New Report: The Journey-First Enterprise

Jan 30 / Michel Stevens

Enterprises have spent billions on digital transformation. Yet, despite these investments, customer experience remains stubbornly fragmented. This is a structural problem, rooted in how organizations are designed.


To understand why customer journeys fragment, we conducted extensive research across industries, examining how organizational structures create friction at every customer handoff.

This article introduces the key findings from our new +70-page research report, The Journey-First Enterprise. It reveals the Double Bind that traps modern enterprises, explains why collaboration alone cannot solve the problem, and introduces a new operating model that shifts the unit of management from products and functions to customer journeys themselves.

Over the past two decades, enterprises have invested billions in digital transformation. They have hired talented engineers and designers, built sophisticated platforms, and deployed cutting-edge technology. The result is impressive: well-designed products, fast-loading websites, and intuitive mobile applications. Yet, despite these investments, a striking paradox remains. Customers still struggle with inconsistent experiences across channels, data fails to sync between systems, and when digital journeys break, they are forced to revert to expensive phone calls and emails.

This is not a design problem. It is not a technology problem. It is a structural problem.

To understand why customer experience remains fragmented, we must recognize that most enterprises are battling on two fronts simultaneously. This fragmentation is driven by two distinct types of organizational structures that often coexist, creating what our new research report, The Journey-First Enterprise, calls the Double Bind.

The first silo: Functional organization

Traditionally, enterprises have operated in functional silos. Marketing owns customer acquisition, Sales owns the sales process, and Product owns the digital product. Each function has its own budget, its own team, and its own success metrics. This structure made sense in an earlier era when a customer's experience was largely shaped by a single touchpoint. However, the digital age changed the nature of customer interaction, as customers now engage with the entire organization through a complex ecosystem of digital and analog touchpoints.

The second silo: Product organization

In response to the digital age, enterprises modernized. They adopted product-centric operating models, creating dedicated teams for specific domains like the Mobile App, Web Platform, or Support Portal. This approach was necessary and, in many ways, successful. It enabled rapid innovation. But it also created a new problem: digital silos. These product teams were bolted onto the existing functional silos, creating a matrix of complexity.

The core issue is that the customer's reality is a journey, but the organization's reality is a matrix of silos. These two realities are fundamentally misaligned. Each handoff between silos introduces friction, and each team optimizes for its own success, not for the customer's goal.

The high cost of a broken journey

This misalignment is a measurable business problem that leads to significant value leakage. When customer journeys break, customers are forced into high-effort experiences, which research has shown is a primary driver of churn(1).

For example, our research found that in a single "I'm moving" journey for a utilities company, 63% of all support calls were generated because customers failed to find the correct document in the digital journey. This resulted in thousands of preventable, costly phone calls. The same organization found that churn rates were 43% higher among customers who struggled with this fragmented journey compared to those who completed it smoothly.

The path forward: A new operating model

Better collaboration is not the answer. The problem is not that people do not want to work together; the problem is that the organization is not structured to enable journey-level collaboration.

The solution is a shift in the unit of management. For decades, enterprises have managed products and functions. In a journey-first operating model, the primary unit of management shifts to the journey itself. This forces the organization to wire its existing silos together rather than asking them to compete for resources.

This article is a brief introduction to the concepts detailed in our 71-page research report, The Journey-First Enterprise. The report provides a comprehensive framework for operationalizing journey management, including the four-level journey framework, the role of journey teams, and a practical guide to building this capability in your organization.

Get the full report to learn more about the journey-first operating model and how to solve the Double Bind.
(1) Dixon, M., Freeman, K., & Toman, N. (2010). Stop trying to delight your customers. Harvard Business Review, 88(7/8), 116-122.
REPORT

The Journey-First Enterprise

The Journey-First Enterprise is a research report grounded in rigorous academic literature, interviews with CX leaders, and survey data from practitioners across industries. The report provides a practical framework for operationalizing journey management, complete with case studies, implementation guidance, and a roadmap for building cross-functional journey teams that bridge organizational silos.
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The Experts

This research was shaped by in-depth interviews with CX leaders across continents.
Maria Lallerman, Head of CX at Enento Group
Anne-Laura Janssens, Head of Marketing & CX at Idalko
Waleed AlHamdan, Managing Director at Compassway
Martin Bruun Conradsen, Global CX Manager
Eckhart Boehme, Managing Director at unipro
Camilla Norseng, Head of CX at Lyse
Michel Stevens, Course Director at CXM Academy

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