Customer Journeys Development Hub

Journey Management is an approach to Customer Experience Management to focus on finding the right opportunity for the right reasons through deep customer insight, a clear journey map and a standardised, process-driven workflow and customer-driven organisational structure.

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Achieving Journey Mastery is a journey on its own. Being customer-centric is not just a boardroom strategy, it's a way of working that ties back into having a deep understanding of all your customer journeys. 

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Reaching Mastery takes a lot of time and effort including the following five stages:

 

Stage 1: Intuition-driven

Everyone has a different idea of what customers need and people are mostly reactive to external shocks. People are intuition-driven and there aren't any formal procedures to manage a customer crisis.

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Stage 2: Introducing Process

Senior management makes innovation a priority and people start introducing procedures. However, methods are not yet being standardised and teams use different tools.

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Stage 3: Journey-driven workflow

Process means including journeys in every project. Journeys maps are designed based on workflows.

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Stage 4: Company-wide framework

Customer journeys start shaping the organisational strategy with people using unique, customer-centric tools.

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Stage 5: Journey Mastery

All the departments have a deep understanding of customer experience and journeys are considered the single source of truth

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In today's rapidly evolving corporate landscape, innovation is the linchpin for achieving success. However, innovation alone is not enough; it must be guided by a strategic approach that ensures not only its effectiveness but also its rewarding outcomes. To help you navigate the complex terrain of innovation, we present the ‘Innovation Excellence: 12 Principles for Impactful Growth’, which are designed to steer your innovation journey towards a future brimming with opportunities and prosperity.

 

Principle 1: Innovation with Clear Specifications and Completeness

Effective innovation goes beyond ideation; it must be executed with clarity and completeness. Innovation is truly complete when it leaves a discernible impact on the customer or end-user. In other words, it should solve a real problem or fulfill a genuine need.

 

Principle 2: Customer Value

The second principle emphasizes the importance of delivering customer value. Innovations should empower the sales and onboarding journey, making it easier for new clients to navigate the pipeline. It's about ensuring that your innovations directly benefit your customers.

 

Principle 3: Solving Incidents

Innovation often arises from unexpected incidents. These incidents present opportunities to solve problems or fill gaps in the customer journey, leading to a positive impact on the overall customer experience. Embrace these incidents as chances for growth.

 

Principle 4: Anything Contributing to Corporate Growth

Impactful innovations align with the corporate strategy, particularly in terms of expanding the business through new platforms and avenues. Your innovations should be catalysts for corporate growth.

 

Principle 5: Ensuring Corporate Compliance

Maintaining corporate visibility and ensuring compliance based on the given regulations is vital. Your innovations should not jeopardize these essential aspects of the business.

 

Principle 6: Reaching Company Targets & KPIs

Innovations should be geared towards achieving company targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The best innovations deliver immediate, measurable positive impacts on these metrics.

 

Principle 7: Industry Disruption

True innovation goes beyond mere improvements; it disrupts industry norms and benchmarks. It should enable significant market penetration and redefine the industry landscape.

 

Principle 8: Customer Feedback

Gathering feedback is crucial to assessing the impact of your innovations. It helps you understand how your innovations have influenced the customer experience and motivates further improvements.

 

Principle 9: Unique Professionalism

Successful innovations often challenge existing department functions, operations, or professional practices. They introduce new standards and approaches to doing business more effectively.

 

Principle 10: Internal Business Improvements

Innovations aren't limited to external-facing initiatives. They can also optimise internal processes, enhancing productivity and overall performance within the organization.

 

Principle 11: Consistency

Consistency is the bedrock of innovation excellence. Departments that consistently deliver innovations demonstrate a higher level of commitment to organisational growth.

 

Principle 12: Long-Term Effect

The true test of an innovation's impact is its longevity. A successful innovation should continue to yield positive results long after its initial implementation.

 

Remember, these twelve principles are not meant to encourage innovation for its own sake. Instead, they serve as a strategic guide to ensure that your innovation efforts are purposeful, effective, and geared towards real impact and growth. Allow these principles to steer your innovation journey. Who knows, your next big idea might just be the catalyst that transforms everything. Innovate wisely, and success will surely follow. Your journey towards innovation excellence begins here.

