Journey Management creates a unified language across teams
Create alignment with the universal language of the customer
When working to innovate in a business, unified language is important… A set of clearly defined terms of reference that everyone understands has power. A unified language allows cross-functional teams and a variety of roles to work together effectively… It is a key ingredient for successful innovation.
This article shows three distinct ways that Customer Journey Management supports a unified language across teams.
Unified Design
Unified Content & process
Unity through Inclusive Language
Unified Design
Modern Journey Management tools create a single source of truth for CX information. Your CX information can now live in a centralised, real time application, accessible and usable by all teams.
A key benefit of a single source of truth is alignment on the design of key CX artefacts.
Consistent design for journey maps & personas
Up until now, journey mapping basically starts with a blank canvas. This leads to wildly different styles and formats
The same is true for Personas
This variety of design generates additional cognitive effort. It’s like a website with a different theme for each webpage. Analysis becomes difficult due to the wide variation in style.
Journey Management platforms create a consistent style across all journey maps and personas, while providing room for customisation… you can change colours, layouts, pictures, etc. This standardisation provides a structure that brings consistency across all of your customer journeys.
Instant win!
For companies with CX teams working in silos using inconsistent approaches, the benefits for this are instant!
Within weeks you can have all this information aligned at and your fingertips.
Unified Content and process
This is the second way to unify language with Journey Management.
As we unify journey maps and personas into one app, this provides a great opportunity for teams to align on content and process.
Consistent content is the start to a unified teams process. A clear set of guidelines on the process and content to standardise journey maps and personas is a first step in defining roles and expectations across CX roles.
A couple of examples:
Jobs to be done
Your teams might agree that each persona will include the Jobs to be done, with examples of good JTBD definitions and how to collect this information through customer interviews. This defines an approach to follow when creating a persona and a mechanism to validate this across teams.
Journey metrics
Your teams might agree that each macro customer journey will have a single journey metric, as a guiding measure of success across the journey. The teams can provide examples of high quality journey metrics and a process to define this with the team and leadership. An approach like this helps to standardise how teams will plan for and measure CX success and link this to business value.
Design Ops
If you are looking for more consistency across CX teams, Customer Journey Management can be a great stepping stone to defined content and processes. And having a single source of truth allows you to monitor your processes across teams.
The key here is to bringing stakeholders involved in CX together to define current and future ways of working together, so they best suit your team’s size, experience and context.
Unity through inclusive language
We have described how we can use Customer Journey Management to unify the designs, content and processes to create CX artifacts. Once we have this centralised, consistent information there is a bigger opportunity to unify language across the business.
The language of the customer is inclusive
We can use this CX information to frame our business innovation through the customer lens, which, in my opinion provides the ideal unified language to use across tams.
A shared understanding couched in the customer experience is understandable and will resonate with every person in your business across leadership, tech, sales, marketing, customer support and success and finance & HR.
A customer focussed narrative works across silos… When business decisions are brought back to the customer need and the business gain this creates, this creates shared understanding across functions, and this helps teams to navigate challenges like endless technical details, difficult roadmap prioritisation, analysis paralysis or the 100 other challenges that can block innovation.
Customer Journey Management provides the foundations to place the customer perspective front and centre in business decision making.
Summary
Journey Management is an excellent framework to develop a unified language for your business. Language is unified at 3 levels:
Design: A consistent style across all journey maps and personas reduces cognitive load, increases speed and accuracy. For CX teams working in silos, this benefit can be realised instantly.
Content and process: Unifying content and process for CX teams brings more clarity and consistency to our CX work. Journey Management a great starting point for design ops.
Inclusive language of the customer: We can bring our centralised customer experience information to bear, embedding the universal language of the customer in wider innovation discussions, which is an ideal language for inclusivity.