customer journey enterprise architecture

Architecting and Delivering Optimal Customer Journeys

by Daniel Lambert

Marketers and product managers are getting very good at the elaboration of enticing and optimal customer journeys. Their organizations use various agile methodologies in the hope of speeding things up and yet most of them struggle in delivering these journeys on time and within budget. This article intends to show how enterprise and business architecture can unravel and prioritize customer journey initiatives early on by identifying and focusing foremost on the problematic and enabling capabilities of their organization using a “Personal Loan” customer journey map example.

Customer Journeys Today

The recent upsurge of new digital technologies has created empowered customers, forcing companies to adapt and focus on their customer experiences. “Now, leveraging emerging technologies, processes, and organizational structures, companies are restoring the balance of power and creating new value for brands and buyers alike. Central to this shift is a fresh way of thinking: Rather than merely reacting to the journeys that consumers themselves devise, companies are shaping their paths, leading rather than following. Marketers are increasingly managing journeys as they would any product. Journeys are thus becoming central to the customer’s experience of a brand—and as important as the products themselves in providing a competitive advantage,” as indicated in this Harvard Business Review article entitled “Competing on Customer Journeys [i] ”.

Figure 1 - Personal Loan Customer Journey Map.png

Based on this article, a customer journey (like the personal loan customer journey map shown in Figure 1 above) will be variations on the following basic steps:

Consider - the customer has a need and is considering purchasing a product;

Evaluate - the customer is comparing prices and checks on a variety of products, including the organization’s rivals;

Buy - the customer commits and buys the product;

Enjoy - the customer is satisfied with its purchase;

Advocate - the customer communicates with friends, family, and extended social network about his new purchase

Bond - the customer identifies with the brand of its selected product to eventually purchase again.

Key elements need to be considered when planning the customer journey within an organization. First, automation, using artificial intelligence and machine learning among others, can ensure that fastidious manual processes are simplified and automated as much as possible. Second, proactive personalization must be advantaged, where services are designed in such a way that they seem very specific to each persona or customer segment of the organization. Third, contextual interaction must also be considered, where the organization can switch from online to physical and back while interacting with its clients. Finally, the use of practical innovations must be examined while optimizing a customer journey, where creating and experimenting with new spheres of value that sometimes did not previously exist.

Linking Customer Journeys to Value

Linking the customer experience to value creation both for the customer and the organization is essential to justify any transformation. As pointed out in this McKinsey & Co report entitled “Creating Value through Transforming Customer Journeys [ii] ”, “many customer-experience transformations stall because leaders can’t show how these efforts create value. Patiently building a business case can fund them, secure buy-in, and build momentum.”

Figure 2 – From Customer Journey to Value Stream.png

This is why business architects in conjunction with marketers, product managers, and subject matter experts often use value streams to examine closely value creation. Each value stage of a value stream can usually easily be related to a Customer Journey Stage, as demonstrated in Figure 2 on the previous page. “Value streams are artifacts within business architecture that allow a business to specify the value proposition derived by an external (e.g., customer) or internal stakeholder from an organization. (…) The value stream is depicted as an end-to-end collection of value-adding activities that create an overall result for a customer, stakeholder, or end-user. In modeling terms, those value-adding activities are represented by value stream stages, each of which creates and adds incremental stakeholder value items from one stage to the next, [iii] ” as shown in the detailed value stream “Obtain Personal Loan” in Figure 3 below.

Customer Journey Requires New Enabling Capabilities

A set of current and new emerging capabilities, as those shown in Figure 4 on the next page, is required to capture the value from optimal customer journeys. As revealed in another McKinsey & Co report entitled “Customer Experience: New Capabilities, New Audiences, New Opportunities”, “Decision makers from all stakeholder groups should align together and embrace uncertainty together, developing capabilities throughout the entire design process. The use of existing resources can keep the investment in time and costs low.”

Figure 4 – Value Stream with Enabling Capabilities.png

Focusing on Problematic Enabling Capabilities

To ensure the delivery of strategic goals and objectives, a customer-experience measurement system needs to be put in place, where customer journeys are at the base with their enabling current and new capabilities. As well, the preference for a collaborative approach allows us to engage with key internal stakeholders and bring in a diverse assortment of measurable capabilities throughout the planning process. Measuring current and new customer-centric enabling capabilities, as shown in Figure 5 below, according to their priority, performance, and business complexity for example will allow to build strategic initiatives that focus foremost on the capabilities that will provide the most value to both the customer and the organization.

After measuring the enabling capabilities of the “Obtain Personal Loan” value stream, for example, the following observations can be mentioned:

The Account/Agreement Interest Determination and the Financial Transaction Disbursement Management capabilities are of critical priority and performing low.

The Collateral and Loan Pairing capability is of very high priority with low performance.

The Client Risk Scoring capability is of high priority and performing low.

The Client Survey Management, the Loan Authorization Management, and the Financial Transaction and Client Pairing capabilities are of high priority and of high or very high performance. They are not problematic capabilities.

Figure 5 – Measuring Enabling Capabilities.png

As mentioned in this article entitled “The Four Pillars of Distinctive Customer Journeys”, “reaching the top quartile of CX performers is no easy task. Cost, design, and value are emerging as key differentiators for customers, yet companies often lack guiding principles to shape those efforts. [iv] ” To reach ambitious strategic goals and objectives, an organization needs to build its customer-centric initiatives on these four pillars:

Focus on the few issues and capabilities that matter the most to customers, as shown in Figure 6 on the next page;

Provide easy, simple, short customer journeys;

Master online digital-first journeys over traditional approaches; and

If you want a long-term commitment for your customers, be aware that brand and perceptions matter.

For example, after measuring the 24 enabling capabilities of the Obtain Personal Loan supporting the Loan Service Customer Journey map as per Figure 5 on the previous page, it’s easier to conclude that the organization should focus its strategic initiative(s) toward enhancing the 4 problematic enabling capabilities (4 red arrows in Figure 5 and as shown in Figure 6 below).

Figure 6 – Problematic Enabling Capabilities.png

Transformative Initiatives Based on Problematic Enabling Capabilities

The problematic enabling capabilities in our example, shown in Figure 6 above, indicate that the bank is generating an abnormally high number of errors while filling personal loans for its customers. This is why the bank is instigating the “Lowering Errors in Personal Loan Filling” initiative as shown in Figure 7 on the next page. This initiative consists of 4 sub-initiatives that should impact positively the 4 problematic enabling capabilities as follows:

The sub-initiative “Increasing the Accuracy of the Account/Agreement Interest Determination” should positively impact the “Account/Agreement Interest Determination” capability;

The sub-initiative “Automation of Loan Filling and Disbursement Process” should positively impact the “Financial Transaction Disbursement Management” capability;

The sub-initiative “Increase the Precision of the Description and Value of Collaterals” should positively impact the “Collateral and Loan Pairing” capability; and

The sub-initiative “Increase the Accuracy of Client Scoring” should positively impact the “Client Risk Scoring” capability.

Figure 7 – Initiative Solving Problematic Enabling Capabilities.png

After examining gap items for each one of the 4 problematic enabling capabilities in the “Lowering Errors in Personal Loan Filings” gap analysis, a specific strategic outcome needs to be established for each one of its impacting sub-initiative as shown in Figure 8 on the next page. The 4 strategic outcomes in this example are as follows:

The strategic outcome of the sub-initiative “Increasing the Accuracy of the Account/Agreement Interest Determination” could be “Calculate the Account/Agreement Interest Determination Based on Client Risk Scoring and Collaterals”;

The strategic outcome of the sub-initiative “Automation of Loan Filling and Disbursement Process” could be “Limit Human Intervention of the Loan Filing and Disbursement Process at the End for Final Approval”;

The strategic outcome of the sub-initiative “Increase the Precision of the Description and Value of Collaterals” could be “Have Less than 5% of Collaterals Valued at Least than 90% of Capital Loan”; and

The strategic outcome of the sub-initiative “Increase the Accuracy of Client Scoring” could be “Establish Client Risk Scoring on 2 Independent Credit Scoring Agencies”.

Figure 8 – Expected Initiative Outcomes to Solve Problematic Enabling Capabilities.png

It’s only at this stage that an organization should examine the current and future software applications that are or could support the problematic enabling capabilities and the databases used by these applications to build various scenario roadmaps, as shown in Figure 9 on the next page. In this example, the “as is” current state are shown with the full lines indicating the use of current databases for each currently used application supporting the problematic enabling capabilities. In one of the two scenarios (without blockchain), the following could be delivered based on our example:

The Application Asset “Bank Credit Line/Customer Credit Line/Customer Security Line” now uses the “Risk Management Database”.

