A Customer Journey does not equal a User Journey. I have experienced teams that use the terms interchangeably and teams that have a working assumption that they are the same, certainly in practice. I’ve also experienced CS teams that do not ever use or refer to a User Journey. It’s as if the term doesn’t exist at all. But rarely have I found an organization that sees the two as distinct yet related.
It is important to understand the distinction. It is even more important to ensure that both exist in your organization, with clear lines of ownership and expectations. Let’s unpack the two.
My thesis: Customer Journeys should be built, implemented, and maintained by Customer Success. User Journeys should be built, implemented, and maintained by Product and User Experience. The two are related, but they are not siblings. Think of them as first cousins.
Customer Journeys
In my last post I gave a short working definition of a Customer Journey:
A customer journey is a map representing the stages, key milestones, and internal responsibilities related to the strategic path you desire to lead your customers. A properly scoped and mapped out customer journey leads to healthy customers meeting and exceeding their business values and goals with your product.
The Customer Success team(s) own the Customer Journey. A Customer Journey details the journey your customer goes on. That is, it considers things like team onboarding, overall business goals and objectives, expansion opportunities, and renewals. It is concerned with not only the successful onboarding of a group(s), but the business itself. A Customer Journey highlights when Success Plans should be created, when Business Reviews are conducted, and when the Renewal process begins. Should it reference specific milestones that are product based? Of course, but the individual success of a single user is not the focus.
Also, a single Customer Journey should not attempt to boil the ocean. If your team has never created a Customer Journey, my encouragement is to start simple. Simple equals a Year One journey for your net-new customers. It should start with the Closed/Won event and should end with the Year One Renewal. Once this journey is established you can add to your inventory of maps: Year 2; Pre-Sale; Downgrade; Competitor Migration; etc. You will never have a single customer journey that entirely represents your business, nor should you. Create a robust inventory of journeys that paint the picture of what your customers should experience with your organization. Then, work with your CS Operations team to build out processes, programs, procedures, and reports that flesh out your journeys for your customers.
User Journeys
A User Journey, by contrast, cares very much about the individual success of a single user. Product and User Experience (UX), or User Design (UD) own the User Journey. User Journeys should highlight the individual steps a user should take in the product to ensure success (creating an account, adding more users, creating a report or dashboard, setting up an alert, etc). User Journeys do not concern themselves with things like Business Reviews or Renewals. User Journeys are concerned with display real estate, colors and fonts, usability, responsiveness, workflow steps, and the like.
UX or UD should work with a User Research team testing out wireframes, interviewing existing and potential customers to solve in-product issues that can make champions out of new users. User Journeys are one hundred percent Product Journeys.
Influence & Interplay
As I mentioned, a Customer Journey and a User Journey are related, but think of them as cousins, not siblings. Each has a set of parents that represent different goals (e.g. customer onboarding vs user onboarding). But these cousins share the same grandparents, a common, over-arching goal - to lead your company to provide best-in-class product and service resulting in the success of your customers. Each journey should influence the other. Customer Journeys provide context to Product and UX about why a customer downgrades or does not renew. User Journeys provide context for product use-cases that can lead to growth in an account.
I like how a colleague of mine describes the two:
- A Customer Journey cares about the State of the Account.
- A User Journey cares about the User Behavior.
If you are in CS, own the Customer Journey, but ensure that you are continually communicating that journey to Product and UX, and that you have avenues to inform the User Journey. If you are in Product, UX, or UD, own the User Journey, but ensure that you bubble it up to CS and take the opportunity to inform CS how a well crafted journey can lead to account growth.