Innovation is a critical component of business success, and its management is becoming increasingly important in today's fast-paced and constantly evolving business environment, making it almost a prerequisite for survival. Perceptions about innovation and innovation management have a significant impact on how companies approach this area.

 

Many leadership and executive teams view innovation as a key driver of growth and competitive advantage. Therefore, they prioritise research and development (R&D) and invest heavily in new technologies, processes, and products. They believe that innovation is essential to remain relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace.

 

However, not all businesses share this perception of innovation. Some view it as a costly and risky activity that does not always yield results. These organisations may be more hesitant to invest in R&D and prefer to focus on optimising their existing products and processes.

 

Businesses that prioritise innovation tend to have a more proactive approach to innovation management. They often have dedicated teams or departments focused on R&D and may even partner with external organisations, such as universities or startups, to develop new technologies and products. These companies often have a strong culture of experimentation and risk-taking, encouraging employees to explore new ideas and approaches.

 

In contrast, businesses that are more hesitant about innovation may have a more reactive approach to innovation management. They may only invest in R&D when they see a direct need, such as when their competitors introduce new products or when they face disruptive changes in their industry. These companies may also be more conservative in their approach, focusing on incremental improvements rather than radical innovation.

 

Another important factor that influences business perceptions about innovation and innovation management is the industry in which they operate. Some industries, such as technology and healthcare, have a strong culture of innovation, and companies operating in these fields are expected to be at the forefront of new developments. However, industries such as retail or manufacturing may have a more conservative approach to innovation, as there is less pressure to constantly introduce new products or services.

 

In our business case, innovation can take both perceptions, either new product and platform development through continuous R&D activity or improving existing procedures, customer touchpoints and experiences, involve extensive innovative thinking and implementation. The key success to innovation management is developing consistently and endlessly innovations that add value to the customers or improve their lives.

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An idea turns into a project when customer journeys maps initiate and motivate decision-making. While Journey Mapping is essential in Journey Management, it is not the goal. Every department needs its customer journey to understand it, to research it, to design it, but then, they need to take action from it - insider this journey. And that is where the management aspect comes in.

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For an organisation to make this leap in maturity from mapping to management it needs to have a clear understanding and commitment towards a customer-centric strategy that outlines the steps required to achieve this objective. The steps initiate with all business units mapping out their customer journeys, after BU Leaders and team members have sit together to establish their front end and back end interactions on these journeys alongside their related protocols, policies and procedures that help them deliver outstanding experiences to their customers.

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In addition, organisational change is the best cultural strategy to adhere to customer-driven journeys, as it is the only culture that can nurture continuous improvements and the willingness to embrace change. Customer demands change, so the organisation follows. This means that all the teams, from top down to bottom up, should be open to new ideas and ways of doing things better for the customer and their department's procedures.

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These are the vital elements in innovative mature business environments that have clear and visible journey maps for every department and customer group. This is the right setting to make people focus on the biggest opportunities and prioritise the most important things from any journey across the entire customer lifecycle. 

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To sum up, Journey Management Maturity is defined by six key dimensions that each play a vital role in scaling up innovation management across an organisation:

1. Governance - having leaders on top effectively managing the journeys and motivating teams to own and innovate on their customer touchpoints 

2. Processes, Policies, Protocols - establishing the procedures that ensure seamless and frictionless customer journeys 

3. Culture - inspiring and nurturing a journey-centric mindset and training the related skills in this culture

4. Organisational Structure - Organising the teams, the departments and roles around the ownership and responsibilities related to customer journeys. Our OD chart follows the Journey Management Flow as there is only one boss, the customer. 

5. Measurement - designing and establishing key performance indicators based on the customer journey interactions and use this data to drive improvements.

6. Tools - using technology or non technology systems and toolkits to support a journey-centric way of thinking and working. Customer Journeys provide theydo.io software to help the teams manage their journeys more effectively.