The Application Asset “Risk Management and Compliance Application Package” now uses the following databases: “Client Database 2”, “Public Collateral Registration Service”, “Client Risk Scoring Service 1” and “Client Risk Scoring Service 2”.

The application asset “Consumer Banking” does not use the “Consumer Banking Database”, but instead the “Client Database 2”.

In brief, it involves the use of more databases by 3 supporting applications, shown by the dotted lines. It goes without saying that a similar diagram could be built for the blockchain scenario.

Figure 9 – Applications Supporting Problematic Enabling Capabilities.png

Delivering Optimal Customer Journeys

Most chief digital officer and their corresponding Scrum teams within an organization a) design user interfaces, b) develop software for apps, websites, and automated journey steps, c) analyze and measure customer interactions data, d) oversee the back-end support of the organization’s sales and customer services operations, and e) provide customer with marketing insight to ensure that branding is embedded throughout the customer journey, without any architecture at the planning stage. As I’ve written in an article entitled “Digital Transformation Using Enterprise and Business Architecture [v] ”, “90% of corporate leaders view digital as a top priority”, and yet “83% of leaders struggle to make meaningful progress on digital transformation.” I strongly believe that if agile teams were to start incorporating architecture at the planning stage, the number of leaders struggling to make any meaningful progress in their digital transformation would be much lower.

Figure 10 – User Story Using Architecture.png

Defining a detailed and very useful user story, as described in Figure 10 above, based on an architected customer journey would accelerate greatly its delivery. Most of the words used in this user story are made up of detailed elements defined and structured within the business and enterprise architecture of the company, including capabilities, stakeholders, value streams, information concepts, and business processes. Gathering the information to complete this user story using a business and architecture model will be completed at a quicker pace and at a lower risk of failure. Furthermore, building relevant requirements, epics, and user stories using the organization’s business and enterprise architecture will allow business analysts to waste less of their time and the business stakeholders’ time from which they need to extract knowledge.

Enterprises use more and more various agile methodologies in the hope of speeding things up with the pursuit of optimal customer journeys. Yet most of them struggle to deliver these journeys on time and within budget. To make meaningful progress in their digital transformation, corporate leaders need more than agile approaches. Agile teams need to start incorporating architecture early on at the planning stage of their initiatives. Focused business and enterprise architecture allow corporations to prioritize better at the planning level, cut time lost building relevant epics and user stories, and finally lower significantly the number of sprints necessary to complete their projects.

________________________________________________________

[i] Article entitled “ Competing on Customer Journeys ” written by David C. Edelman and Marc Singer in the Harvard Business Review in November 2015.

[ii] Report entitled “ Customer Experience: Creating Value through Transforming Customer Journeys ” written in collaboration with McKinsey & Co employees and published during winter 2016.

[iii] Value Stream Definition according to Wikipedia .

[iv] Article entitled “ The Four Pillars of Distinctive Customer Journeys ” written by Joao Dias, Oana Ionuțiu, Xavier Lhuer, and Jasper van Ouwerkerk published on McKinsey & Co.’s website in September 2016.

[v ] Article entitled “ Digital Transformation Using Enterprise and Business Architecture ” written by Daniel Lambert and published by CIO.com in October 2018.

What Are Customer Journey Architects, and Do You Need One?

Post author By Bunny Tharpe
Post date June 1, 2017
1 Comment on What Are Customer Journey Architects, and Do You Need One?

Customer journey architects are becoming more relevant than ever before.

For businesses that want to make improvements, enterprise architecture has long been a tried and tested technique for mapping out how change should take place.

Enterprise architecture looks at the whole company and everything within it. It envelopes the applications and the infrastructure – the hardware, middleware and networks. Enterprise architecture answers the who, what, why, when and where of a company.

But for the most part, enterprise architecture is internally focused. Nowadays if businesses are to succeed, they need to look not just at what is happening within but also what is happening externally.

What Are Customer Journey Architects?

erwin Director of Product Management Chris White believes businesses need to consider the concept of a customer journey architect because brands no longer define themselves. They are defined by the customer, based largely on their experiences.

“Customers now have the power to define, through social media, the quality and effectiveness of a brand and of a product,” White explains. “So rather than focusing on branding and marketing, companies need to focus on the customer experience. If they get that right, the customer base will build the brand for them.”

“In a time when customers have a wealth of choices available to them regarding with whom they choose to do business, White believes action needs to be taken to get ahead of the competition and really understand what the customer wants.

“This is our opportunity to help companies think about their customers, challenges and desire to improve the customer experience,” he continues.

“Companies focus on a lot of processes and data that has no impact on customers. However, a customer journey architect would serve as a specialized enterprise architect dedicated to the entire customer journey and all their experiences along the way.”

Does My Company Need a Customer Journey Architect?

Certainly applicable in any business-to-consumer industry, as well as in business-to-business, a customer journey architect would concentrate day in and day out on understanding how customers come to your business and interact with it throughout the buying process.

This idea of constant evaluation and improvement is paramount in today’s business climate. It fundamentally underpins the agility businesses need to adopt to keep up with ever-changing trends, regular disruption and a constant influx of new data .

Many companies profess to understand who their customers are and what they need, but that’s why White thinks they need to look closer. “Customer journey architecture is not going to help you better understand what your customers want; it’s going to enable you to better understand what systems and data assets are directly affecting the customer experience,” he notes. “Where are the gaps, what are the issues, and how can we make improvements? These are the questions a customer journey architect will help you answer.”

What Else Does My Company Need?

Because customer insights are data based, you need to ensure you understand your data. That means you have to manage it efficiently.

So when implementing an enterprise architecture initiative (a customer journey architect in this case), it is important to build the program on strong foundations. A data management platform integrating data modeling , enterprise architecture and business process modeling will provide a more holistic and manageable approach, enabling efficient analysis and decision-making.

For example, enterprise architecture, and by extension customer journey architecture, should influence strategic planning. Implementing a customer journey architect in a vacuum will get you answers , but not solutions. Implementing such solutions will often require process changes.

To learn more about customer journey architects, enterprise architecture and how they fit within the larger data story , please contact us . We’d love to help.

Tags data modeling , enterprise architecture , Any2 , data management , business process modeling , any-squared , data story , anysquared , customer journey architect , enterprise architect , erwin , business agility , agile , customer insight , data management platform

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Customer Journey with ArchiMate

A Customer Journey Map alike view can be modeled with ArchiMate. A customer journey can be modeled with the “Business Process” concept as shown in the diagram below.

This customer-centric viewpoint is focusing on customer experience. This “service design” related approach is concentrating the “outside-in” development of the service that is to be designed. This highlights the services and products as essential aspects that produces value to customers – and indirectly to the organization itself. A customer journey path can be used to visualization of a customer value stream, which spans over several application services and applications. In addition, this view combines both “outside-in” and “inside-out” approaches into single one overall view.

Same view added with customer journey phases: Pre-Service Period, Service Period, Post-Service Period.

Business Process View

Customer Journey is near to typical business process view, which focuses on specific process as shown below.

This business process view provides a “high-level structure and composition of a business process (or several processes), the services that are offered, the assigned roles of actors , and the information used by the business process”. This process diagram contains “Junction” -elements to model “fork” and “join” in the process flow.

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customer journey enterprise architecture

Digital technologies have raised customer expectations for responsive, seamless online services and information-enriched products. Many companies are struggling to meet those expectations and will continue to struggle unless they embrace enterprise architecture.

We define enterprise architecture as the holistic design of people, processes, and technology to execute digitally inspired strategic goals. Every negative customer interaction via a company app, website, telephone call, or service provider exposes your architectural inadequacies. Left unresolved, these issues will destroy formerly great organizations.

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One common architectural problem: Many businesses are designed around product verticals. Those verticals optimize profits and define a customer experience for that specific product independently of the rest of the organization. The digital economy, however, rewards integrated solutions, which require that people work across product lines. To meet these demands, companies must rethink how work gets done and how that work relies on people, processes, and technology.

Although the need for radical redesign is urgent, we don’t recommend that you run out and hire an enterprise architect to identify the gaps in your operations. Unless you have fewer than, say, 50 people in your business, you cannot simply redraw the organizational chart. You will need to evolve into a digital company, addressing the experience challenge without compromising product excellence and innovation. To take advantage of new technologies, you’ll need to become flatter, more evidence-based, more automated, and more digitally aligned both vertically and horizontally. These design changes will allow you to respond faster to both operational problems and new business opportunities.

Three Principles for Organizational Redesign

Enterprise architecture provides a road map for organizational redesign. This will be a long, never-ending ride, so you should get started now. Adopting three enterprise architecture principles — breaking key outcomes into components with designated accountability, empowering cross-functional teams, and allowing business design to influence strategy — will help you embark on your journey.

