The structural inefficiencies of silos have been the source of complaints for decades.  There are both departmental silos and responsibility silos. Silos typically have a leader and its own tools, data, budget, teams and metrics and each of these contributes to its vertical focus.

The conflict lies in the fact that our customers traverse across the silos.  In other words, customers are traveling horizontally across the vertical silo focus.  This occurs in both the end-to-end customer journey, and in the individual and primary service journeys that make up customers’ end-to-end journey.

The end-to-end customer journey is made up of separate and distinct service journeys.

Service journey: The path taken by an individual interacting with any combination of touchpoints regarding an interest, need, request or requirement.  Primary service journeys are those that together and sequentially make up the end-to-end customer journey.

Until this conflict is addressed, an organization will forever be challenged to optimize the results of its CX efforts.

Progressing through the Model accomplishes two shifts critical to addressing the conflict, optimizing outcomes and better positioning the organization to compete and win.

The answers to a series of questions will help clarify the path forward to desired benefits for your organization.

Typical first steps start with relevant CX strategy and plan. Both need to have a focus on closing the current to future state gap and becoming journey-focused and individual-centric.  With a strategy and plan in place, it is time to execute the first stage.

This stage covers the foundational work necessary to make the shift to becoming journey-focused.  As a part of the service journey work, this stage includes developing the strategies that cover what most call channel or digital transformation strategy.  There’s a lot to accomplish in this early stage that drives immediate improvements while also preparing the organization for optimizing the benefits of subsequent Maturity Model stages.

Goal: Generate specific channel, experience or touchpoint improvements via foundational service journey work.

I was working with a large US insurance company that developed a service journey focus.  One of the activities of every insurance company is to collect payments for insurance premiums.  As the nature of that service journey was examined from the perspective of customers, it started to be clear that the service journey wasn’t about payments at all.  Customers viewed paying their premiums as maintaining their eligibility for their insurance benefits.

Building that service journey around the title and understanding of “maintaining eligibility” had a dramatic impact.

First, it impacted employees that worked that service journey.  They shifted from thinking they were collecting money or payments to the fact that they were now helping individuals maintain their eligibility for health insurance.

Second, this dynamic change in perception delivered quantifiable benefits.  First call resolution around what was previously called payments improved as did the related transactional Net Promoter Score.  This simple name change also had a positive impact on the organization’s cash flow.

As CX consultants, employees often share with us, “If I could get responsibility X to do Y, it would make the customer journey and my job so much better.”  Employees complain about silos.  They complain about what’s happening or not happening up or downstream from their work, which inhibits the best service journey for customers and for them.

The real power of the Maturity Model is unlocked when the focus is based on the intent of customers’ service journeys. This horizontal lens that cuts across siloed departments is a key to improving service journey and channel/digital performance.

As organizations consider the future state, it is common practice today to develop a channel or digital strategy.  Typically, what we see under this activity is organization’s focusing on the channel or the tool. The challenge with that focus is that some service journeys just can’t be accomplished in every channel. For instance, few organizations enable customers to pay via chat.

When somebody’s in the wrong channel for what they’re trying to accomplish, it’s bad for them and bad for the organization.

The key is to approach what is typically called a channel strategy through the lens of service journeys.  Think of it this way. It’s not a channel strategy, it’s a service journey strategy by channel.

The Service Journey/Channel Matrix helps organizations view channels through the lens of service journey purposes.  If a service journey’s purpose can’t currently be achieved via a specific channel, ask the question; is it the organization’s desire to eventually enable that service journey through that channel?  The answer drives both the roadmap and customer communication.

One output of the Service Journey/Channel Matrix is clarity of where communications are needed to help ensure that customers don’t try to accomplish a service journey in a dead-end channel. If a customer is in a dead-end channel for the purpose of their service journey, it is bad for them and bad for the company.

Identifying and defining your customers’ primary service journeys is foundational.

Stage two, the Gap Analysis & Roadmap, can benefit from the service journey lens and service journey strategy by channel.

The future state service journey roadmap will integrate with the gap analysis roadmap from the second stage.

Defined primary service journeys are critical to the Integrated Service Journey Model stages.

Best case prerequisites: Defined primary service journeys and future state service journey roadmaps.  Developed Service Journey/Channel Matrix.

This stage is all about improving the timely actionable intelligence and capabilities needed to develop and deploy individual-centric touchpoints that help improve service journeys and conversions.

In the first stage one key output was a roadmap based on the gap between two sets of data: the current and future state blueprints of the organization’s service journeys.

In this stage, the resultant roadmap is also the output of the gap between two sets of data: the current state and best practices across five critical marketing/CX activities.

Goal: Generate the intelligence and capabilities to develop and deliver individual-centric communications.

The second shift that improves CXM maturity and results is the shift to becoming individual-centric.  This isn’t about doing away with segments or personas but delivering touchpoints that are truly relevant to the person and their service journey.

