Summary:
Organizations are starting to merge user experience and customer experience into a single function, setting the foundation for a journey-centric-experience practice.
Organizational silos and product-centric design make it difficult to resolve friction for customers who use our products and services. User-centered design is applied to digital products, but many pain points in real customer journeys require solutions in areas beyond product-design improvement, such as marketing, tech, and customer support.
Pioneering organizations are addressing the silo problem by merging their customer-experience (CX) and user-experience (UX) functions and enabling collaboration between product teams and other areas of the business.
About CX Teams
Customer-experience teams exist within many, but not all, organizations. Large organizations with service-oriented offerings, like financial and insurance companies, are more likely to have a CX group, while small organizations or those with product-focused offerings may have UX resources but no CX resources.
However, even if you don’t have a CX function, you can learn from this new trend that combines UX with CX and adjust accordingly.
Within an organization, CX and UX have historically been separate. Customer experience emerged to manage customer service and deliver business insights. As a result, it is typically positioned higher up in the organizational hierarchy. CX teams traditionally worked to understand the customer’s overall experience with the brand by collecting and analyzing qualitative or quantitative customer feedback. CX is often aligned very closely with business and marketing functions, where these insights are put to work crafting offerings that meet customers’ needs and messaging that resonates with them. CX also works closely with customer support and call centers (where customer problems are often uncovered and which represent a critical interface for customer satisfaction).
Three Levels of Experience: Interaction, Journey, and Relationship
Historically, the practice of UX has been focused on creating a good user experience for digital products. However, the principles of UX have always extended beyond single interactions with computers.
An “experience” can refer to one of three different levels:
- A single interaction with a single product
- A journey, often involving multiple experiences with multiple products or channels
- The lifetime relationship between a customer and a company, which comprises all the experiences the person will ever have with the company
Traditionally, UX has focused on the interaction level. While CX as a practice has a similar philosophy and set of tools as UX, CX teams have typically focused on the relationship level.
Although CX and UX share a similar philosophy, traditionally, they are separate, siloed functions that rarely collaborate on shared goals.
Silos Result in Fragmented Journeys
We can all blame Frederick Winslow Taylor (19th-century American management theorist) for silos. He introduced the scientific management theory, advocating for job specialization, standardization of processes, and a hierarchical structure. While these principles increased efficiency, they also contributed to the development of siloed organizational structures with departments operating independently and naturally hindering crossfunctional collaboration.
Siloed organizational structures deteriorate the customer experience. They result in a patchwork of channel experiences that don’t work well together — the antithesis of omnichannel design.
Customer-journey pain points commonly occur as users interact with touchpoints owned by different functional groups. Due to silos and product-centric UX design, organizations tend to focus on individual interactions instead of viewing each interaction as part of a broader customer journey.
Consider the following scenarios, which illustrate how this mindset can impact the customer experience.
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Scenario |
Problem Type |
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You received a letter from your bank promoting a new credit card. There is no QR code or link to the website for more details. You visit the homepage on your mobile browser, but struggle to find the offer on the website. When you do find it, the details offered online differ from those in the letter you received. |
Seamlessness and consistency problems: The letter from marketing should have provided an easy way to read details or sign up online. The information in the letter should match the information provided online. Disconnect between marketing and product (website) |
|
You purchase a movie ticket from your account on a movie theater’s website. When you arrive at the theater you open the mobile app to access your ticket, but your account has no link to that ticket However, you are able to see your past purchases, so the theater can provide your ticket based on your order number. The next day you find an email with your ticket in your spam folder. |
Seamlessness and optimization problems: The mobile app should have made the ticket available and immediately discoverable in the app. Doing so would have enabled users to transition seamlessly from the purchase experience to the theater experience. Disconnect between website and mobile app |
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You encountered an error filing a claim on your insurance provider’s app. When you call customer support you are routed to the wrong type of support associate. When you finally speak to the correct agent, they have no indication of your claim draft. They then suggest you print and mail your claim form. |
Orchestration problem: Customer support lacks the context of the customer’s prior interactions. It should have access to (1) information that routes calls to the appropriate agent, and (2) an up-to-date view of your record. Disconnect between product(website) and support |
Journey problems can occur as users move between digital products, but (as the above examples show) many problems involve interactions supported by other functional groups, which cannot be solved without crossfunctional collaboration.
Address the Silo Problem by Connecting CX and UX
A common refrain we hear when discussing these challenges is, “We must break down the silos.” As an analyst who has been studying journey-design practices and the space between UX and CX, I am encouraged by recent examples of large, established businesses taking steps to address the root problem of silos.
But these businesses are not breaking down silos. The silos still need to exist and keep operating. Instead of destroying the silos, successful organizations are enabling connectivity and collaboration across the silos to practice user-centered design at the journey level (also known as service design).
CX and UX Must Work Together
UX practitioners know that the journey experience matters. Many have conducted research and created journey maps to outline the issues that exist at the journey level. However, they are frustrated by their lack of influence in implementing comprehensive journey design changes outside of their product teams.
Meanwhile, CX practitioners are broadening their approach to improving customer experience. They’ve also identified the importance of moving beyond surveys, seeing the need to truly design and manage good journey experiences to foster happy and satisfied customers.
