1. Customer centricity is at the heart of digital transformation
You need to better understand your customers' expectations and to be able to put yourself in their shoes when interacting with your company's current servicing assets.
In terms of vision, this tells you in which direction to shoot: what needs to be improved, how, in which context. In terms of execution, it helps you define where to act in priority to quickly solve major pains, while progressively enhancing elements of your experience to keep fitting with ever-evolving servicing expectations.
To do this, you need to collect actionable customer insights — a clear picture of:
- Who they are: age, marital status, income, personal values, attitudes...
- What they want: life triggers, needs, emotions, specific expectations at any moment they consider interacting with your company.
- How they engage with your company: when, to do what, on which touchpoints, for which benefits, and how, why and when they move from one channel to another.
- How they perceive your experience: their own experiences, beliefs, feelings, and the word-of-mouth they've been exposed to.
This customer intelligence is often decentralised among departments or aggregated within segments or "value buckets," which can lead to misfits — such as focusing most servicing efforts on the 20–30% of customers delivering most revenue. That's not a viable strategy anymore, especially in an omnichannel environment: a negative experience from a low-value customer can create as much brand impact as online shaming from a high-value one, and one of the most common marketing objectives is still to keep and grow the customers you worked so hard to acquire.
A better approach is to build clusters around customer attitudes and behaviours, with a focus on key actions, feelings, and expectations by life trigger, channel, and touchpoint — reserving VIP-level servicing for a later stage, once the analysis holds up.
2. You need a more objective eye on your organisation
Beyond a deeper knowledge of your customers, you also need to better understand your organisation — specifically, how customer-facing employees are empowered to deliver the experience.
To do this, meet and interview relevant people across the company to identify all processes and tools — including future projects — related to the customer experience. Workshop participants, even long-time employees, often discover operational incoherencies and projects they had no idea existed.
On top of mapping the AS-IS customer journey, connect the dots with its counterpart — the employee's journey — to understand experience misfits and their underlying reasons: is it a tools problem, or does it also involve skills, attitude, motivation, or company culture? Identify the irritating interactions for both customers and employees, and what levers employees actually have to act on them.
3. You need to fix the basics of your experience
Digital transformation can be confusing — people often fear and expect "big bang" changes that disrupt the market and the business model. But the first reflex should be to isolate all frictions, even the smallest, along the current journey, and fix them before exploring innovation possibilities.
A concrete example: if your ambition is to reduce operational costs by digitalising bills, payments, and first-line support, your website, customer zone, and mobile app become the cornerstones of many interactions. But if analysis reveals a low adoption rate, a lousy login process, and a lack of value in the logged-in experience, the priority isn't a communication campaign or a trendy chatbot — it's fixing the login process turning off your bravest customers.
4. You need to understand where and how you can create impact and value
Once you have a clearer picture of the current experience and have established basic improvements, you can start designing your future experience — by confronting your smoothened current experience against:
- Your business objectives: what goals does this revamp need to achieve, and where in the journey do you need to act?
- Your customers: which needs and expectations can you fulfill to motivate different interaction? On which channels?
- Your competition: what can you learn from them, and what could you "steal with pride"?
- Your employees: how can you solve their frustrations and empower them to be more customer-oriented?
- Your partners: is there an extra service that could improve the customer experience?
- Your trends: which technologies and servicing concepts used by customers, employees, and competitors could enhance the journey?
5. You need to justify your choices to your management
Whatever your position, you'll need to update your management or steering committee on the directions taken. It's always easier to start with an audit of the current situation — board members rarely have time to join every internal workshop, and they expect coherency with the current situation and a smooth transition to the new paradigm.
The AS-IS customer journey is the perfect tool to present the key actions to undertake: it helps visualise the end-to-end journey, validate your thinking on what to improve, and discuss priorities to get agreement to explore the different options further.
Frequently asked questions
Why is understanding the current customer journey important before designing a new one?
Skipping straight to the new experience risks missing meaningful opportunities and low-hanging fruit, or investing heavily in fast-fading trends instead of fixing real friction points.
What's the difference between customer knowledge and customer intelligence in this context?
Customer intelligence means having an actionable picture of who customers are, what they want, how they engage, and how they perceive the experience — not just aggregated segment data.
What should be fixed first in a digital transformation: the basics or the innovation?
The basics. Advanced technology layered on top of a broken process — like a bad login flow — doesn't fix the underlying friction; it just makes it more visible.
How should this work be presented to management?
Start with an audit of the current situation — it gives leadership the coherency and context they need to validate priorities and agree on next steps.