Principle 1: Enterprise architecture breaks processes and products into components. At the beginning of the current millennium, developing an enterprise architecture meant designing enterprisewide systems and processes. Enterprise architects — often based in IT units — helped executives articulate a target state for the execution of transactions and core business processes. This is a value-adding exercise, but it is no longer enough.

Today, enterprise architecture involves componentizing a company’s key outcomes — products, customer experiences, and core enterprise processes — and assigning clear accountability for each component. In other words, the enterprise architecture designs an organization’s critical people-process-technology bundles in a way that facilitates both operational excellence and adaptability to change.

For example, in many companies, payment processing is built into many different products. Instead of designing payments into each product separately, a single team could design the technology and processes required for payment processing for all products. That turns payment processing into one of these people-process-technology bundles, which is a reusable component. Staff members can continually improve processes and technologies in response to the changing needs of the customers and product owners who are the components’ stakeholders. The component becomes a living asset in the company.

Early research findings indicate that componentization helps organizations use data more effectively and respond to business opportunities faster. Decomposing a business into components, however, is not easy. It’s a very different way of thinking about how work gets done. In addition, extracting reusable components from existing processes is a delicate operation.

The long time horizon should not be discouraging, however. Each new component adds value when implemented. Companies can stage the development of new components when it’s clear that they will create value.

Principle 2: Empowered cross-functional teams implement enterprise architecture. Creating people-process-technology bundles represents a dramatic shift from traditional management approaches in which IT people design and manage systems, functional leaders design and manage processes, and business unit managers design roles and manage people. For this new model to work, employees must be empowered with responsibility for the processes and technology within each component.

The leadership task becomes one of formulating teams and then coaching team members to help clarify their missions, establish meaningful metrics, and design experiments to test innovations. Team members define their goals. Leaders hold teams accountable for meeting those goals and, just as important, grant them the autonomy to do so.

To fulfill their missions, component teams usually need diverse talent. The enterprise architecture effort thus requires not only componentizing the business but also assigning cross-functional teams of experts to each unit. Staff members need to understand the component’s process and technology requirements, so most teams will need product experts, software developers, and user design specialists. They might also need data scientists, lawyers, finance people, or other specialists. Over time, teams will articulate their own resource requirements.

Principle 3: Enterprise architecture influences strategy. In responding to customer demands, empowered teams naturally identify new opportunities inspired by the capabilities of digital technologies. This creates the third essential principle of enterprise architecture: As component teams address strategic objectives, they simultaneously reformulate strategy based on continuous learning about what customers want and what digital technologies make possible.

In this context, strategy becomes both a top-down and bottom-up exercise. Leaders create new teams (or pivot existing teams) to seize emerging opportunities. When companies fund teams rather than strategic initiatives or systems development projects, those groups can respond almost instantaneously to what digital music service Spotify, for one, refers to as the company’s “bets.” Meanwhile, component teams can restate goals aimed at implementing high-level strategy.

How Enterprise Architecture Guides CarMax

Enterprise architecture charts a path for gradually increasing componentization. Although the process is evolutionary, it can be immediately effective. CarMax offers an example of a company on this journey.

Founded in 1993, CarMax is a $20 billion business created to deliver an exceptional customer experience in an industry known for terrible ones. It is the largest used-car dealer in the U.S., with over 200 stores in 41 states. CarMax’s vision calls for combining online, in-store, and at-home service offerings to ensure a convenient, personalized car-buying experience.

Customer data is CarMax’s business engine, and the implementation of an enterprisewide customer relationship management system to componentize, capture, and manage that data was a major architectural effort. Another key architectural effort was the introduction of empowered product teams . The company introduced its first three teams around 2015 to address what management viewed as an urgent need to improve its online customer experience.

Each of those first teams owned responsibility for one of three missions: descriptions and pictures representing each individual car, online display of those pictures and descriptions, and underlying infrastructure supporting the website. When leaders were able to document the positive results of the efforts of the first three teams, they started identifying additional components and forming other accountable teams.

Today, CarMax has more than 30 empowered teams with accountability for specified components of an omnichannel business model. These teams stick together and pivot (rather than disband) if strategic objectives change. Each team of around seven members includes a product owner, lead developer, and user designer. These cross-functional teams report into CarMax’s two-in-a-box management design , which refers to joint ownership by a product manager and a technology manager for forming, developing, and overseeing the teams. This model extends all the way up to a box shared by the chief marketing officer and CIO.

Senior leaders own responsibility for CarMax’s enterprise architecture, but enterprise architecture thinking permeates the company. During annual and quarterly strategic planning processes, leaders articulate business priorities. Team missions are adapted — and new teams formed — in response to changes in strategy.

Based on the company’s strategic priorities, teams develop quarterly objectives and biweekly goals. CarMax tracks teams’ alignment and progress in biweekly open houses. At these meetings, teams share their objectives and key results in 15-minute time slots and receive feedback from one another and interested leaders. In fulfilling their missions, teams develop insights that influence the strategic planning process. In fact, the company’s embrace of an omnichannel vision was triggered by insights generated by one of the teams. That strategic shift led it to redefine the missions of four teams.

This top-down and bottom-up approach to strategy and strategy execution has not only helped the company formulate an omnichannel vision. It also enabled the business to respond rapidly to the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic: Leveraging its componentized architecture, the company needed just two weeks to roll out CarMax Curbside , a contactless buying experience.

Start Small but Get Started

CarMax’s product teams represent a small percentage of its more than 27,000 employees, and it has no plans to transition the entire company to a component-based business architecture. After all, some end-to-end processes are well suited to top-down process optimization, and some people prefer to execute delegated tasks rather than own a problem. Component teams, however, are at the heart of the company’s enterprise architecture and increasing componentization.

Other businesses need to begin following a similar model. Leaders who don’t start exploring radical redesign for their increasingly digital companies are at risk of committing managerial malpractice. You — whoever you are, and whatever role you fill — need enterprise architecture to guide you through that radical redesign.

About the Author

Jeanne Ross and Cynthia Beath are coauthors of Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success (MIT Press, 2019). Ross was principal research scientist for MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research for almost 27 years. Beath is professor emerita of information systems at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Optimize your customer journeys using personas and business architecture

This article is a summary of a whitepaper by Bao Do and Daniel Lambert with the same title.

The use of personas has been a maturing customer-centric methodology in marketing, but under utilized elsewhere. Yet, the use of personas throughout customer digital journeys from beginning to end is now possible using the discipline of business architecture. Corporations that want to become customer-driven enterprises have several types of clients (or personas), and none of them should experience the exact same customer journey when interfacing with any part of its organization, not just in marketing. With the increasing pace at which disruptive technologies are being adopted by their customers, it is becoming imperative that corporations find dynamic ways to accompany their customers throughout their journey.

Customer experience: not just marketing

As pointed out in this article entitled “ 7 Steps to Deliver Better Customer Experiences ,” many executives seem “to think that designing and managing the customer experience is a marketing function, as if the customer is only associated with marketing,” and that customer journey does not involve operations. These executives seem happy to maintain silos between marketing and operations. Yet, as mentioned in this article entitled “ A Step-by-Step Plan to Improve CMO-COO Collaboration ,” “customer journeys today are a complex series of interactions across multiple channels and platforms, where each point of contact has the potential to encourage the sale or derail it entirely. Coordinating the infrastructure, technology, and messaging in a way that appears seamless and fluid to the customer is, to be blunt, a logistical nightmare” that involves not only marketing but also operation and IT. Within an organization, strategically harmonizing various business capabilities can optimize value streams for specific personas to insure seamless and satisfactory outcomes throughout their customer journey.

Customer journeys

Before exploring the Persona concept, let’s explore customer experience with a simple customer journey map, as shown in Diagram 1 in the whitepaper describing the engagement stages to acquire a product. Each of these stages should involve the operation and IT side of an organization, not just marketing. All customer journey stages need the operations involvement in a customer driven enterprise. Once a customer has purchased a product, he will need at one point of its customer journey to discover, learn and possibly commit to other ones. IT needs to understand these trigger points where it is appropriate to engage in these stages.

These customer journey stages will be different for each persona, who will experience different thoughts, feelings and satisfaction needs. These concepts are common to marketers. They also need to be used by the IT side of an organization in a customer driven enterprise.

The customer’s thinking, feeling and satisfaction based on the organization’s specific set of capabilities for each persona will be either satisfactory or not. If the result is dissatisfaction, the organization must ask itself how to adjust its investments to mature its set of capabilities using appropriate value streams.

Personas represent customers and as Wikipedia’s defines UX Personas , “are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. (…) Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website.” Personas are used for designing more intuitive software, to increase the user-friendliness in industrial design and more recently for online interaction and transactions purposes. This design process includes Design Thinking and Lean User Experience. This design process is iterative. Continuous design delivery for rapid prototyping will be required to keep the specific set of capabilities optimized for each persona using appropriate value streams.

