The Hidden Problem With Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey maps have been the standard for years. But what if they're built for a world that no longer exists?

Dave and Peter challenge the linear, step-by-step approach to understanding customer experience. From showers on Emirates flights to adaptive payment systems, they explore why our traditional mapping tools might be keeping us from seeing breakthrough opportunities.

What We Cover:

• Why traditional journey maps focus on the "critical path" and miss everything else
• The shift from cohorts and personas to individualized experiences
• The privacy paradox of hyper-personalization
• How decreasing costs make adaptive systems possible

Key Takeaways: 

✅ Traditional customer journey mapping optimizes a narrow, linear experience when customers want many different paths 

✅ Privacy and ethics matter more as experiences become hyper-personalized 

✅ What was too costly before is now feasible, changing the game for customer experience

Perfect for product managers, CX professionals, and digital transformation leaders.

Connect: definitelymaybeagile.com | feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Customer Experience
• 0:47 From Cohorts to Individuals
• 2:31 Privacy Meets Personalization
• 5:37 The Emirates Shower Analogy
• 9:12 Beyond Linear Journey Maps
• 11:34 Adaptive Systems in Digital CX
• 14:21 Compliance, Risk, and Real-Time Options

Transcript

Peter: 0:04 Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, Dave. Wonderful to see you again.

Dave: 0:13 Peter, I'm getting nervous now having just... let's talk. What is the topic we're talking about? Customer experience.

Peter: 0:22 Yeah, so you brought this up as we were talking about what we're going to talk about today. And I feel you have something in mind that you want to get to. And I'm not sure we quite got there with our pre-conversation.

Dave: 0:34 Yeah, so this is... I'm just coming in from being at a conference, having a number of conversations recently, and there's a lot of hovering around this understanding of customer experience. And some of the comments that we heard, the ideas that were shared is this idea that when we're in a world where we can create something very, very quickly, so say a buying process, and we can almost tailor this buying process to the individual wants and needs of our customers, literally you know, in a sort of a target group of one. It leads to a conversation about what we mean by customer experience. Because most of our work in terms of understanding customer experience is this sort of linear journey of a cohort of individuals who are all trying to achieve a common end. Whereas when that cohort is now a cohort of one, it means now we have loads and loads of different ways of understanding customer experience. And what impact does that have on the conversation around that experience?

Peter: 1:41 Yeah, I think it's an interesting one because if you think of the traditional call center, or we would group people with like needs together by bucketing them into queues, and we'd call those queues, and in those queues it would be hey, I need to change my password, or I need to change my flight, or I need to do a change, I want to do a new booking, I want to get an update on where my account is at, but they would be in those kind of groups. And what you're seeing now is the promise that has been there for decades, actually, from technology. Technology has been promising for decades that they'll give the 360 view of the customer and we'll be able to service their needs personally. And so much of the world has been geared around that from a marketing perspective to collect the right metadata. This is why you'll start to get vouchers coming through the door, coupons coming through the door for diapers when they see that you bought other things that might look like you might need them, for example.

Dave: 2:44 Well, yeah, I mean there's this whole thing of okay, if I don't have to deal with these, you know, few cohorts, and we've worked with organizations, you come up with a number of different personas, and the problem has always been that we cannot treat individuals as individuals. We have to say, you know, okay, you're here and you're a first-time home buyer or you're middle career trying to upscale your housing, whatever it might be, something along those lines. Whereas nowadays the technology is there, and at least the promise of that technology is there, where we can take each individual and really understand where they're coming from, have a whole bunch of that 360 view, like you say, and then in theory come back with something which is hyper-optimized for that individual. And I think a couple of things really spring to mind, and two really obvious ones come in. Number one is privacy, is that whole how much is it okay for you to glean from me as I walk by your store and come in and you see from whatever it might be, browsing experience or my profile online, whatever it is, how much of that is reasonable for you to infer where I'm coming from. So that privacy side. But the other thing, I think this is where our conversation started, or at least in my thought is I don't think we think of customer experience in that way at all. We think of customer experience in a cohort persona-driven model where there's a linear path for them to follow. And the danger, we've talked about this many times, the difference between using data and drawing conclusions purely from data, versus using a combination of data plus the sense-making of qualitative, not quantitative data and how we get that information. So, on the first hand, we've got this privacy problem. On the other hand, we're really leaving out a whole bunch of this customer experience information because we don't have that quantitative data.

Peter: 4:54 Yeah, and I think we may be mixing up a number of different topics here into this conversation. There is the danger that that is true. Because the experience that the customer has when they interact with you, and the experience you want them to have, like what you want them to feel at every part of that journey through that interaction. Understanding that, that customer experience, what that feels like, what that interaction looks like, is certainly one aspect of that. One of the pieces of that is the more I can understand about that customer, the more I can tailor that experience to their needs.

