User Tested

CHAPTER 9Every Team Owns the Experience: Optimizing the Holistic Customer Journey

An experience begins before someone becomes a customer and builds over time across the holistic customer journey. And so while many experiences within the overall customer journey happen in isolation, it's important to remember that they all add up to one overarching experience customers have with you.

Delightful experiences cement loyalty, but that loyalty can be yanked as soon as a terrible experience arises. For this reason, it's incredibly important to continue to hone and refine the experience you provide once people decide to convert, purchase, sign up, or otherwise indicate that they want to do business with you.

Consider something like air travel. The experience of a single traveler is impacted by a variety of activities owned by dozens of different working groups. She may use the app to book or rebook, a kiosk to check in, and chat with a customer service rep at the gate. She may get emails or text messages updating her on her flight or need to use a chat function on the website to confirm a detail of her itinerary. Then there's the in‐flight experience, including printed materials and instructional safety videos. You get the picture. The team who works on text messaging is unlikely to work closely with the team who edits the in‐flight magazine, but both of them contribute to the overall experience.

Ongoing customer engagement and the creation of delightful experiences doesn't live in ...