Leadership for Customer Lifecycle & Journey Architecture

I've seen some variation on who takes the lead in architecting the over-arching customer lifecycle and journey maps -- sometimes the CMO or Marketing, sometimes the head of Customer Success.

What do people think about the following two:

Which stakeholders should be involved?
Who should lead the initiative?

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Comments

David Ellin

Completely agree with @Alex Turkovic unless the customer is small and the executive is fully engaged all the time. Sometimes customer contacts won't speak freely in front of their own execs! Instead, I'd hold an EBR (executive-level only) on a less frequent basis.

Alex Turkovic

Agree completely with the Director-level callout. I've also had managers involved on occasion to great success as they are typically very well connected with the frontline struggles which exist both internally and on the customer side.

This may be un-popular, but my recommendation is NOT to include any exec-level presence, except for maybe a kickoff session. This avoids coloring the discussion to gain favor in the exec's eyes. Just sayin'.

David Ellin

@Sham Sao, I believe the journey mapping process must be a cross-functional collaboration led by the CS team (typically at the Director-level on my team). Collaborators/contributors should include sales (and pricing team/sales enablement, if separate), marketing, operations, product development and support.

My thought on why CS should lead the effort is because the journey map must be approached from the customer's perspective. if not, you'll include gaps that will turn into issues. Everyone gets a seat at the table to share their perspective and together, you get a great map. From there, I believe in sharing the journey map with a few select clients for their feedback and collaboration. They will tell you what you missed!

Once complete, it should be shared with the execs from each group for their review and buy-in.

Sidd

Great question @Sham Sao - I believe the Chief Customer Officer should led the product as they are the ones that work from an Outside-in perspective and understands the customers' voice.

With regards to other stakeholders involved - I would include CRO, CMO, CEO, CPO (Chief Product Officer) and the Head of Customer Support . I may consider including key stakeholders from RevOps team to comprehend data insights, identify major benchmarks/standards and hence identify a pattern to achieve consistency.

Curious to know from more senior leaders in this community.

Alex Turkovic

Having done this a few times before - I think who actually facilitates the exercise should have less to do with their position/org in the company vs. a passion for the customer journey and ability to facilitate cross-functional (i.e. non-politically motivated) workshops.

That said, I do feel strongly that the function best suited to spearheading this kind of effort lies somewhere in operations, whether it be Customer Experience, Services, Support, etc. The reason for this is that these orgs typically have a very good sense for the downstream noise & issues that arise along a customer's journey vs. those who are more towards the front of the process.

The way I have selected participants for these workshops in the past was through A) my own knowledge of the org and key players Exec/Director engagement and recommendations. The latter is a great way to get buy in from leaders around the company for your initiative as well as to have them be able to select who they would like their representative in the workshop to be. I would recommend not more than 1 or 2 participants per org attending.

Happy to rap about it some more if you like in terms of what I have seen work and not work.