BCG’s customer journey offering helps organizations implement fundamental new ways of working and achieve next-level customer experience. Our scalable approach focuses on rethinking existing, often siloed, initiatives and shifting to customer-centric value streams, agile operations, and the latest modular data and architecture capabilities.
At BCG, the customer journey goes far deeper than customer journey mapping. Customer journeys should synthesize and empower new ways of working in order to drive maximum transformation and fundamentally reorganize the way that change is delivered. Moreover, a successful customer journey strategy breaks down siloed initiatives and reinforces a bionic company—powerfully combining agile human capabilities with front-to-back digitization, smart automation, and integrated data and analytics.
Customer journey mapping and experience design are indeed critical components of a successful customer journey strategy. This work includes deep “voice of the customer” research and an ongoing process of customer testing. Organizations must approach journey mapping with a human-centered, zero-based design approach and a clear view of customers, intermediaries, employees, and other constituents.
In addition, organizations need to focus on five key pillars:
Updating Legacy Technology and Data. Current technology and data resources are often unable to support the needed transformation. Organizations need to focus on updating technology to enable direct client communication, aggregated across critical data sources, as well as an integrated data and analytics program.
Process and Operating Model. For the development of a successful customer journey strategy, organizations must reimagine internal processes, embrace new operating structures and modifications to old policies and procedures, and be ready to enhance current products and services.
Digital Technology Adoption. A critical component is the adoption of emerging digital technologies, including robotic process automation and machine learning, artificial intelligence and chatbots, and overall omnichannel solutions.
Change Management. This requires value- and outcome-based measurement and governance, strong support from senior executives and business owners, and a realignment of both the funding model and performance management.
Agile Delivery. Internal design capabilities, the adoption of agile ways of working, and multidisciplinary, collocated teams focused on high-value delivery should be embedded in customer journey strategy.
BCG offers customer journey solutions, with a powerful focus on digital potential, through a range of entry points:
Our customer journey consulting combines BCG’s traditional hypothesis-driven approach with a discovery-driven technological perspective, mixing strategy and design engineering for exceptional outcomes. We define, develop, and enable ambitious pilots, minimum viable products (MVPs), and at-scale digital product and service experiences.
The experiences we deliver are grounded in human-centered design, closely aligned with business strategy, and based on an iterative, agile approach to expedite delivery and accelerate time to value. We help clients lead ambitious change programs in parallel with the strategy, culture, leadership, talent, organizational, and governance changes that are critical to long-term sustainability.
BCG’s multidisciplinary teams are made up of customer journey consultants with deep expertise, human-centric designers, people and organizational strategists, agile coaches, and instructional designers. We also build strategic partnerships to achieve the goals of our clients.
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BCG also brings to bear the talents of our digital specialty businesses, working together in interdisciplinary teams, to extend the range of strategic capabilities:
Starting and scaling these journey transformations, he says, requires the three key P’s: people, people, people.
BCG partnered with an Australian bank to create a completely digital experience for banking customers with their customer journey program.
BCG helped one of India’s largest property-and-casualty and health insurers rethink its customer journeys all along the value chain to achieve dramatic improvements in turnaround times and in overall operational productivity.
The digitization of the company’s core processes for customer acquisition and claims resolution resulted in an overall reduction in turnaround time of 99%.
Digitization of these core processes also enabled overall productivity enhancements of up to 40% in frontline operations.
To reach scale, companies must transform their operating model.
Reconfiguring the company around journeys does more than improve the customer experience. It advances digital transformation and strengthens the capacity for ongoing change.
Technology can help companies improve customer service by tracking the channels customers have used and the information they’ve shared about their needs and problems.
