TMW #191 | Beyond Journeys: CX in a Machine’s World

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Beyond Journeys: CX in a Machine’s World

A different line of thinking for customer journey design is emerging, and it has nothing to do with humans

You know it. I know it. Customer journeys are kind of a joke. 

Picture this: 

• You spend a day in a room with a bunch of people (and maybe some consultants) mapping your ideal customer journey
• Everyone argues about what the stages mean, what messages go out when 
• You try and decide the things you’re going to do to progress customers through the journey you created
• Then the map then goes into cold storage in the backwaters of your file drives – never to see the light of day again 

Rinse and repeat every 12 months. Customer journey mapping is a ceremony as old as marketing itself. At some point, we all decided that creating a fixed, mostly conceptual flow of how customers buy from brands would be a good idea. 

Then the software companies built products to make those journeys happen. They often look like this – a fixed canvas with defined flows. Filled with triggers, timers, channel communications, and dead ends. Just a big old game of snakes and ladders. 

Jokes aside, there is real value in creating customer journey maps. It helps you align all of your teams on the kinds of things your brand is going to do to make the customer experience better, catalyzing areas in the experience that could drive growth, minimize churn, and help with that NPS score. It’s a conceptual representation of what we think a good journey should look like, and often reveals where it goes horribly wrong. 

But we all know that customer journeys reflect only a small fraction of your customer’s actual experience. Back in 2020, Google did a big study on customer journeys, and they created what is one of the more compelling analyses of why fixed customer journeys go wrong. They call it the “messy middle”: 

“In our model, the messy middle sits between the twin poles of trigger and purchase, and against a backdrop of exposure which represents all of the existing perceptions and feelings a shopper has about the brands, retailers, and products in a category

Brand exposure is latent and always on. Triggers are specific moments in time where a customer interacts with a brand (eg. Adding something to card). Purchase is the end goal. 

And then there are the two loops where customers switch between exploration and evaluation, often in the same browsing session at the same time.”

This model more accurately reflects the messiness of the interactions between brands and customers. We all know that everyone doesn’t purchase things the same way, nor do rigid, defined stages reflect what our customer actually does. It’s a confluence of behaviors, channels, content, campaigns, real-world interactions, and personal situations that make up a purchase.

Which brings us to a crossroads. Customer journeys are static, but there are new categories of technologies emerging that smash the idea of fixed journeys altogether. They increasingly use algorithms to predict the next interaction for a customer, when to promote, when to pull back, when to provide an offer, and most importantly, what channel mix is the best way to reach customers. 

It's beyond the journey, towards individually tailored decisions for each and every one of your customers. And it could be the future.    

So what does it look like?

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.