“Word Nerd Wednesday” is a weekly series that uses language to help us think differently and solve old problems in new ways.
While designing a survey on customer journeys, I started debating with colleagues what counts as a “journey”. My first thought was, of course, to check the dictionary. #wordnerd)
The formal definition of journey includes explicit start and end points. If you had to articulate a start and end for each of your core customer journeys, could you? What about employee journeys? Whose perspective do those definitions reflect – yours or theirs?
Take onboarding. In one workshop it took more than an hour for my client’s stakeholders to agree on when this journey should be declared “done.” Group A wanted to use the calendar…90 days from when the buyer signed the contract. Group B didn’t like that. Few B2B clients, they argued, and even fewer users, remember or care when paperwork is signed. Group B wanted to use client skill level or mental state as the marker. We’re done done when a user feels confident doing their work with our tools without help from us. It’s less concrete but more customer-centric.
Has your organization wrestled with this issue? If not with customer experience, perhaps with employeeexperience? How do you manage a journey with ambiguous start and end points?
