Featuring:
Joana de Quintanilha, VP and Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
The road to journey centricity is not an easy one, but the benefits can be significant. What does a journey-centric transformation entail, and where should companies start? Vice President and Principal Analyst Joana de Quintanilha shares her insight on this week’s episode of What It Means.
The episode starts with definitions of a couple of key terms: Customer journey, de Quintanilha explains, refers to a customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal. A journey-centric transformation focuses the entire organization — its structure, culture, processes, and employees — on helping customers accomplish their goals. Journey-centric companies use journey mapping and journey analytics to understand the steps their customers take and work cross-functionally to reduce friction.
Becoming journey-centric takes time and commitment. “It’s not something that you can overlay on your current operating model,” de Quintanilha says. “You can’t preserve the status quo. It requires a bold vision that uses journeys to really incorporate your products, your services, and how you work as an organization into customers’ lives.” There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to the work, she continues; often, it starts with the biggest pain point — or area of potential — from the customer’s point of view.
The conversation then delves into the three stages of journey-centric transformation and what each one entails. (De Quintanilha notes an assessment that Forrester clients can take to gauge where they are within their transformations.) She also describes the pitfalls that companies need to avoid when undertaking the work — including that it has an endpoint. (Hint: It doesn’t, as journey centricity is a perpetual orientation.)
Near the end of the episode, de Quintanilha shares examples of companies that have successfully undertaken this work and the business results that they’ve seen. Stay tuned for that — and check out the agenda for Forrester’s CX Summit EMEA, where a few of these companies will share their stories in greater detail and de Quintanilha will present several sessions and workshops.