As shown in Diagram 3 in the whitepaper, a user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews. For each product, more than one Persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design. With personas, organizations will understand better what their products are really providing to their customers.

Business architecture and customer strategy

Business architecture is an excellent way to ensure that customer journeys for all your key personas are implemented successfully everywhere throughout your organizations. Business architecture allows the following:

Concentrate on the most strategic customer journeys that matters the most,
Work together on a roadmap planning and delivery for each of these customer journeys by enhancing and creating capabilities tailored for each persona’s behavior,
Build a structure for collaboration within your organization by making available to all relevant stakeholders your business architecture model, and
See each customer journey all the way through with appropriate measurement methods using value streams/capabilities.

Value streams and enabling business capabilities

Customer-facing value streams are the best kept secret among the business architect’s arsenals. Not enough business architects use them. Yet, it is an ideal method to transform your business to a customer driven enterprise and provide customer lifetime value. Diagram 8 in the whitepaper shows, for example, the “Acquire a Customer for a Service” value stream/capabilities for a customer in a bank.

This value stream requires five value stages. Each value stage is enabled by five or six capabilities. Each value stage and relevant capabilities can be measured in several ways, using performance heat map, custom KPIs, etc. From this perspective, you can then move much more smoothly from initiative planning to initiative delivery by linking the appropriate detailed processes to the relevant value stage(s), detailed assets and requirements to the relevant capability(ies), etc.

In brief, the increasing pace of digital disruption is forcing all organizations to move from points of customer sales to points of customer experience. Enterprises must mature their business capabilities around the dynamic customer experience. The use of Business architecture in combination with personas throughout a customer journey is an excellent method for modern organizations to keep up with this pace of disruption everywhere in the organization. From value stream to technology solution to process models, business capability mappings are becoming a vital mechanism to transform businesses into a customer driven enterprise that provides lifetime value to customers.

Daniel Lambert is a marketing & finance strategist and entrepreneur assisting companies in their growth, their business architecture and ultimately their digital transformation. He has worked with financial institutions, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, logistics & transportation, computer software, telecom and public sector organizations.

Bao Do is Business Architecture Manager at Wells Fargo Advisors. You can find him on LinkedIn.

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Customer Journey Mapping: Insights for the Modern Organization

For any business to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive landscape, it is crucial to provide its customers with the best experiences. Consistency of service and experience across channels is nearly impossible until you manage the customer’s journey across new channels, devices, applications, and more. To do so, it is essential to understand the customer journey- how they act when they visit your store or browse your website, and what you can do to improve their experience, so they return.

Traditionally, this approach was siloed, with departments such as product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing looking at only their part in the customer’s journey. This compartmentalized approach to individual touchpoints overlooks the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s overall experience. You can only begin to comprehend how to meaningfully increase performance by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes.

For example, when popular audio streaming service Spotify wanted to improve its customers’ musical experience, it hired a marketing company to map its customers’ journeys. The goal of this customer journey map was to:

Increase number of users
Improve the experience of sharing music for current users
Improving the music sharing feature and increasing its adoption

The map included all the user experiences — from the moment they start using Spotify on a mobile device to asking if they like a song shared by a friend. At each step, data is collected on what the customer is interested in, what they are thinking about, and what they are feeling.

Based on this, Spotify made changes to its functionality, tweaked the interface to make the music sharing experience smoother and more seamless and thus encouraged more users to share music with their friends and acquaintances. Needless to say, this also led to an increase in profits for Spotify.

Why does Every Business Need a Customer Journey Map?

According to a recent study conducted by Salesforce, customer experience strategies are more significant than ever. The UK-based research revealed that:

80% of new-gen customers placed as much weightage on their interactions with companies as on the products offered.
69% of customers wanted to communicate with a firm in real-time.
60% of consumers expected their customer experience to be connected.

By using a customer journey map to analyze user behavior, an enterprise can better understand how their customers travel through the sales process and how they feel at each step. If organizations provide the customer with the finest experience from start to finish, it will lead to increased customer satisfaction, higher sales and retention, lower end-to-end service costs, and improved employee morale. Thus, customer journey maps help:

Increase consumer engagement
Remove ineffective touchpoints from the equation
Shift from a company-centric to a customer-centric mindset
Bridge interdepartmental gaps.
Target specific client personas with marketing initiatives that are appropriate to their identities
Recognize circumstances that may have resulted in quantitative data abnormalities
Assign ownership of multiple client touchpoints
Make it feasible to calculate the return on investment for future UX/CX investments
Optimize a client’s onboarding process through the feedback shared by customers
Convert prospects to loyal customers in a faster and easier manner

How to Create Customer Journey Maps?

To leverage the benefits of customer journey mapping, it is advisable to start as early as possible. This can prevent the possibility of customer dissatisfaction at the later stages (which are more complex) of the journey.

However, there is no ‘standard map’ that can represent every consumer’s journey, simply because there is no such thing as a ‘standard’ client experience. An ideal journey map must be completely personalized, aligned with the customer’s profile and created from the customer’s perspective. This enables the organization to determine the focus points for future modifications as well as evaluate the efficacy of the current experience strategies.

Here is what organizations must do to create a truly customer-centric journey map :

Understand your customer’s perspective:

Listening to your customers is essential. The best customer journey maps represent the customer’s perspective — regarding the kind of service they want, the problems they face with the current product, what they expect from the company, etc.

For example, suppose your potential customers look for you at trade fairs, and you keep on advertising in the newspapers. In that case, the advertising budget is unlikely to deliver the kind of results the company is targeting. Representing the customer’s perspective permits the organization to focus on more successful relationship-building initiatives rather than squandering resources on programs that weren’t truly benefiting their results – or their bottom line.

Conduct Research and Analysis:

Extensive and qualitative customer research is required to prepare your customer journey map. To figure out what’s really going on, you’ll need interviews, ethnographies, focus group discussions, surveys, and/or other sorts of customer research, depending on the extent of the journey. In some specific cases, employees can also be asked to interact with customers to build the map. This strategy works best for B2B organizations that focus on a specific process. Some companies hire consumers to develop maps, but in this case, efforts are needed to avoid any bias related to sample size. Brands can also identify areas of improvement through customer ratings and feedback.

A company can get genuine feedback about consumer experiences through face-to-face interaction at multiple checkpoints. Apart from obtaining accurate data, this exercise also helps make the brand’s customers understand that the enterprise is going the extra mile to fulfill their requirements.

Identify and Represent Customer Personas:

When we talk about creating personas, we do not mean micro-segmentation; instead, we’re looking for the top two to four core consumer personas that the brand serves. Marketers can design a customer journey map for each persona and customers will then be segmented based on their demographics, lifestyle, and interests.

For example , while evaluating how customers spend on health insurance, a customer mapping exercise discovered two different types of users. While one group spent only a few hours researching, the second set of customers spent six weeks for the same, on average, and came up with several methods or options for spending on health insurance. A good customer journey map cannot combine the two segments as the outcome would not adequately reflect each segment’s experience.

Include Customer Objectives:

A good journey map represents what the customer wants or is looking for and also whether these goals change over the course of the journey.

For example , if the organization in question is a supermarket chain, it can have two different types of customers:

Brings a list and sticks to it- This kind of customer does not want to be disturbed and wants to just find the goods as per the list.
Open-minded- This customer might want to explore the supermarket and try out new goods.

Both sets of customers have different expectations from the company. Creating a journey map lets you develop cost-effective strategies to suit the demands of each group.

Concentrate on Emotions:

Customer sentiments are essential to any corporate organization, whether small, medium, or large. It has been proved that emotionally connected customers are much more valuable than highly satisfied customers. These emotionally connected customers buy more of your products and services, visit you more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to your communications, follow your advice, and recommend you more. Conversely, if the customers develop negative emotional connections with the offered products or services, it’s hard for them to forget these problems, which affects the rest of their journey. One of the primary purposes of journey mapping is to eliminate or mitigate such issues.

Map all interactions:

Each time the customer interacts with your brand, you get new information to add to your customer journey map. Planning the journey at every stage of your customer’s experience — including gaining brand awareness, acting on buying motivation, displaying loyalty and advocacy – lets the organization maintain records of, and gain insights from, each interaction. Not only does this help to understand the customer’s point of view, both positive and negative, it also allows the prediction of their future reactions towards the organization’s products or services.

