Thunderhead argues that businesses should shift their focus from managing the customer journey to understanding the customer-managed journey. A customer's journey consists of interactions they choose across multiple channels and cannot be controlled by a business. However, businesses can gain insight into the actual customer journey by comparing it to journey maps and using data from real interactions to analyze customer behavior and take real-time action. This allows businesses to improve the customer experience at each stage of their personal journey.

1. WHITE PAPER
Customer-managed
journeys:
Beyondthemap
toactionable
journeyinsight

2. www.thunderhead.com
Customer-Managed Journeys
WHITE PAPER
How do you
manage the
customer journey?
It’s an important question because many businesses
place the customer journey, and their view of it, as the
central piece of their efforts to improve customer expe-
rience.
In the age of the empowered consumer, Thunderhead
believes that the answer is quite simple: you don’t man-
age the journey, your customers do.
A journey: the interactions your customer makes with
your brand at touchpoints to address their needs, based
on choices they make which cannot be managed. How-
ever, they can be understood. The role of the organisa-
tion is to enable each customer to move from interac-
tion to interaction, seamlessly, while delivering value at
each stage of his or her personal journey. This is the
essence of the customer-managed journey.
Thunderhead believes that businesses need to shift
their focus to the customer-managed journey as op-
posed to the static, “mapped” customer journey. This
means moving from the idea that the customer journey
is a controllable process to one that acknowledges that
the customer is ultimately in charge. By understanding
actual customer behaviour, businesses will gain what’s
really important, customer journey insight, which will
help them take action to create conversations that ad-
dress customer needs in context and in real time.
Empowered customers
and journey maps
Today, the modern customer is more empowered than in
the days when businesses had monopolised information
about their products and services. Consumers are not
only more aware and have better access to information,
they are also more demanding and willing to share and
interact with businesses. What’s more, the opportunities
to talk directly with businesses over multiple channels
and touchpoints have increased.
With empowered customers and a proliferation of chan-
nels, businesses turned to the concept of a customer
journey as a way of better understanding and improving
the experience they provide customers. Many brands
have “mapped” the customer journey, making an intense
and detailed effort to record a series of interactions be-
tween a business and customer. By understanding the
process and the touchpoints where they think customers
interact, it’s hoped that the business can then focus on
the interactions and touchpoints within the journey,
analyze what’s happening, and make improvements to
the experience.
Forrester Research’s John Browne points out that while
many enterprises have embraced the process of map-
ping, these same enterprises have struggled to put their
maps to any meaningful use. But why is this?
First, journey mapping is based largely on the assump-
tion that customer experience is an unchanging process
that can be controlled and thus captured as a standard-
isedprocess. However,acustomer’sjourneyisnotasim-
ple and finite series of steps, but is in fact a complex (and
sometimes contradictory) set of interactions over multi-
ple channels. How can one hope to “map” this with any
accuracy?
How you know it’s a customer-managed journey:
Actual – Is your view of the customer journey ‘in the moment’ and based on what your custom-
ers actually do in real interactions that happen across all your channels?
Analysis – Can your business use the actual journey for analysis to gain insight that improves
the way it meets customer needs?
Actionable – Does the journey data live in systems that enable you to take real time action in
response to individual customer needs?

