The role of governance: Successful customer journey operations

The first article in this three-part series was “Collaboration across people, processes, data and platforms.”

Creating a compelling and rewarding customer experience is top of mind for most brands these days, as it is common knowledge that consumers value the journey almost as much as the products and services they buy. That said, maintaining a consistently great customer experience across multiple channels over time requires more than a well-articulated strategy and an initial agreement to move in this direction. It requires a systematic approach to customer journey management and operations that utilizes governance to maintain standards over time.

In the first article of this three-part series, we explored the collaborative aspects of customer journey operations. Now, in this second article, we are going to look at governance as an aspect of successfully creating, managing, and improving the customer experience utilizing tools like customer journey orchestration.

Governance structure

Let’s start by talking about how we should structure governance of our customer journey operations, as this will have a big influence on how the work is prioritized, initiated, implemented, and improved. Governance in the context of customer journey operations refers to the set of policies, procedures, and controls that an organization establishes to ensure effective and efficient management of its marketing efforts towards customer journey orchestration. It involves defining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes to ensure that the organization’s marketing activities are aligned with its overall business objectives.

Benefits of a strong governance structure

There are many reasons why a governance structure is valuable for customer journey operations, but some of the most important ones include the breadth and depth that CJO requires in terms of coordination and cooperation.  Here are some other benefits:

1. Improved efficiency. Governance helps streamline the customer journey operation process, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. By establishing clear roles and responsibilities, organizations can avoid confusion and duplication of effort, enabling their teams to focus on high-value tasks.
2. Enhanced accountability. Governance promotes accountability by clearly defining roles and responsibilities, making it easier to track progress and identify areas for improvement. This helps organizations ensure that they are meeting their goals and objectives, and makes it easier to address any issues or challenges that arise.
3. Better decision-making. Governance enables better decision-making by providing a structured approach to prioritizing activities and initiatives related to customer journey orchestration. By establishing clear policies and procedures related to orchestration that may span multiple teams, platforms, and product and service lines, organizations can make more informed decisions that are aligned with both business KPIs and customer expectations.
4. Increased transparency. Governance promotes transparency by providing visibility into the organization’s marketing activities and performance. If your organization is particularly siloed, this is especially important.
5. Improved compliance. Governance ensures compliance with relevant laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR and CCPA for consumer data privacy), and industry standards and regulations (e.g. HIPAA for healthcare), helping organizations mitigate risks and adhere to their ethical standards. Customer journey orchestration’s multi-channel approach and emphasis on personalization can often exacerbate the risks here.

A sample governance structure

While the exact governance structure will vary from organization to organization, here are five key areas to incorporate into your customer journey operations, each with a brief definition:

• Vision and strategy. It all starts here, with the overall vision and strategy for how customer journey orchestration can benefit customers and best achieve company goals. This is best when done collaboratively and shared with all teams in a transparent way. While these elements may not change frequently, it is important to pay attention to both external and internal factors that may cause them to be revisited and adjusted.
• Roles and responsibilities. Customer journey operations governance also ensures that the right people and roles are defined and that responsibilities are clear between teams and departments. After all, with the level of coordination that customer journey orchestration requires when done on an omnichannel basis across an enterprise, clear definitions are critical.
• Standards and practices.
  This area of governance is a particularly important one, and it is an area that governance teams are uniquely positioned to play a key role. After all, one of the benefits of governance teams are their ability to take a “step back” to look at the bigger picture and how the work is being performed, not just what works is being done. Standards and practices, therefore are important to define as well as to refine as lessons are learned.
• Resources. This area includes both the teams of people that participate in customer journey orchestration and operations, as well as the technology tools and platforms that support it.
• Measurements. This area includes how goals are measured, as well as the methodologies used to measure them. It also includes the data sources and methods of data collection that is used to improve customer journey orchestration.
• Continuous improvement. Finally, we have the area where we create a feedback loop to take our measurements, lessons learned, and other valuable data and information to make sure we are continually optimizing our efforts. This is where change management is incorporated into governance and where teams need to be particularly careful about how change occurs, as far as communication, documentation, and enforcement.

Think of governance as the underlying structure that supports your organization’s customer journey operations. With the right components in the right places, your brands’ customer journey orchestration efforts will have the greatest opportunity for success.

Dig deeper: Why marketers should care about customer journey orchestration

Federation and participation

When a solid governance structure is in place your teams now have the guidance, processes, and measurements of success necessary to put your customer journey orchestration efforts into action. Customer journey orchestration, and its related operations, requires many teams across marketing and communication channels, departments, and product or service lines to work together. It simply isn’t practical to merge all these teams into one, nor would that be effective for their individual work. Therefore we need a federated approach to allow autonomy and coordination at the same time.

What exactly do we mean by federation, and why is this important?

Thus, federation refers to an approach where multiple teams or departments within an organization work together to create a cohesive and integrated customer experience across all touchpoints that may span multiple steps in the customer journey from initial acquisition to long-term customers. This involves aligning marketing strategies, tactics, and tools to deliver a consistent and personalized journey for customers, regardless of the channel or device they use.

There are a few reasons why a federated approach is important and why it can create successful customer journey operations. Let’s look at a few now:

1. Improved Ccustomer experience. The very spirit of successful customer journey orchestration is embodied by this federated approach! By working together across teams and departments, organizations can create a more cohesive and integrated customer experience that is aligned with their overall business objectives. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue.
2. Enhanced flexibility. A federated approach enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing customer preferences and market trends, while maintaining subject matter expertise in their own areas, because both of these things are incredibly valuable. By working together across teams and departments, organizations can respond more rapidly to customer needs and preferences, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Improved collaboration and agility. A federated approach fosters collaboration and communication across teams and departments, enabling organizations to work together more effectively towards common goals while still being held to their own measures of success that may be specific to their channel, department, or product/service line. This leads to a more cohesive and integrated customer experience, increased productivity, and improved business outcomes while not sacrificing more granular accountability. It also enables them to be more agile and adaptable in their marketing efforts, leading to increased customer satisfaction and revenue.
4. Improved data-driven decision-making. When done well, a federated approach enables organizations to leverage shared data and insights to make more informed decisions that are aligned with their business objectives. This leads to improved customer outcomes, increased revenue, and a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This can also have 

Of course, extremely siloed organizations with entrenched team members who look at other teams as the “competition” are the enemy of this type of approach. It is critical that leaders take caution when approaching difficult situations, but the benefits to increasing collaboration will benefit both the employees themselves as well as the end customers.

A critical component

As you can see, governance within customer journey operations is a critical component that ensures that all the teams and their respective channels are aligned and working towards the same goals. While everyone’s intentions might be good, over time differences can manifest themselves within teams and other stakeholders. Governance is designed to standardize approaches and maintain consistency, open dialogue, and ensure everyone is focused on the same outcomes.

In the next and final article in this series, we’re going to be discussing another important aspect of customer journey operations: how we create feedback loops and build agility into our processes to continuously improve the customer experience and ensure that our customer journeys are optimized.