Does your organization have lofty goals of becoming more customer-centric but lack tangible ways to translate that into results? Are you struggling to show the outcomes of your service design work? Are multiple teams doing qualitative and quantitative research across your organization, struggling to make sense of an ocean of data and insights? Constructing a journey atlas and developing practices to use it in decision-making can make a positive impact on all of these issues.
Harmonic defines journey management in this way:
Journey management is an ongoing, strategic practice of understanding, organizing, and optimizing end-to-end journeys across all touchpoints and channels at scale. It aligns organizational efforts around a shared view of customer needs, making it easier for cross-functional teams to collaborate in creating meaningful customer and employee experiences while driving business value.
By leveraging data and insights, journey management enables organizations to proactively and continuously refine journeys over time–creating experiences that feel connected and intentional and benefit both the customer and the business.
A key tool of journey management is a journey atlas. A journey atlas is an overall framework that organizes all the disparate information your organization might have about customer experiences and journeys into a logical, hierarchical structure. I love Joana de Quintanilha’s analogy in this Forrester podcast comparing journey atlases to “closet organizers” for your journey data.
How do you set up a journey atlas? A journey atlas must have a carefully designed information architecture. What story is being told at each level of the atlas, and why, must be fully clear and understood before you can begin bringing unstructured data into it.
A journey atlas helps organizations unify their customer (or other actor, such as employee) journeys under one framework with a shared language. Organizations can use journey atlases in their decision-making processes to:
- Amplify the power of existing data and design work
- Highlight waste in the system and improve efficiency
- Connect customer outcomes to business outcomes
- Increase revenue through greater customer adoption, conversion, and loyalty
- Highlight design opportunities
- Improve internal teams’ ability to collaborate and make swift decisions through greater transparency and alignment
When creating a journey atlas for your organization, we recommend developing its structure based on what you are trying to accomplish with it, how your customers experience your offerings, and how work gets done at your organization. Marzia Aricò’s perspective on the choice of “customer journey atlas” vs. “consumer journey atlas” is a good one to consider when getting started. It can help you think bigger about the frame you put around the journeys you’re including. Learn more about her methods for creating an atlas here.
Here are a few tips on getting started and an example of a generic structure that may help you get started, but it likely needs to be tailored to fit your context and needs.
Best Practices to Set Up Your Journey Atlas Architecture:
- Organize journey information from a top-down frame to establish a standardized way of looking at and communicating about customer experiences, where layers at the top are the most stable and the bottom the most variable.
- Use a structure such as this one only as a starting point to be refined through usage and further refined through customer research and insights.
How to Get Started with A Journey Atlas:
- Start from the top down: If your journey atlas is centered on customer journeys, a customer relationship lifecycle (which is a common framework that most companies use to describe what stages their customers go through from before, to during, to after their experiences with their offering) is likely a good option to structure the framework around to allow for identifying and managing journeys that enable a change in the relationship over time. This provides flexibility when adding services beyond the organization’s current core services. This also accommodates experience design for awareness building and customer relationship management at times beyond the service itself, making space for the expansion of business activities in the future. Your journey atlas may be focused on the employee lifecycle or other constituents.
- Use outside-in language: To build a journey atlas that reflects what is gained from research, frame the journey in the language customers use to describe their experiences rather than internal language to describe journeys, phases, and moments. However, if it is too disruptive to “challenge” or “change” existing inside-out language, you could keep those labels at the macro levels and use more customer-centric language at lower levels.
Creating the Structure:
- Break up the next layer into more manageable chunks: In our example, the macro journey level is constrained to one layer that segments the full, most common customer journey into more manageable chunks for strategy, design, and measurement. This layer accounts for the highest-level description of the experience that most customers have using the services. “Moments that Matter” live in this layer. These are moments that nearly all customers experience and are relatively evergreen in the jobs to be addressed while inspiring ongoing innovation, re-imagination, and optimization of solutions that enable these moments.
- Account for all the most important variations: The micro journey layer accounts for the diversity of customer experiences across the organization’s products and services and channels based on their segment, lens, occasion, or any variable that would make that experience unique. Within these journeys, more specific moments, opportunities, and solutions for those experiences are accounted for. Shown here are examples of what those journeys might be, but the work ahead would be to inventory and create these.
Creating Customer And Business Value With The Help Of Your Journey Atlas:
- Make the journey atlas a transformational tool by connecting strategy to data: Strategic business objectives should be accounted for and tracked at the top layers of the atlas, whereas, within the macro and micro levels, experiential KPIs and specific metrics can be connected to specific solutions, moments, and micro journeys. When drafting the atlas, note specific data that is needed to measure appropriate indicators that will ladder up to a bigger-picture understanding of how the organization is progressing in key strategic themes. Once this is thought through and designed, it is time to work with collaborators to collect and connect the data needed.
- Track progress on solutions AND capabilities: Tracking shared capabilities that enable solutions is one layer of information that will enhance the usefulness of the journey atlas in the long term. This will ensure no redundancies across solutions and that the organization is getting the most value out of all the capabilities it builds.
In summary, creating a journey atlas is one key step toward managing the experiences your organization offers to its customers, employees, and others. It also benefits businesses by connecting data and insights to key business goals and by more clearly being able to track the results of improvement work. It can help create efficiency and improve experiences, which is a win-win.
This is a key step towards journey management; however, if your organization isn’t ready to adopt journey management, creating a journey atlas can still add tremendous value to leaders and facilitate better outcomes for teams across functions. How do you know if your organization is ready for journey management? Check out our blog on that topic!