3. www.thunderhead.com
Customer-Managed Journeys
WHITE PAPER
And finally, because journey maps are static, they do not
offer the ability to understand how a change in behav-
iour or customer need impacts on how that customer
prefers to progress through their journey, over time and
in real-time.
Have businesses wasted their time and effort building
maps to help them understand the how, when and where
of a customer journey? On the surface it may seem so,
but Thunderhead believes that the customer journey
map can be instrumental to improving experience, so
long as businesses start from the right assumption and
that the map is primed to reveal the actual customer
journey.
Customer-managed journeys
Thunderhead believes that businesses, when thinking
about customer journeys, needs to start from the as-
sumption that “you don’t manage the journey, your cus-
tomers do”. This is the idea of the customer-managed
journey, where every interaction your customer makes
with your brand should be based on a choice they make
rather than the businesses desire that they follow a pre-
scribed process, often expressed as a marketing or sales
funnel.
Once you let go of the idea of seeing a journey as a pro-
cess, then customer journey mapping gains greater use-
fulness in the improvement of customer experience.
Specifically, Thunderhead believes that the customer
journey map should be the model against which one can
understand the actual customer journey. By comparing
the map to actual behaviour, you can create the most im-
portant element – customer journey insight – that helps
you take action to improve customer experience.
Second, journey maps by themselves, are static and
come from an “inside out” view – what the business
hopes or wants a customer to do based on their systems
and processes. In reality, customers can be on multiple
journeys at the same time and may even switch between
them. An organisation must use customer insight to see
the journey from the customer’s perspective, taking an
outside-in approach to avoid analyzing a journey pre-
scribed by the business.
Thunderhead’s Engage-
ment 3.0 research among
2,007 UK customers
revealed:
• 52% of customers surveyed say that they’ve
seen no improvement in their relationship
with businesses in the last three years, and
25% say it has become worse
• 83% of customers appreciate receiving per-
sonalised and relevant information
• 89% of customers have an improved opinion
of businesses that remember previous inter-
actions with them
• 29% will trade their customer purchase re-
cords to get through to the contact center
first time round
Improving The Customer Journey
Many businesses have focused on the performance of specific touchpoints in an ef-
fort to improve customer experience. As journeys happen over time and over multi-
ple touchpoints, McKinsey and Co. have shown that focusing on the journey – inter-
actions over time and multiple touchpoints – has greater impact on business
performance.
• Journey performance has a 30%-40% greater impact on customer satisfaction
than touchpoint performance.
• Journey performance has a 20%-30% greater impact on value and business out-
comes than touchpoint performance.
Source - The Truth about Customer Experience, McKinsey research, Harvard Business Review , 2013
+
+
CUSTOMER
SATISFACTION
VALUE & BUSINESS
OUTCOMES
30% - 40%
20% - 30%
Journey Performance

4. About Thunderhead
At Thunderhead, our mission is to make brands and their customers work in harmony. Thunderhead
is a privately owned and British-founded software company that has become, since launching in 2004,
a recognised global leader in the customer communications and customer engagement solutions markets.
Headquartered in London, Thunderhead has a client base of over 200 global brands, serving its
customers from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Thunderhead.com
@ThunderheadONE
linkedin.com/company/thunderhead-.-com
Copyright © Thunderhead 2015 All rights reserved. Version 1.0 (UK). Thunderhead endeavours to ensure that the information
within this document is correct and fairly stated, but does not accept any liability for any errors or omissions.
Customer-Managed Journeys
WHITE PAPER
The result of taking an “outside-in” approach can be
summed up in three concepts.
• Actual–Isyourviewofthecustomerjourneybased
on funnel based processes or on what your custom-
ers actually do in real time interactions across all
your channels? Most journey maps end up gather-
ing virtual dust because they don’t reflect what is
actually happening. The journey map you create
needs to “live” in a system where one can see cus-
tomer interactions and how these diverge or con-
form to the expected journey you have mapped.
The mapped customer journey is set up as a model
and the customer interactions are collected and set
against journey stages and touchpoints so busi-
nesses understand when a customer enters and
falls out of a journey.
• Analysis – Can your business use the actual jour-
ney for analysis to gain insight that improves the
way your business meets customer needs at an in-
dividual or aggregated customer level? Once you
understand and possess customer journey insight,
then you can analyze real customer behaviour at
your touchpoints. The point of journey mapping is
to understand behaviour at a stage, or specific
touchpoint, with the hope of improving the experi-
ence at that stage or touchpoint. Actual journey be-
haviour mapped against your journey stages and
touchpoints make that analysis and recommenda-
tion of change for improvement possible.
• Actionable – Does customer journey insight “live” in
systems that enable you to take action in response to
individual customer needs? If you are going to im-
prove experience based on analysis of customer
journey insight, it stands to reason that you must
have a way of turning the insight and analysis into
an actionable recommendation to meet a customer
need. As the journey map needs to “live” in a system
so to does the recommended action. Fortunately,
there are not only systems that can action recom-
mendations, but they can do so in real-time and in
the moment when a customer interacts with your
business.
Asolutionfocusedontruecustomerengagementwillen-
able companies to continually optimise and adapt cus-
tomer journeys based on the customer’s individual re-
quirements and behaviours. This, in turn, will enable a
brand to have a clear view of all interactions, leading to a
positive journey outcome down the line.
To summarise, customer journeys are not about the
map, but the insight your business gains when it under-
stands and can take action from the actual customer
journey. Understanding interactions at touchpoints,
analyzing interaction data and recommending action in
real-time – these technologies exist now to make jour-
ney maps become alive and useful in the cause of im-
proving customer experience. And the return here for
your business will be a whole that is far greater than the
mere sum of its parts: increased retention, loyalty and
advocacy through successfully building customer en-
gagement.