BPM & Your Customer Journey

Written by Guest Blogger, Kelly Sewczwicz, Process Manager at Cox Communications.

It seems like everywhere I turn, I hear about customer journeys and how important they are.  In 2016, Forrester research said “63% of marketing professionals rely on customer journey maps.  Yet, many companies have said that they don’t understand the customer journey”.  A customer journey is all the steps a customer takes to achieve a specific outcome.

Brian Manusama, a research director for Gartner said, “Ten years ago there weren’t as many engagement channels, whereas now we have so many channels we’ve basically lost the customer.  We don’t know where they are, how they work with us.  I’m not even sure the customer knows this.” The interactions with customers are no longer linear.  A customer jumps between channels and has the expectation that they can pick up on where they left off.  In addition, customers have more choices of companies to engage with to deliver products and services to them.  Customers want to interact in a way that is convenient for them.  McKinsey talked about “top performing companies” in the Harvard Business Review, saying that they “are increasingly managing journeys as they would any product.  Journeys are thus becoming …as important as the products themselves in providing competitive advantage”.

Mapping customer journeys can be tricky if you are trying to use traditional process mapping tools to describe non-linear relationships.  Creating customer journeys is a “mixture of art and insight” according to Matthew Fairweather, director of a customer experience design consultancy firm.  As a BPM professional, I wonder how does the customer journey fit into the process landscape?  How can I connect the customer moments from the customer journey to the processes and the other elements that different organizations within Cox care about?  How do I ensure that customer moments align to our organization’s brand principles?

Companies need to look for mapping tools that focus on the relationships between elements.  I need to create dynamic models that explain the relationships between customer moments and the elements that bring that moment to life, including tools, language, resources, information, and context.  I’m excited to share Cox’s story using iGrafx as our BPM tool to build our customer journey framework at the Building Business Capabilities conference, November 5-9, 2018 in San Antonio, TX.