From touch-points to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do
By Nicolas Maechler, Kevin Neher, and Robert Park

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1603

To maximize customer satisfaction, companies have long emphasized touch-points. But doing so can divert attention from the more important issue: the customer’s end-to-end journey.

Very powerful article with very rich insights. It highlights the importance of breaking internal barriers when creating customer experiences by looking at the journey through the customers’ eyes—the customer does not care how you are organized at all, they care about their complete experience with a company.

When most companies focus on customer experience they think about touch-points—the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. This is logical. It reflects organization and accountability, and is relatively easy to build into operations. Companies try to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials. But this siloed focus on individual touch-points misses the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.... 

...This is especially true in today’s multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, always-on, hyper-competitive consumer markets. The explosion of potential customer interaction points—across new channels, devices, applications, and more—makes consistency of service and experience across channels nigh impossible—unless you are managing the journey, and not simply individual touch-points.... 

...The answer isn’t to replace touch-point management and thinking. Indeed, the expertise, efficiencies, and insights that functional groups bring to bear are important, and touch-points will continue to represent invaluable sources of insights—particularly in the fast-changing digital arena. Instead, companies need to recognize and address the fact that—at least, in most cases—they are simply not wired to naturally think about the journeys their customers take. They are wired to maximize productivity and scale economies through functional units. They are wired for transactions, not journeys.
So how should companies tackle this issue? In our experience, six actions are critical to managing customer-experience journeys (articles elsewhere in this volume explore several of these topics in depth): 

• Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view. 

• Understand how customers navigate across the touch-points as they move through the journey.

• Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey. 

• Build an understanding of what is working and what is not. 

• Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey. 

• Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience. 

The amount of time it can take to identify journeys, understand performance, and redesign the experience can vary widely from company to company. For companies seeking only to fix a few glaring problems in specific journeys, top-down problem solving can be enough. But those that want to transform the overall customer experience may need a bottom-up effort to create a detailed road map for each journey, one that describes the process from start to finish and takes into account the business impact of enhancing the journey and sequencing the initiatives to do so. For many companies, combining operational, marketing and customer, and competitive-research data to understand journeys is a first-time undertaking, and it can be a long process—sometimes lasting several months. But the reward is well worth it; creating a fact base allows management to clearly see the customer’s experience and decide which aspects to prioritize.