Dave: 5:31 I think I have an example just as we're talking, and I just wanted to see if this resonates. I'm not sure if this is true. I've never been on an Emirates flight. However, my understanding, if the ads that I have seen are true, is that you can take a shower on an Emirates flight. And that raises both of these problems really clearly. If I look at the privacy thing, if I walk up to a flight and a flight attendant, whoever I'm trying to get on board the flight with, when I go to take a seat, if they come to me and say, We know you've had a long delay and you've been flying for over 12 hours, would you like to take advantage of the shower? There's a whole bunch there about exactly how much they should know about my journey and whether or not I want them to come up to me and go, Whew, you look like you need to take a shower. I mean, we're offering it for you, but you really need to take a shower. There's something a bit peculiar about that. But here's the other one, and this is that bit about customer experience. If we do a traditional customer journey mapping exercise, I don't know where the shower comes from. You'll go through this exercise of turning up at the airport, queuing, putting your bags, you know, checking your bags in, going to the lounge, going to queue, getting your passport checked, getting on the flight, sitting down. But at no point in that whole experience, that linear experience that we're used to, does anybody say, you know what, I think what we need right now is a shower. That isn't... that's really thinking way beyond the step by step by step view of customer experience that most of us have when we view and map a customer journey.

Peter: 7:13 Yes. And I think there's how you get access to that shower.

Dave: 7:19 It might be basically levels. There's some logistics in there that definitely have to be figured out, right? But yes.

Peter: 7:25 I mean, it takes up a lot of space and water on a very enclosed ecosystem, which is the plane as well, which is an interesting set of logistic problems to deal with.

Dave: 7:34 I love talking to engineers and operations people because they just go straight into the solution.

Peter: 7:39 Well, how would you do this?

Dave: 7:42 If I get back... I want to pull us back. Don't worry about how it works, but think about where does the idea come from? Because our customer journey is this linear step-by-step. At no point do we suddenly think this would be something that would be of interest, at least in our traditional conversations around customer journey mapping.

Peter: 7:59 So where did the initial idea come from? Why was it what and maybe it is just simply that it's seen as a point of luxury, or Emirates flights are typically very long, and this would be a point of luxury that they could offer to a certain class of customer. And when they went, maybe they went and surveyed or asked their customers, what would you like on your flight? And somebody said, shower.

Dave: 8:21 And then I think there is... this is the whole point that we can broaden that conversation to be really a cohort of one type of experience. Now, in Emirates, it's hugely costly to put a shower in so that people can take a shower on a plane. However, in digital arenas, it is now becoming commoditized. If anybody's not tried this yet, you should try it... going to use some of the tools that are out there and build an app in hours. So it's possible to create these experiences near real time. So, what does that mean when you look at customer experience? The customer experience is no longer this linear step-by-step. It's something which is a lot more involved. And I don't know that we've really seen this analysis of customer experience in that way.

Peter: 9:14 So the concept I think you're referring to is kind of an adaptive system where the system would adapt to the customer's needs. And so, if, for example, in a digital arena, I want to be able to make a return with a certain payment type. That payment type isn't currently offered by the system. The system could potentially make a call out, find a particular service that it could make that payment type through, and then execute that payment and manage the entire end-to-end transaction without all of the complexity of having to set up all of the payments and exchanges of money.

Dave: 9:53 A great example, right? So straight away it's almost... it's no longer you have to have a Visa and a MasterCard, as long as you've got some form of digital payment, then the system can figure it out potentially.

Peter: 10:04 Yeah. And now the interesting connotation potentially of that is the payment provider I picked... one that meets all of the criteria. So I've got to make sure that when I'm setting this up, that it's set up in such a way that it meets whatever tax regime or particular regulations and other pieces that need to be in place to make sure that this all works the way that it's supposed to and it's properly recorded, etc., and that it integrates into the rest of the systems. So it's interesting in that you could essentially have a model where an agent is helping resolve customers' needs at the front end. So they're improving the customer experience by providing real-time solutions to problems they might be having or things that they want to be able to do while interacting with your environment that weren't there before, but that the system is adaptive enough that it can start to build out components that it would then be able to provide to the customer. Now, I think that's the kind of thing we're talking about.

Dave: 11:21 I'm not sure if we can do that in the... forget the technical... I want us to think not about the technical perspective.

Peter: 11:28 So I'll suspend my disbelief.