Recognize Moments of Truth that Stand Out:

Moments of truth are important moments in a customer’s journey when a significant event occurs and a brand opinion is established. Simply said, these are the points at which your clients will either fall in love with your product or reject it and depart. They are vital to an organization since they can represent the weakest part of the customer journey and fix it. Not every touchpoint is a moment of truth- some touchpoints are more critical than others. For example, if a supermarket chain does not offer parking, it is highly possible that the customer chooses not to visit the supermarket at all. In this case, parking is much more important than other touchpoints. Thus, an organization needs to understand crucial touchpoints and incorporate these in the customer journey maps. This helps ensure the customer has a positive experience at those touchpoints.

Measure the flow of time:

The length of a customer’s experience is crucial information. Is a normal customer call taking 2 minutes or 10 minutes? Did the customer think about the product for 20 minutes or 40 hours before making a purchase? Time is an important factor in customer journey mapping.

Remember, it’s critical research to learn more about customer motivations and hurdles. If you do not have the data to answer these questions, you might need to make assumptions that may lead to inadequate strategic planning later. A good customer journey map recognizes the importance of every bit of information.

Revisions based on new information:

When it comes to improving the customer experience, the process is iterative and there is always room for improvement. One of the main customer experience strategies is to continue to learn about your customers. Reassess your data, receive feedback, leverage the insights and adapt and improve. Regardless of how big or small they are, the changes you make will be crucial because they are directly related to the pain points that the customers flagged.

Map the current and future state:

Start organizing your data and touchpoints to map the current state of your customer experience. Mapping the current state will also help you identify gaps or red flags in the experience, information duplication, inadequate transitions between phases, and any significant weaknesses and obstacles in your customer’s journey. You can then easily map potential solutions and compare the current state of the customer journey to the ideal future state. Present your results to the entire organization to keep everyone informed about the areas that need to be improved, as well as a clear roadmap for planned change and how their responsibilities will contribute to improving the customer journey.

Customer Journey Maps are valuable for understanding what brand consumers are doing and experiencing as they traverse each point of interaction. It allows businesses to minimize bottlenecks and optimize customer journeys while simultaneously enhancing their consumers’ satisfaction levels. Several customer mapping tools introduced by SAP aim to assist with your customer experience and make the necessary adjustments to attract and retain customers.

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Home Blogs Enterprise Architecture ArchiMate® 3.0 and Customer Journey Maps

ArchiMate® 3.0 and Customer Journey Maps

Enterprise Architecture

A Customer Journey Map is a useful way to graphically represent the customer experience of an organization. It focuses on the touchpoints that characterize the customers’ interaction with the services of the organization and helps you to optimize this experience.

ArchiMate concepts can easily be used in customer journey maps. The backbone of a customer journey map is of course the business process, with the stages therein modeled as sub-processes. The touchpoints with the customer are modeled as business services plus business interfaces, to model both the behavior of the organization and the channels it uses in the customer contact. Different customer journey maps for the same process could be specified for various personas, who are typically modeled as business roles.

Information from customer surveys and other measurements of the customer experience (e.g. data from the website or call center, net promoter score) is added to the steps in the process, using ArchiMate’s profile mechanism to specify relevant attributes. Alternatively, you can define Metric as a specialization of the Driver concept, in the way described in Section 15.2.5 of the ArchiMate 3.0 standard. Different metrics for different aspects of the customer journey can be associated with the steps in the journey. This information has to be evaluated, which can be modeled with the Assessment concept, and appropriate improvements to the customer experience may be specified as Requirements.

There is no fixed, standardized vocabulary in customer journey maps. The table below shows a number of common terms and their mapping onto appropriate ArchiMate concepts

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Business Architecture

Outside-in Architecture and Customer Journey Map

This is the part 2 of the article focusing on outside-in architecture. In the part 1, I focused on defining the customer journey mapping which is one of the key blueprints used for designing business from the outside-in. In this article, we will dig deeper into understanding what it takes to map a journey and the key building blocks that constitute a journey. The end-to-end process of architecting a business from customer point of view (outside-in) is illustrated in the diagram below.

Outside -in Architecture Process steps

In the outside-in architecture, the first step is to capture the customer vision. From the vision statement, it becomes clear to identify what customers really want or what their real jobs are. In this article, we will only focus on the first two steps – Customer Vision Validation and the Strategy Validation.

Customer Jobs and Outcome

Customer Jobs (aka Goals) are the fundamental tasks customers are trying to carry out and get done. The job focuses on the “why” (the customer’s fundamental problem in a particular circumstances), not the what (the customer’s needs and solution). The customer job is concerned with the problem the customers have and why they are looking to make a purchase, not the actual purchase itself. To get a job done, customers interact through various touch point across their journey to achieve all their outcomes. Companies should define their business models and market around customer jobs not around their products and services. Tony Ulwick in his article “ Bring Markets Into Perfect Focus by Defining Them Around the Customer’s Job-To-Be-Done ” , suggested that the market is defined as “a group of people and the job they are trying to get done.”

In the article “ Architecting for Customer Outcomes ”, I had discussed some of the ways of identifying customer jobs and outcomes.

Steps to capture customer jobs in Enterprise Evolver

Make a list of all jobs customers are attempting to address in a given circumstances (moment in time and place)
Decompose jobs into mutual exclusive groups and eliminate redundancies.
Organize these jobs into a tree structure using Enterprise Evolver’s visual editor. The highest level of the tree must describes the fundamental problem the customer is facing, for example, in an insurance setting, the fundamental problem customers are facing is to ensure peace of mind financially or in a healthcare setting, the highest job could be to prevent disease.
Decompose the jobs until the outcomes become clear.
Use Job category to capture all the jobs in Enterprise Evolver

Jobs-to-be-done Tree Map

Journey Stages/Phases

After, you create an inventory of the jobs to be done, the next step is to identify journey(s) that are involved in getting a customer’s jobs completed. You may end up creating many journeys for your customers. Identification of journey stages (i.e. key activities that customer perform to achieve the outcomes for a job) is the most important task in journey mapping exercise. These stages are also called behavioral stages/phases that customers take when getting to know your brand, products & services. Customers follow different path and different journeys while interacting with your organization to get their jobs done. A typical shopping journey could have 4-5 journey stages (e.g. for a shopping journey, you may have stages like discovery, research, decision, purchase etc.). There are various methods (questionnaire, focus group, interviews and observations etc.) that you can use to identify key stages that your customers go through. Additional information such as how long does it take your customers to move from one stage to another, how many customers does each touchpoint serve, how do they feel about each touchpoint etc. could be captured. In the Evolver app, you can use tag feature to capture these additional information.

Break the entire journey into key behavioral stages from customer point of view. Analyze the steps customer take, what they think, feel and do to achieve their outcomes and to get their job done. Each customer job/goal must be aligned with the journey stages that customer are taking.

The simplest way to create a customer journey map in the Evolver app is to select the Customer viewpoint and then the ‘Experience Journey Map’ template from the Maps section. Use the Visual editor to capture journey stages. In Enterprise Evolver, the object ‘Activity’ is used to store journey stages.

Touchpoints & Interactions

Touchpoints are the places, products/services or point of interaction where customers are engaging with your company for a specific need to get their job done. Customer experiences are created at touchpoints but most importantly network of interactions across touchpoints create the whole experience. How a customer feels about an interaction at touchpoint is one of the key drivers for customer loyalty and good experience. In the Evolver app, you can analyze a touchpoint supporting multiple journeys & interactions to understand the whole experience.

Touchpoints are designed by focusing customer jobs to be done. For example, during a discover stage of the customer journey, customers are learning about your brand, products and services; keeping this in mind, touchpoints like blogs, webinars, educational videos, newsletters, website product catalogs etc. will suite more to address customer specific jobs of learning about your company.

A touchpoint is a type of resource/asset and can be categorized by many dimensions. It is important to identify the intent of the touchpoints using some categorization scheme. A touchpoint can be digital, physical, relational or aspirational and can be used for two way or one way interaction. For example, a digital touchpoint is the one that emphasizes the virtual dimension (e.g. Data, software services, website, blogs, mobile app etc.) and some digital touchpoint can be used for two way interaction (blogs, social network etc.). On the other hand, a touchpoint like ‘Collateral” ‘Manual’ will fall under one way communications. In Enterprise Evolver, you can configure touchpoint object to categorize it by interaction type and by asset dimensions or some other way that you think is appropriate.

Tom Graves has identified asset dimensions in his article “ Fractals, naming and enterprise architecture ” that you may like to use to categorize touchpoints. Configure a touchpoint by its intent, type or whatever you want.

Create a map to illustrate the relationships between touchpoints with the business units/departments responsible for driving the improvements of experience.

In the next part of this series, I will provide a small video clip to demonstrate how you can create a journey map and a digital graph supporting many journeys. Stay tuned!

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Achieving business objectives through technology standards

Providing Customer-Driven Value With a TOGAF® based Enterprise Architecture

By Daniel Lambert, VP Business Architect, Benchmark Consulting

The business architecture domain within Enterprise Architecture is not just about business capabilities and business processes. It is foremost about optimizing value for your customers and contribute to building a more customer-driven organization.