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There are three basic innovation types for a customer-centric organisation to consider:

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1. New: a novelty introduced for the first time to the organisation and it is recorded as Version 1 in the customer journey mapping

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2. Incremental: an improvement to an existing, well-known process, experience, touchpoint or any kind of interaction with a customer

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3. Disruptive: a new intervention to our industry, so it is a ground breaking accomplishment and added value to the customer. This has enormous impact in the organisation and the customer as well. Until another rival introduces something similar, this innovation is considered as ‘disruptive’.

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All innovation types have a significant impact when they are delivered to the customers. They key to their success is determined by a number of factors such as the right timing to be implemented, the well-defined moment of truth they address to, either solving a customer issue or improve an existing process, the customer feedback that is received after their implementation and the organisational impact in terms of returns and intangible benefits.

When all customer journeys become visible to the whole organisation, teams are united and collaborate under a single source of truth, where everyone agrees what to do next and why, finding their relevance to the customers' lifecycle. Connecting all journeys in one place.

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Journeys' visualisation creates better outcomes from everyone, including their customer. All teams can see the big picture across many journeys and better understand their connections between them. 

 

This visibility addresses the greatest issue of almost all companies, the departments' silos and  complicated process that makes the customer's life more difficult than solving their problems. All journeys in a great platform is a unified customer ecosystem where everyone is aware of what the are doing and why they are doing

Customer Feedback Management, which is also known as Customer Experience Management (CEM) Programme, is the process of collecting, analysing and responding to customer feedback across many channels in order to improve customer experiences. It is a vital component and an integral part of CEX operations in a company that helps it gain valuable insights into their customer's perceptions of their products, services and the overall brand.

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This is the best structured approach to manage feedback across multiple communication channels, such a as surveys, social media, customer service call recordings, website content or feedback forms. All are places to listen to both positive and negative feedback that can be processed and interpreted by internal teams and suggest improvement areas. 

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BU Leaders and team members should find the best collaborative ways and establish the appropriate procedures that collect feedback while also having in place analytics tools to act on insightful customer data and monitor the performance of their customer journeys.

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Every customer journey, regardless of a department's front end and back end interactions can include particular touchpoints that capture customer feedback, i.e. sales can transfer it to other internal departments when they need more technical information on a product/service or require further personalisation which can be achieved only through customer's input.

 

When internal teams collaborate on improvements best on this feedback, they deliver innovations, meaningful for their customers. Although CEM Programmers are usually designed by CEX people the Customer Experience which is based on customer feedback is eventually a responsibility of all the departments in the entire organisation.

When delving into the fascinating world of creative thinking, people often struggle to identify new ideas and innovations.

 

The struggle to define innovation arises from the complex and ever-evolving nature of information and the inherent challenge of categorising such a broad and dynamic concept. Classifying information is a cognitive ability that allows individuals to organise and make sense of the world around them. It involves the mental process of grouping similar objects, ideas, or experiences into categories based on shared characteristics or attributes

 

Innovation is the lifeblood of progress, and by understanding the barriers and cognitive processes involved, we can unlock our own potential for groundbreaking ideas and transformative change.

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Apart from cognitive challenges, people find it difficult to identify, classify and analyse new ideas because of many psychological factors such as fear of failure: The fear of failure can hinder individuals from venturing into uncharted territory and exploring new ideas. More importantly, departments that act as information silos find it hard to expand new ideas' potential, as in such as restrictive environment, there is no interaction or collaboration to brainstorm innovations, neither the proper foundation to understand ideas concepts and characteristics in order for these to be classified properly. This means limited exposure to diverse perspectives and experiences can restrict our ability to identify innovative ideas. Humans tend to prefer familiarity and routine, often sticking to what they know instead of embracing new ideas.

 

Analysing and evaluating new ideas require critical thinking skills. Once a new idea is implemented, evaluating its impact is crucial. Additionally, comprehending the cognitive processes required to analyse and assess new ideas enables us to think and make more well informed decisions. With this knowledge, we can unlock our own potential for innovation and contribute to a more innovative and dynamic world.

 

Remember, the next groundbreaking idea may be just around the corner, waiting to be discovered by someone with an open mind and a willingness to embrace new possibilities. Stay curious, keep exploring, and be the catalyst for change in your field.

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