizes that customer behavior extends beyond your world, encompassing interactions and influences from external factors that impact the overall experience.
Micro Journeys (L2): These journeys capture real customer interactions, including raw data and research, and transform them into clear insights which can be used across journeys to build customer empathy.
We observe that our customers use these three main groups of journeys with varying levels of sophistication, highlighting the need for detailed insights into different touch points along the customer’s journey with a company.
Who uses each journey level?
The relevance of each journey level varies depending on the role within the organization.
Framework Journeys (L0): These abstracted journeys are the most cross-functional, involving department executives and senior leaders. They serve as a strategic overview and are updated monthly to quarterly. See our Journey Management Ceremonies guide for more information.
Macro Journeys (L1): These curated journeys are relevant to specific teams or cross functional groups, such as a product, marketing, and operations. They are updated more frequently—typically weekly to monthly.
Micro Journeys (L2): These detail-rich journeys are primarily used by individual contributors within a team and are created and refined based on direct customer research. The insights gained here feed into the Macro and Framework journeys, ensuring a cohesive understanding across the organization.
Regardless of where you sit in an organization, your Journey Framework serves as both a starting point for drilling down into more detailed levels of nested journeys and zooming out to the bigger picture. The sophistication of your Framework determines how deeply an executive, or a senior manager can explore the customer experience nested within.
Average number of journeys
From our customers’ experiences, we see that Journey Frameworks scale significantly over time. On average, companies start with around 80 Journeys in their first year. By the second year, this typically grows to 250-300 journeys, and by the third year, 350-400.
These journeys are organized into 2-4 Journey Frameworks, each with 3-5 levels (depending on the organization). The average distribution of journeys across these levels follows a 1:6:18:26 ratio, meaning that for every one journey at the top level, there are six at the next level, 18 at the following level, and 26 at the lowest level.
Keep in mind that these numbers are averages—your Framework may look different based on your business structure and the level of detail required.
Opportunities arising from journeys
As you unpack journeys, you’ll uncover Opportunities for improving both the customer experience and your business. Our research shows that Opportunities serve different roles depending on the journey level.
Framework Journeys (L0): These contain only a few Opportunities, representing the top strategic priorities for the company.
Macro Journeys (L1): Opportunities in these journeys offer rich insights coupled with problem definitions and potential solutions that often lead to business case proposals.
Micro Journeys (L2): Opportunities in these journeys are few, and offer the chance to build empathy with the customer and present their point of view for improvement.
This differentiation ensures that each opportunity is utilized according to its context and scope. Opportunities that present the customer’s perspective (from Micro Journeys) feed into business case opportunities (in Macro Journeys), which in turn inform strategic decisions at the Framework level.
Key takeaways
Our exploration into how our customers use journeys has highlighted the profound impact that each level has on understanding and improving the customer experience. Here are our main takeaways:
Three broad levels: Customers typically use three levels of journeys—Framework, Macro, and Micro—each offering different time horizons and contexts.
Insights at every level: Each level reflects business leaders’ needs for insights, from big-picture views to detailed analysis of customer interactions.
Journey growth over time: The number of journeys typically scales from 80-100 in Year 1, to 250-300 in Year 2, and 350-400 in Year 3.
Strategic decision-making: Business leaders and their teams roll up the Opportunities from each journey level into the focused strategic decisions that guide the company.
At TheyDo, we’re committed to evolving our practices and empowering you with the tools you need to navigate and optimize your journeys effectively. Stay tuned as we continue to learn and share our insights.