The Importance of Value in Enterprise Architecture

Traditionally, business processes have been the principal mean of interaction with business stakeholders for Enterprise Architects. As for the notion of business capability, it is a more recent concept also often used in Enterprise Architecture. Business capabilities allow a better understanding of how software applications are supporting the business, as very well explained in this video entitled “ TOGAF® Business Architecture: Business Capability Guide ”. Often, some new business capabilities have no supporting applications, while other older capabilities have too many. Both concepts alone fail to capture the value that an agile customer-driven organization must undertake to keep and grow its market share with more and more rapid and continuous innovative changes and more informed customers that are forcing them to have more fluid business strategies.

The concept of value needs to be mastered and used by enterprise architects in a customer-driven enterprise, as shown in Figure 1 above. An organization usually provides several value propositions to its different customer segments (or persona) and partners that are delivered by value streams made of several value stages. Value stages have internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, and often the customer as participants. Value stages enable customer journey steps, are enabled by capabilities and operationalized by processes (level 2 or 3 usually). The TOGAF® Business Architecture: Value Stream Guide video provides a very clear and simple explanation, should you want to know more. Customer journeys are not strictly speaking part of business architecture, but still, be very useful to interface with business stakeholders.

These value streams/stages cannot be realized out of thin air. An organization must have the ability to achieve a specific purpose, which is to provide value to the triggering stakeholder, in occurrence the customers. This ability is an enabling business capability. Without this capability, the organization cannot provide value to triggering stakeholders (customers). a capability enables a value stage and is operationalized by a business process. It is also owned by one business unit or a division within an organization and used by one or more business units or a division. A capability ordinarily needs to be supported by at least one application, system, or IT service.

Practically, value propositions, value streams, and value stages are the ‘Why’ an initiative or a project needs to be done. A Stakeholder is the ‘Whom” that needs to participate to create value. The business process is the “How” an organization can create value. Finally, the business capability is the “What” the organization needs to manage or must do to create value.

Important Definitions

Referring often to TOGAF Standard definitions, each element mentioned in Figure 1 above can be defined as followed:

Business Process. A business process is a group of related and structured activities made by individuals or equipment, which in a specific sequence produces a service or product (or serves a business goal or objective).

Business Capability. A business capability is a particular ability that a business may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose. A business capability needs to be supported by applications, systems, and/or IT services.

Customer. One who purchases a product or service.

Customer Journey. The customer journey describes the full addition of all experiences that customers go through when interacting in a path of progressive steps with an organization before and after purchasing a product or service. Instead of looking at just a portion of a transaction or experience, the customer journey will document the complete experience of being a customer. A customer journey is comprised of several journey stages.

Product. A product offered by an organization is a good, an idea, a method, information, an object, or service conceived as a result of a process and serves a need or satisfies a want of a customer. A product is usually part of a value proposition.

Stakeholder. An individual, team, organization, or class thereof, having an interest in a system.

Service. A repeatable activity – a discrete behavior that a building block may be requested or otherwise triggered to perform. A product is usually part of a value proposition.

Value Proposition. A value proposition is a commitment to deliver value to the triggering stakeholder (usually a customer), who has the conviction that at least one benefit will be received after a purchase. A value proposition is made of one or several products or services.

Value Stream. A representation of an end-to-end collection of value-adding activities that create an overall result for a customer, stakeholder, or end-user. A value stream is composed of several value stages with at least one identifiable participating stakeholder.

Roger Burlton, Jim Rhyne, and Daniel St. George recently wrote a whitepaper entitled “ Similar Yet Different – Value Streams and Business Processes: The Business Architecture Perspective ”, whish explains clearly how business processes and value streams and their enabling capabilities differ. “ The business architecture value stream and associated capabilities provide a value-based perspective on the capabilities needed to operate any business of a type (e.g., any hotel), without regard for organizational structure, location, product variants, specific procedures, or other operational characteristics that distinguish a particular business or chain of businesses. By contrast, the value-based business process and its decomposition as activities and flows, provides a value-based perspective on the flow of goods, information, and attainment of outcomes through the activities of a (potentially generic) business. ”

Enterprise Architecture and the 5 Phases of Agile Strategy Execution

Let’s now position each one of the elements mentioned in Figure 1 above to figure out which one of the 5 steps to an organizational agile strategy execution, as illustrated in Figure 2 below. These stages are explained in detail in this book entitled “ Practical Guide to Agile Strategy Execution: Design, Architect, Prioritize, and Deliver your Corporate Future Successfully ”.

Customers (segments and/or persona) and partners are involved everywhere during the five steps of an organization’s agile strategy execution. Business stakeholders are involved in all steps, except in the fourth one, which is the agile delivery and execution phase. As for IT Stakeholders, they are mostly implicated in initiative planning (step 3) and agile delivery and execution (step 4).

Value propositions, products, services are mostly elaborated in business design and strategy (step 1) to meet specific strategies and goals. Customer journeys, value streams, and value stages are usually examined at the beginning of your architecting transformation (step 2). Business capabilities are explored in both architecting transformation and initiative planning (steps 2 and 3). As for business processes, they are essentially taken care of in the agile delivery and execution phase (step 4) at the operational and tactical level where business process experts and agile experts need to meet clear objectives measuring tactics.

To provide further value to their organization, enterprise architects need to understand that business architecture is not just about business capabilities and business processes. Enterprise architects should not limit their scope only to architecting the transformation and initiative planning of their organization. Enterprise architects can also contribute to the optimization of value for their organization’s customers and partners. Including all aspects of business architecture in your enterprise architecture practice will make your team much more valuable to business stakeholders at the initial business design and strategy phase and to IT stakeholders at the agile delivery and execution phase.

Daniel Lambert is a marketing and finance strategist assisting expanding companies in their growth, their business architecture, and ultimately their digital transformation. He has worked in the past with organizations in a broad array of industries: financial services, insurance companies, telecom, utilities, pharmaceuticals, transportation, computer software, healthcare, and the public sector. His current clients include FedEx, the TD Bank, Regeneron, UnitedHealthcare, Independence Blue Cross, Autodesk, the US government, and the UK government, among others.

Mr. Lambert is currently VP Business Architect at Benchmark Consulting. Benchmark provides digital transformation consulting services and is also the creator of the collaborative IRIS Business Architect software application for enterprise architects, business architects, IT/Solution architects, and business analysis to optimize planning and roadmaps from strategy to delivery. Benchmark Consulting has clients of all sizes from as little as 800 employees to as large as 600,000 employees. In his previous life, Mr. Lambert was also a venture capitalist. He was involved in these successful and very profitable exits: Giganet sold to Broadcom; Kinaxis now trading on NASDAQ; SFI sold to BMC Software, Taleo sold to Oracle, and Telweb sold to Schlumberger.

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Making the Customer Experience Real with Business Architecture

B & EA EXECUTIVE UPDATE VOL. 20, NO. 14

In most industries, customer expectations have greatly escalated over time — customers want what they want, how they want it, and when they want it — and they will go elsewhere if their needs are not met. Organizations have responded to heightened customer demands by transforming in various ways: digitalizing the way they deliver products and services, shifting from product-centric business models to customer-centric models, and even reorganizing internally to better serve customers. Within these organizations, it is not uncommon to see leaders and teams purely focused on the strategy, design, and measurement of the customer experience (CX). Disciplines have even formed related to CX and service design, delivering artifacts such as journey maps, service blueprints, and customer personas.

The emergence of CX design as a key discipline practiced by many organizations has opened up some questions about how it relates to business architecture. This Executive Update provides an overview of the benefits and integration points between CX design and business architecture, two mutually beneficial disciplines, both critical to customer centricity and transformation.

The Relationship Between CX Design and Business Architecture

Customer experience design and business architecture are two separate disciplines, each with different goals, focuses, artifacts, and team members. However, they both greatly benefit from close collaboration with each other to design, improve, and implement the experience that an organization delivers to its customers. A Business Architecture Guild® white paper on the integration of these two disciplines describes it as follows:

Through the combination of business architecture and customer experience design, organizations will gain more insight as to where and how to align and transform their business models in order to focus on the ongoing needs of their customers while driving organizational efficiencies. This alignment will lead to business architecture practitioners and customer experience teams working hand in hand, helping to shape and evolve the business architecture, which will create maximum customer and business value.

Simply stated, business architecture translates CX designs 1 (new ones or revisions to existing ones) into the changes necessary to the business and IT environment to make them real, and packages those changes into a coordinated set of initiatives for execution.

