Benefit #4 Journey Management creates a unified language across teams

A unified language is a pre-requisite to transformation success. Journey Management is an ideal framework to align your business around the inclusive language of the customer. Here's how...

Jul 25, 2023

When working to transform a business, unified language is important… Clearly defined terms of reference that everyone understands is a powerful tool. A unified language allows cross-functional teams and a variety of roles to work together effectively to solve innovation challenges. It is a key ingredient for a successful transformation.

This article explains how Journey Management supports a unified language which increases your chances of transformation success…

A recap of our foundational benefits

In my first three articles on the benefits of Journey Management I outlined key foundational benefits of Journey Management.

We can build on these foundations to unify language in 3 ways...

Unified Design
Unified Content & process
Unity through Inclusive Language

Unified Design

We’ve seen how Theydo creates a single source of truth for CX information. (See Benefit #1) Your CX information can now live in a centralised, real time application that can easily be accessed by all teams.

A key benefit of a single source of truth is alignment on the design of key CX artifacts.

Consistent design for journey maps & personas

Up until now, journey mapping basically starts with a blank canvas. This leads to wildly different styles and formats

The same is true for Personas

This creates additional cognitive effort. It’s like a website with a different theme for each webpage. It’s just difficult to compare information that is so varied in style.

Theydo creates a consistent style across all journey maps and personas.

There is plenty of room for customisation… you can change colours, layouts, pictures, etc. But using a single app provides a structure that brings consistency across all of your customer journeys.

Instant win!

For companies with CX teams working in silos using inconsistent approaches, the benefits for this are instant! Collect up the information that currently exists across teams and port this into Theydo.

Within a week you can have all this information aligned at and your fingertips.

Unified Content and process

This is the second way to unify language with Journey Management.

As we bring all journey maps and personas into one app, this provides a great opportunity for teams to align on content and process. Theydo is flexible and can accommodate different content.

Consistent content is the start to a unified teams process. A clear set of guidelines on the content that will be collected in journey maps and personas is a first step in defining roles and expectations across CX roles.

A couple of examples:

Jobs to be done
Your teams might agree that each persona will include the Job to be done for that person, with examples of what good looks like and how to collect this information through customer interviews, this defines an approach to follow when creating a persona and a mechanism to validate this across teams.

North star metrics
Your teams might agree that each macro customer journey will have a north star metric, as a single measure of success across the journey. The teams can provide examples of high quality north stars and a process to define this with the team and leadership. This determines how teams will plan for and measure CX success and link this to business value.

Design Ops roadmap

If you are looking for more consistency across teams, using Journey Management to define content and processes is a great first step. And having a single source of truth allows you to monitor your process across teams.

The key here is to bringing everyone involved in CX together to define current and future ways of working together, so they best suit your team’s size, experience and context.

Unity through inclusive language

We have seen how we can use Journey Management to unify the designs, content and processes for CX roles. Once we have this centralised, consistent information there is a bigger opportunity to unify language across the business, to support a successful transformation.

The language of the customer is inclusive

At this point, we now have:

A single source of truth, that everyone in the business can access
A levelled journey framework, that helps us see our customer’s experience at different levels
Consistency in our customer journey and persona designs, content and process, which provides a much clearer picture of CX across the business

We can use this CX information to frame our business innovation through the customer lens, which provides the perfect unified language to bring your teams together to innovate.

A shared understanding of your business goals in terms of customer needs, designs, pains and opportunities will be understandable and resonate with every person in your business across leadership, tech, sales, marketing, customer support and success and finance & HR.

A customer focussed narrative works across silos… When business decisions are brought back to the customer need that we are solving for and the business gain this creates, it is far less likely to get bogged down in technical details, difficult roadmap prioritization, analysis paralysis or the 100 other challenges that block innovation.

You now have the foundations in place to develop this… and that’s what we will look into further in the following articles.

Summary

Journey Management is an excellent framework to develop a unified language for your business. Language is unified at 3 levels:

Design: A consistent style across all journey maps and personas reduces cognitive load, increases speed and accuracy. For CX teams working in silos, this benefit can be realised instantly.
Content and process: Unifying content and process for CX teams brings more clarity and consistency to our CX work. Journey Management a great starting point for design ops.
Inclusive language of the customer: We now have everything in place to base innovation around customer language, which is an ideal language for inclusivity.

About me

My name is Simon Conway, A Journey Management Consultant: I help digital leaders succeed with Journey Management. I provide:

Education: For teams new to journey management
Pilot development: For CX and Product leaders making a case for Journey Management and win buy-in for
Scaling and transformation design: For Digital Leaders looking to embed journey management across your business
Coaching: 1:1 tailored support, helping digital leaders to succeed with Journey Management