Designing good customer-journey experiences that maximize business value cannot be done by either group independently or while working separately. They need to work together. Each group has something that the other one needs.
- CX brings top-level insight and strategy, along with its close connection to executive leadership and broad scope of influence over business functions, which UX lacks.
- UX brings the user-centered research and design skillset, operational processes, and digital implementation capabilities that CX lacks.
Companies are beginning to align these two practices under a single experience-design arm of the business. Creating a single experience-design function lays the foundation for designing and managing the critical middle layer, the journey-level experience, which, to this point, has had no real owner.
Journey-Centric Design Through Journey Teams
To design and manage journey experiences, organizations need connectivity and collaboration between all teams that influence the journey-level experience.
To that end, companies are introducing journey-centric design, an operational approach to experience design that facilitates research and design of the end-to-end customer journey.
Journey-centric design brings together crossfunctional collaborators to form a journey team. Journey teams are often made up of stakeholders from CX, UX, product, marketing, support, business, and technology. Together, they design solutions for problems that transcend any one channel and cannot be fixed through product design alone.
Journey team members from CX, UX, and product management drive the research and design process, while stakeholders from other functional groups (marketing, tech, support, etc.) provide subject matter expertise and advise the team on the viability and feasibility of their service design solutions.
Following the design process, product teams implement changes to support the redesigned journey experience and propagate these changes across various functional groups (e.g., marketing) as necessary.
Journey-centric design facilitates connection and collaboration across the organization in two dimensions:
- Top to bottom: Top-level business and CX stakeholders collaborate more closely with product-level execution (product and UX), with journeys serving as the connection point.
- End to end: It also connects the various product teams and functional groups whose business functions contribute to the end-to-end journey experience to optimize the journey’s performance.
Product teams play a crucial role in journey-centric design as part of the journey team. Product owners contribute to the journey-design strategy, providing insight from their product point of view. UX practitioners also help design solutions that support broader journey-design initiatives.
With journey-centric design, organizations can manage and optimize journeys as if they were products — through ongoing research, measurement, and design iteration.
Why CX and UX Should Be in the Same Functional Group
Technically, CX and UX don’t need to be part of the same functional group to collaborate in journey teams. However, integrating them into the same functional group allows for the following:
- Shared strategy and priorities
- A shared budget
1. Shared Strategy and Priorities
In this model, business priorities and strategy (influenced by CX insights) can cascade down to influence both journey-level design and product-level design. This ensures that journey teams and product teams work toward the same goals and follow the same guiding principles.
Although product teams will be plugged into a broader design strategy, they should continue to operate independently with their own product-level backlogs and priorities.
Business strategy and priorities influence the prioritization of work for both journey teams and product teams. Decisions are made about which journey-design opportunities and initiatives will benefit the business most. In turn, business priorities and journey-design priorities influence the prioritization of work carried out by the individual product teams.
2. A Shared Budget
A shared budget is necessary for UX and CX resources to work together toward shared goals.
Without a shared budget, it’s impossible for CX and product teams to execute journey-level design strategies. Separate budgets put teams at odds when it comes to resourcing. Product-level resources must be allowed and encouraged to execute journey-level design initiatives. Thoughtful journey-level and product-level design tradeoffs should be made based on business priorities without penalizing resources at either layer for making these tradeoffs.
Organizations Without Traditional CX Can Also Introduce Journey-Centric Design
As I previously mentioned, not all organizations have a traditional CX group. However, organizations that have only UX can practice journey-centric design as well. The same components still need to exist, but the approach may differ.
Scale your Existing UX Group to Include Journey-Level Resources
Without a CX team, there’s no need to connect UX to CX. Instead, UX needs to scale toward becoming a more comprehensive function. Without CX, however, necessary resources like service designers and journey owners will need to be introduced to the UX team.
Other roles, such as CX insights and strategist roles, may also be useful for informing the overarching CX strategy for goal setting and prioritization purposes.
Establish a Close Connection to Executive Leadership
Many UX and product teams are far removed from executive leadership. Without executive sponsorship, it’s very hard to enact the type of change needed to adopt journey-centric design and ongoing journey management, as these require collaboration from other functional groups outside of the product department.
Looking Forward: Big Opportunities for Business
Journey-centric design brings big opportunities for business, such as:
- A more-strategic and business-driven approach to service delivery
- More opportunity for design innovation, resulting in improved business outcomes
- More efficiency in rolling out business initiatives that are cohesively delivered across products
- More advanced behavioral data and measurement of design’s return on investment (ROI)
- Opportunities to understand key drivers behind journey outcomes for ongoing performance optimization
- Opportunities for AI-driven solutions to personalize service delivery for improved outcomes
Conclusion and Learning Opportunities
Creating connectivity and collaboration across silos is critical to instilling a customer-centric mindset in the organization, innovating service delivery, and reducing barriers for customers looking to do business with us.
Journey-centric design offers an operational framework for efficiently and proactively optimizing journeys within existing company structures.
Learn More
Our report, Architecting a Journey Management Practice, is a prescriptive guide to developing a journey-centric design practice. It includes operational models, strategic frameworks, and two in-depth case studies illustrating how real organizations retooled their design operations to achieve it.