The customer is always right: Enabling customer journeys for enterprise architecture

Abstract

Analysing customer journeys provide organisations means to better understand the expectations of their customers, and to create an optimal customer experience. Academic and industrial evidences show that when the customer journey supports contextual aspects, the chances that a customer buys a certain product they used before increases. Some strategies to improve the customer journey includes process mining and customer experience mapping. These strategies improve customer journeys by comparing the expected customer journey with how the customer is actually experiences the customer journey. Nevertheless, none of the previous strategies provides support to align contextual aspects that support the customer journey or align the customer journey with elements in the enterprise architecture. In this study, we design a process to support contextual aspects in a customer journey and support alignment with the enterprise architecture: The contextual customer journey process. The process supports enterprise architects when aligning customer journey with the contextual aspects and the enterprise architecture. This enables the process of the customer journey and realises context-awareness of the customer. To validate the contextual customer journey process, we analysed a use case at a Dutch banking business and we held a focus group to evaluate the process and the application of the use case in terms of stakeholders’ perceptions. The focus group has shown that the contextual customer journey process is a structured and logical approach, which gives a quick overview of the changes when including a new contextual aspect in a customer journey.