The agency world is filled with visions of perfectly joined-up customer journeys. With the help of strategists, creatives and experience specialists, we look at the origins and plausibility of that vision.
’360° views of consumers...’ ’Perfection at every touchpoint...’ ’Fully joined-up customer journeys...’ Listen to the goals of marketers and their clients right now and it’s easy to get the picture of a single big dream: a technology-enabled, universal stitching-together of just about everything to provide faultless flows through streamlined brand worlds.
But whose dream is this? Where does it come from? And is anyone getting anywhere close to realizing it?
Better is better
As M&C Saatchi London’s chief data strategy officer James Calvert says, a version of the joined-up dream is quite natural, thanks to a “general, though not always stated, belief that when you have things working together, performance will be better,” and that, ”if we make everything look like it’s all part of the same thing, it’ll work better”.
Seems true enough. But as Avery Hennings, lead experience specialist at The Marketing Practice, puts it: “We can all sit here and say that a joined-up experience is better than a fragmented one… what we’re missing is the ’why’.”
It’s not customers who are leading the charge; certainly, words like ‘joined-up experience’ aren’t on many of their lips. And a quick poll of our assembled experts suggests that it’s not always clients who are demanding fully joined-up customer experiences either. “Sometimes we hear about a ‘2025 vision for a connected journey’ coming from the very top,” says Ogilvy Experience’s strategy director Michael Crewe. “But then the people you’re working with on a day-to-day level all have different metrics and different targets that they’re working towards. It can be difficult to look at it end-to-end because their goals don’t make sense together, so when we’re trying to join it up, we’re not building something that’s truly connected, but using rubber bands and sticky tape to try and stitch things together”.
Often, it is agencies that become evangelists for what some would call ‘joined-up thinking,’ thanks to what Journey Further’s conversion director Jonny Longden calls, simply, a “disconnect between strategy and execution”. Customers might not be in the streets demanding joined-up thinking from the brands they buy, but as DPDK’s chief creative officer Michael Vromans has it, “they’ll let you know when it’s not good“. He says: “Great design is the absence of ripples; it’s hard to discern when it’s seamless, but it’s easy to point out when it’s not”.
According to our panel, the roadblocks in the way of seamlessness won’t surprise many: siloed organizations, failure to understand what customers really want, creaky old decision-making processes, failures to understand timescales of change. As Jacob Harris, partner at Known, says: “The long-term effects of the joined-up customer journey are well-studied, but you show this to a client at the start of a project and no one wants to wait for that. There’s this interesting balance between what they want to drive now versus what you can show them that exists in their categories before you can even get into understanding the customer”.