To put this relationship into an enterprise context, Figure 1 shows an end-to-end perspective on strategy execution. In Stage 1, both the CX design and business architecture teams inform and consume the organization’s strategies as they are formulated. Once finalized, in Stage 2, the CX team (informed by the business architecture team as applicable) designs or modifies the customer experience as needed to reflect the strategy. The business architecture team then translates both the strategies and the CX designs into the specific changes required for business architecture capabilities and value streams.

Figure 1 — An enterprise perspective on strategy execution.

From the intersection of these two domains, all other changes to the business and IT environment can be identified. Based on the collective set of required changes, together with IT architects, the business architecture team produces a target business and IT architecture(s) that the organization can work toward. In Stage 3, they organize the business and IT changes necessary to achieve the target architecture(s) into the most effective set of initiatives with nonoverlapping scopes, which are logically sequenced and reflective of dependencies and integration points. These initiatives are then input into the portfolio management process. Once funded, in Stage 4, business and IT initiatives can begin executing, and their success is measured in Stage 5. 2

Benefits of CX Design and Business Architecture Collaboration

The CX design and business architecture teams receive mutual benefit from working with each other. For example, the CX design team benefits business architects by:

Articulating a comprehensive vision of the organization’s target customers and end-to-end customer experience

Providing clear direction and priorities related to customer needs

Serving as a focal point for decision making and governance for customer-facing capabilities and value streams 3

Identifying gaps or areas for improvement in business architecture related to current or future customer needs

On the other hand, the business architecture team benefits CX designers by:

Informing CX design plans based on what is currently in place or planned for, per the business architecture

Providing an enterprise-level framework, describing what the organization does at a high level, which can be used as a foundation for identifying and planning customer automation and digitalization

Translating customer needs into logically structured initiatives that will deliver them, harmonized with related changes across the enterprise

Establishing a common business vocabulary, applicable across all business units

Cross-Mapping CX Design and Business Architecture

There can and should be a direct relationship (or “cross-mapping”) made between the artifacts produced by the CX design and business architecture teams. One of the most common and beneficial approaches is to cross-map customer journeys (at the phase level) to value streams and capabilities. For each customer journey phase, it is ideal to have traceability to the value stream stages (located in one or more value streams) and the capabilities within those stages that apply. This provides the highest degree of specificity to pinpoint how a customer journey is operationalized and to facilitate impact analysis when changes are made to either the journey or any part of the business architecture.

Figure 2 shows a simplified, conceptual view of this cross-mapping for a retail organization, where each phase of the customer journey is mapped to the applicable customer-facing value streams and capabilities. (Note: the figure does not show the cross-mapping between value stream stages and capabilities, though this would ideally be captured in a knowledgebase.)

Figure 2 — Customer journey and BA relationships (a retail example).

Cross-mapping customer journeys to business architecture value streams and capabilities helps to:

Demonstrate the importance of the relationship between the two disciplines to other people, especially when visuals such as the example in Figure 2 are publicly available

Provide additional context for each discipline’s artifacts (e.g., to show business architecture in the broader customer context and to show the business architecture aspects that operationalize the customer journeys)

Validate that the business architecture contains (or will contain) all pieces necessary to enable the current and future customer experience

Moving Forward Toward Collaboration

While both CX design and business architecture teams are increasingly common and provide significant value, they may not exist in every organization. If one or both do not exist, they should be established — provided that the value proposition, advocacy, and resources are in place to support them. Once both are in place, there are a few straightforward steps that CX design and BA teams can take to begin collaborating:

Build a relationship and start working together. The first step is to get to know the other team: what they do, who works on the team, how they work, and what their priorities are. This can lead to discussions about integration points, inputs/outputs, and opportunities to work together. As opportunities arise, take them and start working through the process.

Cross-map artifacts. At any point in time, begin cross-mapping customer journeys to business architecture value streams and capabilities. This information will need to be kept up to date in a knowledgebase(s) and potentially expanded over time. Share visuals of the cross-mappings with others.

Realign roles and processes. After some time working together, it is possible that areas of potential overlap or improvement may be identified, as they pertain to the responsibilities, activities, or artifacts provided by each team. For example, certain CX design approaches and templates define operating model details (e.g., people, process, procedures, and technology) or initiative ideas. In contrast, the business architecture team should identify these types of changes through the translation of the strategy and CX design, taking into account the full picture across the enterprise. In this case, the CX designer’s responsibility would shift from defining initiatives to informing the BA team about them.

Customer experience design and business architecture are arguably two of the most critical disciplines for helping organizations transform for customer centricity and digitalization, as together they define the end-to-end customer vision and make it real in the business and IT environment. Both gain mutual benefit by working together and allow the organization to serve customers in the best possible way, while also operating effectively.

1 This Update refers to customer experience design with an emphasis on the external individuals or organization served, but the discipline can also be practiced as experience design , which focuses on the experiences of both external customers and other internal stakeholders.

2 For more information on the strategy execution lifecycle, see my Update “A New Vision for Strategy Execution.”

3 This responsibility typically requires a group of leaders who serve as final decision makers, not just the CX design team.

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Customer Journey Analytics overview

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Customer Journey Analytics is Adobe’s next-generation Analytics solution that lets you use the power of Analysis Workspace with data from Adobe Experience Platform. It can break down, filter, query, and visualize years’ worth of data, and is combined with Platform’s ability to hold all kinds of data schemas and types. Using the Experience Data Model (XDM) , data can be uniformly represented and organized, ready for combination and exploration. Adobe Experience Platform Query Service allows you to use SQL-compatible tools and frameworks to query and manipulate all your data.

The high-level Customer Journey Analytics architecture is shown here:

Customer Journey Analytics architecture explained in this section

Here is a video overview of Customer Journey Analytics:

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/30090/?quality=12

Comparing Customer Journey Analytics to Traditional Adobe Analytics

Customer Journey Analytics expands the scope of Adobe Analytics by offering easy to use cross-channel capabilities and removing limitations in previous versions of Adobe Analytics. Some notable improvements are:

Unlimited variables and events : The concepts of eVars, props, and events no longer exist. Data is primarily focused on dimensions and metrics. Datasets can have an unlimited number of unique dimensions and metrics.
Unlimited unique values : Adobe Experience Platform is not constrained to any unique limitations.
Alter historical data : Using Adobe Experience Platform, data can be removed or corrected.
Cross-report-suite data : Existing implementations from multiple datasets can be combined in Platform.

The initial release of Customer Journey Analytics includes many of the features included in Adobe Analytics. For a complete list, see Customer Journey Analytics feature support .

Key use cases

Customer Journey Analytics lets you:

See the customer in a journey context : You can view and analyze data sequentially, spanning multiple channels. Data from your call center, POS systems, and online properties can be combined into a single reporting view.
Make insights available to everyone : Democratize data access and let more people make business decisions with data-derived insights. Anyone in the organization with responsibility for any aspect of the customer experience can make real decisions faster, based on more complete data.
Harness the power of data science for your analysts : Customer Journey Analytics lets normal humans use data science to unlock deep insights and analysis.
Visualize and interact with your datasets using on demand reporting : Workspace can use any dataset from Adobe Experience Platform that conforms to some basic rules.
View non-web data : Workspace is no longer limited to a rigid definition of a ‘hit’ or ‘event’. Custom schemas allow complete control over data and definitions.
Exert greater control over your data manipulation : Change data that you have uploaded, create datasets, and import them into Workspace. Adobe Experience Platform provides querying, extracting, transforming, and loading tools through the Experience Platform Query Service.

Prerequisites

Before you can start using Customer Journey Analytics, the following prerequisites must be met:

Your organization has an active contract with Adobe Analytics for Select, Prime, or Ultimate with the Customer Journey Analytics add-on. If you are not sure what type of contract you have, or are not sure if you have the Customer Journey Analytics add-on, contact your Adobe Account Team.
Your organization has been provisioned for Adobe Experience Platform.
You can also purchase Customer Journey Analytics as a standalone product, without the need for Adobe Analytics.

Access Control

See Access Control .

Terminology updates

Several features in Customer Journey Analytics have been renamed, when compared to traditional Adobe Analytics, to align with industry standards. Some updated terminology includes:

Segments are now known as ‘Filters’.
Virtual report suites are now known as ‘Data views’.
Classifications are now known as ‘Lookup datasets’.
Customer attributes are now known as ‘Profile datasets’.
Hit containers are now known as ‘Event’ containers.
Visit containers are now known as ‘Session’ containers.
Visitor containers are now known as ‘Person’ containers.

Other capabilities built on Adobe Experience Platform

Customer Journey Analytics is one capability among many that rely on the Adobe Experience Platform. Several other capabilities, also built on Experience Platform, let you get the most out of your data.