Individual-centric communication replaces communication that can be perceived as irrelevant and doesn’t prompt engagement with the call-to-action, or worse, actually hurts the brand.  The truth is nobody wants to receive a communication to a persona or segment that doesn’t really fit.  People want to be treated as an individual and benefit from content that is relevant to them.

A factor in the need to shift to individual-centric communication is the proliferation of privacy laws.  Whether it’s GDPR in Europe, TCPA in the United States or individual states or countries passing privacy laws, companies need to understand those privacy laws and deal with privacy on an individual basis.

An opportunity this stage represents is the individual-centric capability to finally be able to develop and deploy “right” touchpoints.

Right touchpoints are outputs of the five critical marketing/CX activities based on the right intelligence and deployed:

Organizations focus a lot on conversions. Conversions to register, buy, renew – those conversions significant to the organization. To achieve any one of those significant conversions, the individual has to convert touchpoint-to-touchpoint to complete the service journey.  How many touchpoints are there for one of your prospects get to the point of buying/paying?  The touchpoint-to-touchpoint conversions are critical.  If an individual doesn’t convert to the next touchpoint along their service journey, then there isn’t an opportunity to get to a significant conversion such as buying.

Establishing the capabilities to develop and deploy individual-centric right touchpoints helps improve the touchpoint-to-touchpoint conversions critical to achieving significant conversions.

One key to maximizing benefits from the Maturity Model is understanding the purpose of an individual’s service journey. How is that accomplished?  There are emerging technologies today that will capture each of the touchpoints across social, online, call center, retail, etc. and map those by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions.

This omni-channel touchpoint sequencing in real-time enables the identification of the individual’s service journey within a reasonable level of confidence.  Application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to that knowledge coupled with the aggregation and analyzation of profile, purchase and other relevant data positions the organization to deliver individualized communications.  The technology to know the individual and their service journey and deliver right touchpoints in real-time that help the customer accomplish the service journey’s purpose is available and in use today.  And conversion results can be impressive.

Emerging marketing/CX technologies have dramatically increased the capability to deliver individual-centric communications and do so in real-time.

Amazingly enough, there isn’t a single platform that covers all five of the critical marketing/CX activities. There are 574 different platforms in rating reports covering most of the types of platforms that serve these five activities. This is one reason for the challenges integrating these activities, their various platforms and related data flow.

Improving the integration, data flow and capabilities around these five marketing/CX activities is complicated and challenging.  The Model’s second stage presents a logical approach of conducting the current state to best practices gap analysis. This is the holistic method needed to address the five critical marketing/CX activities and the various tools in current stacks and consider emerging technologies.  Through this gap analysis the organization will clearly see how to dramatically improve the capabilities needed to achieve the benefits of individual-centric communications.

While this stage is not a critical prerequisite for the Integrated Service Journey Model (ISJM) stages that follow, the improved capabilities help optimize ISJM results.

This stage’s roadmap will need to integrate with the ISJM roadmap.

Due to ISJM complexity, the Maturity Model separates the ISJM into two stages.  The first of the two stages involves defining and implementing the various components.  The second stage is primarily focused on continuous improvement.

Just as departments have an owner, team, budget, metrics and accountability, under an ISJM the same is applied to each service journey.  Service journey teams are much smaller than departments as not everyone in an organization is assigned a service journey role.

Implementing an ISJM is a significant undertaking and needs to be well planned, communicated and structured.  Prior to rolling out the new responsibilities, it is advised that governance and change management are chartered and initiated.  Additionally, it is typically best to roll the ISJM out service journey by service journey over time.

The benefits are worth the challenge.  It is through implementing the ISJM that the organization truly overcomes silo conflict and becomes service journey-focused.  Service journey outcomes will be improved for both customers and employees as well as the organization.

An updated CX strategy and plan doesn’t have to include all of the Maturity Model’s stages, nor do the stages have to be done in sequence. There are various paths and sequences to achieve an organization’s desired level of maturity.

The organization can start by defining and blueprinting a single service journey. And not all organizations will initially plan to adopt an Integrated Service Journey Model, which is OK. A key is that as a stage or part of a stage is executed, to ensure that the output serves subsequent stages whether there is or isn’t a plan to advance to a subsequent stage.

The shift to becoming journey-focused improves customer and employee experiences and the resultant KPIs.  Service journeys are also a better way of measuring the impact of CX efforts and ROI.

Improving capabilities to enable individual-centric communications improves the touchpoint-to-touchpoint conversions that improve sales, renewals and other significant conversions.

Journey-focused and individual-centric. These are keys to addressing the conflict between silos and journeys and to organizations successfully competing in today’s economy – the journey economy. It’s about our customers’ service journeys and really focusing and being efficient and effective in building value for customers and the business through that journey focus. But it’s not going to be easy. We’ve been complaining about silos for how long?

The CX Transformation Maturity Model is an innovative tool to help organizations take a holistic approach to winning the journey economy.  As Gartner’s research notes, over two thirds of companies compete primarily on customer experience.

It is time to move on from focusing on steps within silos and to reap the benefits of becoming journey-focused and individual-centric by progressing through the stages of the CX Transformation Maturity Model.