Beyond Touchpoints: Mastering the Customer Journey Mindset

Here are real-world examples of how CX leaders overcome barriers like data silos and accountability gaps by focusing on high-impact journeys.

Customer experience measurement is broken. For years, companies have chased feedback but struggled to turn data into meaningful change. Why? Because measuring isolated moments misses the bigger picture.

Businesses that unlock real value have shifted from focusing on individual touchpoints to understanding end-to-end customer journeys.

According to McKinsey, journey performance correlates more strongly with business metrics than touchpoint performance. For example, revenue growth, repeat purchases, and churn reduction. Yet, despite the clear benefits, many organizations struggle to make the shift. Common barriers include:

• Journey complexity: deciding which journeys to measure and improve.
  
• Accountability: creating structures for shared ownership across the journey.
  
• Measurement methodology: understanding how the journey truly unfolds, including hidden or missed touchpoints.

Let’s explore how leading businesses are overcoming these barriers, turning the journey mindset into operational reality.

Which Journeys Should You Measure?

According to Forrester, Lloyds Banking Group reorganized its operations around 10 key customer journeys, a prime example of a shift to journey measurement. They moved beyond optimizing individual digital channels to overhauling end-to-end customer experiences. This involved creating cross-functional “journey labs” composed of teams of product owners, CX designers, digital technologists, and business architects working collaboratively to accelerate delivery and improve customer outcomes. 

But how many journeys should you measure? And where should you start?

A best practice is to identify and focus on key journeys that represent the major goals customers are trying to achieve. For example, in banking this may be: I onboard, I own a home, I seek finance, I engage support, or I prepare for retirement. In telecommunications (telco), the number of journeys may differ, but they can include I explore, I consider, I purchase, I get started, I engage support, I use, monitor, manage, and pay, I improve, I leave. 

There is no single rule on the number of journeys.

Here’s another example: A large European utilities provider had long collected touchpoint feedback. Initially, it was actionable—retail customers reporting long wait times led to staffing adjustments. But the limitations soon became clear. Touchpoint owners only controlled part of the experience. For example, the billing team received poor scores for invoice accuracy, but the root issue was incorrect data from the metering system, outside their remit.

The company shifted to an agile model with “tribes” aligned to end-to-end journeys like I join, I use, I need help, I leave, I complain. This laid the groundwork for journey measurement.

The business focused on the costliest journey first: I complain. Complaints were draining both cost and goodwill. Customers described multiple calls to resolve simple issues, being passed between departments, and long delays for corrections. Each extra step increased handling costs, regulatory risk, and churn.

By viewing complaints as a journey rather than isolated interactions, the team identified breakdowns in handoffs and redesigned the experience. Once leaders saw the impact on cost and churn, they expanded journey-based measurement across the business.

The takeaway: There’s no single path to adopting journey measurement. Impact is key. Start with high-impact journeys and share success stories to gain traction.

Who Owns the Journey? How Leading Brands Break Down Silos

Journey measurement means little if no one is accountable for improvement. Most journeys span departments (e.g. sales, product, billing, support) creating fragmented ownership and limiting action.

Take a UK telco’s onboarding journey. It starts at sign-up and continues through delivery and the first bill. Sales closes the deal, product handles delivery, and billing manages invoices. Without end-to-end ownership, no one resolves issues between steps: delays, miscommunications, or customer frustration. Each team optimizes its part, but the customer still experiences the issues.

Few organizations have formal structures for shared journey accountability. Moving from “optimize my path” to “optimize the entire path” demands cross-functional collaboration, clear ownership, and cultural change. That needs to be led from the top.

A Scandinavian bank tackled this directly. Previously, teams owned products or channels. But when customers moved between online and in-branch experiences, it became unclear who was responsible. The friction was real.

The turning point? Leadership declared, “We’re moving to a journey mindset.” They focused on campaigns to make people across the business feel comfortable. The CX team supported the transition with internal education, change management, seminars, webinars, CX Days—even a podcast. They ran employee surveys to track understanding and alignment. The Chief Customer Officer also made sure that quarterly reviews among senior management involved a review of “journey experiences.”

Key takeaway: Accountability doesn’t happen by default. Leading companies assign journey owners and invest in communication, education, and leadership alignment to rally the business and support them. Journey owners are often senior colleagues, decision-makers, and influencers. They need to work cross-functionally to resolve structural issues and influence the board for budget. 

Measurement Methodology, Data Silos, and Fragmentation

Even with ownership in place, many organizations struggle to measure journeys effectively. Most rely on surveys at the end of the journey. That approach can often fall short.

Why? Because it misses critical signals. Key interactions like browsing, drop-offs, or call deflections aren’t captured by traditional surveys. Worse, most feedback comes from customers who complete the journey, ignoring those who abandon it.

A global telco company faced this issue recently. Their journey NPS (jNPS) only surveyed customers who completed the journey. They missed signals from those most at risk of churn because they did not complete the journey; not to mention that their survey response rates were declining. 

They closed the gap by combining operational and web analytics. Using Medallia Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), they mapped digital flows and assigned Page Experience Scores, which were rolled up into Journey Experience Scores. This surfaced friction points earlier in customer journeys and enabled proactive fixes.

Similarly, a global insurer improved insights by feeding Medallia feedback into their enterprise data lake. By combining CX data with operational metrics, they built dashboards for each journey (Purchase, Claims, Support, Renewal, Maturity, Cancellation), giving journey owners actionable, end-to-end visibility.

Fidelity International is another great example.Their analytics team combines behavioral metadata with NPS feedback, allowing them to more accurately identify where to focus journey improvements. This results in deeper customer insights than in previous years.

The real challenge is that touchpoint data lives in silos: CRMs, support tickets, marketing tools, and more. Journey measurement requires stitching this together. Without integrated data, it’s nearly impossible to understand how issues escalate or cascade across channels.

Key takeaway: Measuring journey performance demands more than just reviewing survey results. It requires an integrated view to capture the full picture. That involves combining touchpoint feedback, journey analytics, operational data, and digital behaviour, including silent drop-offs.

Turning Measurement into Meaningful Change

Customer journeys reflect how people actually experience your business—not how it’s structured internally. While many companies still measure isolated interactions, the real leaders are shifting to journey-based thinking for deeper insight and greater impact.

They’re not just redesigning surveys. They’re building cross-functional accountability, integrating operational and behavioral data, and embedding journey ownership into the culture. They treat journey measurement not as a CX project, but as a core organizational capability.

Where to start? Choose one high-impact journey—emotionally charged, financially costly, or frequently experienced. Appoint a clear owner. Map the full experience, including those who drop out. Integrate feedback, operations, and analytics data.

Use early wins to build momentum and prove the value internally.

The bottom line? Measurement alone doesn’t improve experiences. But when you treat journeys as the unit of change—and empower teams to act—you turn insights into outcomes.

For more guidance, be sure to download Modern CX, Made Achievable: Your Step-by-Step Guide. This practical playbook breaks down modernization into clear, achievable steps—from defining your “why” and securing sponsorship to mapping journeys, integrating data, and building a culture where insights lead to real action.