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Why customer journey analysis has become unavoidable

· 9 min read

Customers judge the whole experience, across every channel. Organizations are built by department. A journey analysis is the one view that shows the organization the way its customers see it, and where the friction and the cost really are.

A customer wants to change one detail of an order. They start on the website, which cannot do it. They call, wait, explain, and are told to send an email. The email is answered two days later by someone who asks for information they already gave on the phone. In the end it is sorted out, and every department involved did its job correctly.

That is the problem in one story. Each step made sense to the team that owned it. Nobody owned the whole, and the whole is the only thing the customer experienced. Customer journey analysis exists to make that whole visible, and it has moved from a good idea to something most organizations can no longer do without.

The principle is old. Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 that “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He was arguing about trade policy, not service design, but the sentence describes the journey view exactly: the organization’s parts matter only as far as they serve the person at the end of them.

What changed

Three things changed, and together they make the analysis hard to avoid.

Customers now move between channels as a matter of course. They read on the website, ask on a messaging app, call when something goes wrong and sometimes still come to the counter. They expect each channel to know what happened in the others, and they notice immediately when it does not.

Customers also compare you with the best experience they have had anywhere, not with your competitors. Someone who can rebook a flight in two taps on their phone does not understand why changing a delivery address takes three days, and they are not interested in the reasons. Governments have recognized the same comparison: as long ago as 1993, a US executive order required federal agencies to “benchmark customer service performance against the best customer experience provided in the private sector,” as the 2021 order that renewed the effort recalls.

And switching is easy. In most markets the cost of leaving is a few minutes, so the cost of friction is paid quietly, in customers who simply stop coming back. That is expensive. Harvard Business Review, summarizing research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, reports that “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” The range is wide because businesses differ, but the direction is not in doubt.

Public services are not exempt. Citizens bring the same expectations to a government office that they bring to a shop, and the gap is felt in trust rather than in revenue. The 2021 US order put it in so many words: lost time “operates as a kind of tax—a ‘time tax’—and it imposes a serious burden on our people as they interact with the Government.”

One journey, many departments

The customer sees one path from the first question to the last follow-up. Inside the organization, that path crosses sales, operations, finance, customer service and often an outside partner or two. Each owns its part, measures its part and improves its part.

The places where it breaks are almost never inside a department. They are in the hand-offs between them: the information that does not travel, the case that waits in a queue nobody watches, the rule that one team applies and another team has never heard of. No department can see those breaks from where it sits, because each one sits on a boundary.

Measuring one touchpoint at a time does not reveal them; it hides them. Three McKinsey partners, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2013, warned that a narrow focus on satisfaction at individual moments “can create a distorted picture,” suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are, and drawing attention away from the end-to-end journey.

A journey analysis is the one view that crosses all the boundaries at once, in the order the customer crosses them.

What a journey analysis is

At its simplest, it is a careful description of what a particular kind of customer does to get a particular thing done: the stages they go through, the points where they touch the organization, what they are trying to achieve at each step, and how it feels to them.

The useful version adds the inside view. Behind each step the customer sees, it shows the process that serves it: who does what, which systems are involved, where the work waits, where it is checked and where it is handed on. That second layer is what turns a description of the experience into a diagnosis of its causes.

It is built from evidence, not from opinion. Complaints and their reasons, call records, the time cases actually take, what customers say when they are asked directly, and what front-line staff know and are rarely asked. A journey drawn in a workshop from what managers believe happens is a picture of the organization’s assumptions, and it is usually more flattering than the truth.

How much more flattering was measured long ago. When Bain & Company surveyed 362 firms, 80% believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. Asked the same question, customers said only 8% did. The study dates from 2005, but the gap it named, between what management believes and what customers live, is exactly the gap a journey analysis closes.

What it reveals

When the two layers are laid side by side, the same findings appear again and again.

Steps that are repeated because information collected once is not shared. Long waits that no one notices, because each team’s own part is fast. Dead ends where a customer is sent elsewhere with no one following up. Rules that make sense inside the organization and none at all from outside it.

And a cost most organizations never measure: the work created by failure. The second call because the first one did not resolve the issue, the complaint, the correction, the refund, the escalation. The systems thinker John Seddon gave it a name, failure demand, which the Open University’s course on service management defines as “demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer.” In one study of 1,200 calls to a council housing service, 80% were failure demand.

That was one service. A larger and more recent figure comes from the UK’s National Audit Office, reporting in 2024 on the tax authority, HMRC: “HMRC has estimated that 72% of calls in 2023-24 were caused by ‘failure demand’, which includes calls caused by HMRC’s process failures or delays, customers chasing progress and customers’ errors. This proportion has increased from 65% in 2018-19.” Nearly three calls in four, in other words, existed because something earlier in the journey had gone wrong.

That work is expensive, and much of it disappears once the step that caused it is fixed. A journey analysis is often the first time an organization sees how much of its effort goes into repairing its own friction.

From map to change

A map changes nothing by itself. The value is in what follows, and what follows is a piece of change management.

Choose a few moments, not all of them: the points where the most customers struggle, or where the failure costs the most. Trying to fix the whole journey at once spreads the effort too thin to fix anything.

Give each chosen moment an owner who can act across departments. A problem that sits on a boundary between two teams will not be solved by either team alone; it needs someone with the authority to change how both of them work, and a governance forum where that person can bring decisions.

Fix the process first and the technology second. Many journey problems are solved by changing who does what, what information travels with a case, or a rule nobody needed. Where technology is part of the answer, a new form, a connected system, a better app, it is built by a technology partner, Plasis or another, to fit a process that has already been redesigned rather than to automate one that is broken.

Then measure from the customer’s side: how long the whole thing took, how many contacts it needed, whether it was done right the first time. The share of contacts that are failure demand is one of the most honest measures there is, because it falls only when the journey really improves. Measures taken one department at a time will keep telling you everything is fine.

Common mistakes

The most common is the beautiful poster. The journey is mapped with care, printed large, hung on a wall and admired, and nobody is responsible for changing anything on it. Within a year it describes a journey that no longer exists.

The second is mapping the ideal journey instead of the real one. It is tempting to draw what should happen; the value is entirely in seeing what does.

The third is starting with the app. A new digital channel laid over a broken process gives customers a faster way to reach the same dead end.

How a strategy reaches the customer

Most strategies say something about customers. Journey analysis is how that sentence becomes specific: which customers, which moments, which changes, owned by whom. It connects what the leadership team intends with what a customer actually experiences on an ordinary Tuesday.

If your organization suspects that its customers find it harder to deal with than it should be, the first step is modest: one important journey, analyzed honestly from both sides, with the evidence that already exists. That is the Map stage of how we work, and it is useful on its own.

Sources

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