Adobe Experience Platform lets you centralize and standardize customer data and content from any system and apply data science and machine learning to improve the design and delivery of personalized experiences. Customer data in the platform is stored as datasets,which consist of a schema and batches of data. For more detail on the platform, see Adobe Experience Platform Architecture Overview .

From Data Ingestion to direct SQL access, several components of the Experience Platform are central to Customer Journey Analytics and complement it:

Experience Platform Query Service : Use standard SQL to retrieve data from Adobe Experience Platform, such as Adobe solution data, customer 1st-party data, or any other Platform data. It is a server-less tool that allows you to join any datasets and capture the query results as a new dataset for use in reporting or for ingestion into Profile Service. You can use Experience Platform Query Service to build data analysis ecosystems, creating a picture of consumers across their various interaction channels. These channels might include Point-of-Sale systems, Web, Mobile, CRM systems, and so forth.
Real-time Customer Profile :
Identity Service

Working with data in Customer Journey Analytics:

Architecture and Integrations of Customer Journey Analytics:

In-person on-demand session

Data Views: Unlock the Power of Advanced Reporting Configuration in CJA - S103

English closed captions will be added in early April.

Managing Principal, Expert Solution Consultant, Adobe

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Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

Session resources

No resources available for this session

Session Resources

ABOUT THE SESSION

For your business to harness the value of all data at your disposal, you need a flexible way to prepare it for reporting and analysis. And when confronted with unexpected changes to underlying data, you want to be able to nimbly apply data manipulation and transformation on the fly. With Data Views in Customer Journey Analytics, you can easily define changes, which take effect the next time a report is run. No more needing to go through a data engineering project to build a new view or report!

In this session, learn about:

Virtual definition and configuration of dimensions and metrics
Data transformations applied at report run time
Virtual duplication of dimensions and metrics to support different analysis goals

Track: Analytics

Presentation Style: Tips and tricks

Audience Type: Digital analyst, Data scientist, Marketing analyst, Business decision maker, Data practitioner, Omnichannel architect

Technical Level: Intermediate, Advanced

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.

By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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Managing Principal, Expert Solution Consultant

At Adobe, Nils is a Product Specialist focusing on the Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics Solutions. This role involves engaging with clients that are interested in understanding their customers behaviors across digital and non-digital channels. This typically requires working with client data from multiple sources and performing advanced analysis on that data. Nils has been working with Adobe Analytics for over 17 years and has designed and built countless multi-channel datasets for advanced analysis purposes. Nils holds a B.S. in Management Information Systems from Dominican College. When not working, you can find Nils playing with his 2 children, training for or running a Spartan obstacle course race, mountain biking, skiing, ice skating, or training for or running in a triathlon, depending on the season.

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COMMENTS

Customer Journey Maps in the Enterprise Architecture Space
How Does It Affect Enterprise Architecture? If we look at the customer experience holistically, the interactions of one journey will usually involve a sequence of multiple steps. In other words, it is a process. Obviously, different customers undergo different interactions, and a customer journey map, therefore, is a series of processes.
Architecting and delivering optimal customer journeys
Enterprise and business architecture can unravel and prioritize customer journey initiatives early on by identifying and focusing foremost on the problematic and enabling capabilities of their ...
Architecting and Delivering Optimal Customer Journeys
Based on this article, a customer journey (like the personal loan customer journey map shown in Figure 1 above) will be variations on the following basic steps: Consider - the customer has a need and is considering purchasing a product; Evaluate - the customer is comparing prices and checks on a variety of products, including the organization ...
Value Streams and Customer Journeys
The main classes involved in Value Stream and Customer Journeys are as follows: Conceptual Layer. Value Stream - An an end to end collection of activities that delivers an outcome for a customer. Value Stage - An activity that, as part of a Value Stream, contributes to the delivery of an outcome for a customer. Logical Layer. Customer Journey - Represents a customer persona's typical ...
Understanding the Customer Journey in Business Architecture
Amazon, for example, has mastered this aspect by integrating customer journey mapping into their business framework. ... Improving Decision-Making with Enterprise Architecture: A Strategic ...
How to Integrate Customer Journey Maps with Business Architecture
[Originally presented during the Digital EA Summit 2021]ABACUS supports cloud-based enterprise architecture, roadmapping and analytics. More at: https://www....
Design and build experiences that matter with customer journey ...
The effect on enterprise architecture of transforming a customer journey Steps in the customer journey should be essentially enabled by modular business services that can be reused in multiple places.
How to Map Customer Journeys in Business Architecture
A customer journey map is a powerful tool that can help you align your customer journey with your business architecture. This holistic view of your organization's strategy, capabilities, value ...
What Are Customer Journey Architects, and Do You Need One?
A data management platform integrating data modeling, enterprise architecture and business process modeling will provide a more holistic and manageable approach, enabling efficient analysis and decision-making. For example, enterprise architecture, and by extension customer journey architecture, should influence strategic planning.
Architecting and Delivering Optimal Customer Journeys
By Daniel LambertMarketers and product managers are getting very good at the elaboration of enticing and optimal customer journeys. Their organizations use various agile methodologies in the hope of speeding things up and yet most of them struggle in delivering these journeys on time and within budget. This article intends to show how enterprise
Customer Journey with ArchiMate
A Customer Journey Map alike view can be modeled with ArchiMate. A customer journey can be modeled with the "Business Process" concept as shown in the diagram below. This customer-centric viewpoint is focusing on customer experience. This "service design" related approach is concentrating the "outside-in" development of the service that is to be designed. This highlights […]
Why You
Principle 2: Empowered cross-functional teams implement enterprise architecture. Creating people-process-technology bundles represents a dramatic shift from traditional management approaches in which IT people design and manage systems, functional leaders design and manage processes, and business unit managers design roles and manage people.
Demystifying Customer Journey Mapping, Breaking ...
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Optimize your customer journeys using personas and business ...
The use of Business architecture in combination with personas throughout a customer journey is an excellent method for modern organizations to keep up with this pace of disruption everywhere in ...
Customer Journey Mapping: Insights for the Modern Organization
If organizations provide the customer with the finest experience from start to finish, it will lead to increased customer satisfaction, higher sales and retention, lower end-to-end service costs, and improved employee morale. Thus, customer journey maps help: Increase consumer engagement. Remove ineffective touchpoints from the equation.
ArchiMate® 3.0 and Customer Journey Maps
A Customer Journey Map is a useful way to graphically represent the customer experience of an organization. It focuses on the touchpoints that characterize the customers' interaction with the services of the organization and helps you to optimize this experience. ArchiMate concepts can easily be used in customer journey maps.
Outside-in Architecture and Customer Journey Map
This is the part 2 of the article focusing on outside-in architecture. In the part 1, I focused on defining the customer journey mapping which is one of the key blueprints used for designing business from the outside-in. In this article, we will dig deeper into understanding what it takes to map a journey and the key building blocks that constitute a journey.
Providing Customer-Driven Value With a TOGAF® based Enterprise Architecture
Value stages have internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, and often the customer as participants. Value stages enable customer journey steps, are enabled by capabilities and operationalized by processes (level 2 or 3 usually). The TOGAF® Business Architecture: Value Stream Guide video provides a very clear and simple explanation, should ...
Outside-in Architecture and Customer Journey Map
The end-to-end process of architecting a business from customer point of view (outside-in) is illustrated in the diagram below. In the outside-in architecture, the first step is to capture the ...
Making the Customer Experience Real with Business Architecture
Informing CX design plans based on what is currently in place or planned for, per the business architecture. Providing an enterprise-level framework, describing what the organization does at a high level, which can be used as a foundation for identifying and planning customer automation and digitalization ... For each customer journey phase, it ...
Architecture and Integrations of Customer Journey Analytics
In this training we're going to talk about, the architecture of the customer journey analytics, and how it integrates with the Adobe Experience Platform. Customer journey analytics is basically analysis workspace integrated with AEP. Let's walk through this diagram how CJA leverages the technology in AEP.
Business Architecture Value Streams
A customer journey map is a UXD (user experience design) construct and is a highly valuable artifact. A value stream can become the basis for the steps a customer takes - if it is a coarse grain business value stream, it should be decomposed to lower levels of granularity - and then add the customer feelings and emotions at each stage.
Customer Journey Analytics overview
Admin. Customer Journey Analytics is Adobe's next-generation Analytics solution that lets you use the power of Analysis Workspace with data from Adobe Experience Platform. It can break down, filter, query, and visualize years' worth of data, and is combined with Platform's ability to hold all kinds of data schemas and types.
Data Views: Unlock the Power of Advanced Reporting Configuration in CJA
With Data Views in Customer Journey Analytics, you can easily define changes, which take effect the next time a report is run. No more needing to go through a data engineering project to build a new view or report! ... Business decision maker, Data practitioner, Omnichannel architect. Technical Level: Intermediate, Advanced. This content is ...