A customer journey can be defined as the various stages that a customer goes through in their lifecycle with a business, underpinned by the desired interactions, experience and outcomes for the customer, the business and any other stakeholder.

Despite all the expert chatter, the concept of mapping a customer’s journey is still a messy business, often ending up as an internal public relations exercise, or worse, as a business process that customers get funneled through, argues Maria McCann, founder of Joho Ventures, a UK-based customer experience agency. In this article she explores the purpose of a customer journey and how companies can prioritise it.

I recently overheard a conversation among a group of heads of customer experience about best practice in mapping a customer's journey. “Customers are unpredictable in my business,” the first executive said, “so I’m only mapping the most important steps in the customer’s journey in order to highlight the areas where the greatest failings are. It is not a perfect system, but it gets the customer on the agenda”. “I know exactly what my customers are going to do,” replied another executive, “I have already mapped their journeys for them”.

This conversation highlights where most companies are in designing customer journeys: battling with other business priorities or reducing the customer experience to a linear process. I want to challenge the concept that customers want to go on journeys. They don’t. Customers want to complete goals, usually in order to solve a problem or to fulfill a need.

The “Omotenashi” concept

I often advise brands to apply the concept of Omotenashi, the philosophy behind Japanese hospitality, to their customer experience. Omotenashi is based on anticipating the needs of the person you are hosting and fulfilling those needs seamlessly. 

One way to flesh out this concept is through the Kano model, developed by Noriaki Kano, a Japanese writer and consultant. It is based on the principle that a customer proposition will possess "hygiene" components that will reduce customer loyalty if they are absent; and "delighting" components that are unexpected, resulting in a surge in positive consumer behaviour if they are present. Crucially, Kano’s model recognises that "delighting" components will become "hygiene" components (ie, the norm).

Implementing the Kano method can help to identify areas in the customer proposition that do not meet "hygiene" standards, and in a multi-regional proposition it can articulate the variables in customer expectations. For example, many customers in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) countries consider customer service via social media to be a primary contact channel, while in most EU countries, phone interaction is still king. For organisations to be successful in the digital space, they must shift from simply responding to existing customer needs to anticipating those needs.

Creating good customer experiences is good business

When I led customer experience at ASOS, a UK-based fashion retailer, I focused heavily on how we could be one step ahead of our customers. We developed the capability to predict delays, communicate any service failure to customers and refund resulting delivery charges, for example.

This presented a commercial problem, however: if we refunded every service failure, we might refund customers who may not have contacted us in the first place, thereby spending significantly more. This in turn presented a values problem: should we do the right thing by our customers, or protect our profits?  

Using a mix of Kano and Omotenashi enabled us to work through the problem, leading ASOS to become the first large UK retailer to proactively inform and refund customers when a delivery failure occurred. The number of complaints from customers fell rapidly. This did initially lead to us refunding more money than we had done before the scheme's implementation, but reinvesting the resources that were saved as a consequence of reduced customer contact enabled the business to find the root of these delays and to resolve them permanently. Just as importantly, we were able to reduce our reliance on a revenue that had principally been derived at the expense of the customer's satisfaction.

Most organisations have only just begun to place customer goals and journeys at the heart of their business model, but those that do so may reap rewards that they had not anticipated.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.