Dave: 11:32 Yeah. So what I'm more thinking about is if we were to map a customer experience that we want for say our e-commerce solution, whatever it is, I don't think we would ever sit down now, without somebody really kicking us in the shins as we're trying to do this, to look at that payment step and say, just take payment. Right? Which is really what we're talking about. Now, technically, maybe not yet, but it's going to be something that could easily happen. But when I look at customer experience or customer journey mapping, it is a very linear, very quantitative, we've done this loads of times before, we're going to go through this step. And what I find is we bring our preconceptions to the table. We're going to take a credit card payment as an example. And what is really interesting is how do you get out of that mindset to think, is that really... we don't need to be constrained by only taking credit card payments while we stay on this payment idea. We don't need to be constrained by that. We can really have a unique experience for every individual that comes to the table in a future state, but we're not even going to think about that because most of our thinking is going to be we're going to take payment and we're going to use credit card payment, whatever it is. And we don't think of the... there are going to be companies out there that understand that that's not the experience people are looking for. There are many people who would want a different experience, but it's not on the table right now.

Peter: 13:05 And it's building out the system that is capable of responding to that, right? Because today the response would very often be an awful lot of development time, and yeah, maybe six to nine months from now we could maybe have that capability or that feature.

Dave: 13:24 So automatically we don't come up with the idea. We don't come up with the idea because our customer journey mapping is constrained. We don't come up with the idea because there's somebody in the room that is going to say, you don't understand, we cannot do it for these reasons. And those reasons are disappearing.

Peter: 13:43 It's the cost-benefit analysis. It's something we never would have done before because it was too costly to do it, and it would have taken too much time and effort, even though it was a nice idea that maybe some customers would like. Now the cost of actually implementing that has come way, way down, and it now suddenly becomes possible. So that thing we never would have done before that is actually a benefit may actually happen much more rapidly.

Dave: 14:10 And my argument would be we don't even have the mechanism to uncover those opportunities with today's customer experience or customer journey mapping conversation.

Peter: 14:20 No, but we can build out agents that then can pull the information out, continue to learn, and start to bring those things to the fore.

Dave: 14:27 So we give it all away, is what you're saying. I'm not sure. I'd like to think that this is, I think, where the innovation really, you know, is... it's a human customer experience, right? It's not a data-driven thing. It's something about understanding what frame of mind you are in and how can we best serve that in light of that. And I think part of my thesis here is that we're in the early, very, very earliest of days of beginning to rethink customer experience.

Peter: 15:00 Interestingly enough, the model I was coming to was a part of a risk model I've been looking at within organizations for solving like the types of problems that now suddenly become solvable that we never would have solved before. Risk mitigation that we put into place that doesn't operate for this level. Because it wouldn't make sense, but it now becomes possible to do it because we've now got capabilities that allow us to do mass analysis, which we couldn't have done before at a much cheaper price. Okay, let's sum this up, Dave. I want to hand this over to you. So, what are the two things? I'll add the third.

Dave: 15:34 What are the two things that stand out?

Peter: 15:36 I think one of the pieces we were talking about there was around... there is certainly a lot of opportunity to improve the customer experience and tailor it to an individual. But then we also have to worry about the privacy side of this and make sure that it's being done in an ethical manner and that we're not exposing customer data or using customer data in an inappropriate manner too. But I think that moving towards a world where we can tailor the customer experience in theory should be better for the customer. I think the piece you were touching on at the end, though, is a critical part of that too, is we need to be able to do that while maintaining the human aspects and human touch and human interaction. So figuring out how we do that is something we still need to work at. So, what would you add?

Dave: 16:26 This is where I've ended up thinking about this, which is our traditional way of mapping out customer experience or customer journey maps, just looking at customer experience, is a little bit like the critical path. There are lots and lots of additional pathways that have traditionally been ignored. We've looked for that critical path. And I think my key takeaway is we can now consider all those many other paths and we're going to have to think about what that means for the tools that we use, for the conversations we have around customer experience, because we still focus on this narrow, linear, critical path rather than the many opportunities that come out. So that is possible today.

Peter: 17:11 Yeah, so adaptive systems which are highly responsive to change and optionality to be able to make sure the different options are available. Almost sounds like this agile thing.

Dave: 17:25 Don't say anything like that.

Peter: 17:27 Yeah.

Dave: 17:27 I love it when you kind of turn that around and we're now back to where we started many years ago, actually, when we started this podcast. But yes, you're absolutely right.

Peter: 17:36 Yeah. Awesome. So thank you, Dave. It's always fun having these conversations. I hope this was valuable to our listeners too. And look forward to next time.

Dave: 17:45 Yeah, until next time, thanks again.

Peter: 17:48 You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.