Customer expectations aren’t what they used to be. With companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google setting the standard for seamless, responsive service, customers now expect every brand—no matter the industry—to deliver similarly smooth and satisfying experiences. Yet many organisations still take a fragmented approach that focuses on isolated touchpoints like call centre wait times or checkout flows, rather than the customer journey as a whole.
According to McKinsey & Company’s publication Customer Experience: Creating Value through Transforming Customer Journeys, the narrow view of only focusing on individual touchpoints often misses the bigger picture. While individual interactions may appear successful in isolation, the end-to-end experience can still fall short. McKinsey’s research reveals that companies managing customer journeys, not just touchpoints, see stronger results—a phenomenon that we at Resonate CX are more than happy to explore with you.
If your organisation is serious about boosting performance through customer experience, it’s time to move beyond isolated fixes and embrace the full journey. That’s where transformation begins—and where measurable impact follows. Let’s talk about exactly why improving customer experience is important for organisational performance.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
Grow with a Winning CX Strategy
Why Customer Experience Needs a Journey Approach
If your organisation is still measuring customer satisfaction one interaction at a time, it’s likely overlooking what matters most: how customers feel about the experience as a whole. Most companies have long prioritised individual touchpoints—such as resolving a billing issue or answering a service enquiry. But as McKinsey’s research shows, a touchpoint-centric mindset often leads to blind spots, where the overall customer journey breaks down despite strong individual scores.
Take onboarding, for example. You might track whether a new customer had a pleasant phone call with your sales team or if they opened the welcome email. But what happens when that customer then faces confusing setup instructions, delayed support responses, or inconsistent communications over the following weeks? Each touchpoint might perform well in isolation, yet the cumulative experience leaves the customer frustrated—and far less likely to stay.
McKinsey’s research reinforces this point: companies that focus on journeys instead of single interactions consistently outperform.
Across industries, businesses that successfully manage customer journeys grow their revenue 5% to 10% and reduce costs by 15% to 25% within only two or three years.
These improvements come from better cross-functional collaboration, more efficient processes, and increased customer loyalty.
It’s also notable that in one industry surveyed by McKinsey, the gap on customer satisfaction between the best- and worst-performing companies on journey performance was a whole 50% wider than the gap between the best- and worst-performing companies on touchpoint performance. This serves as proof that while most companies can deliver satisfactory experiences at specific touchpoints, a memorable journey is what makes a company truly stand out.
Nike is a standout example of a brand that understands the power of managing entire customer journeys. Beyond its world-class products, Nike uses data and digital tools to deliver consistent, personalised experiences across online and in-store environments. A customer may be browsing a new shoe drop on the app, visiting a flagship store, or speaking with a support agent; at every point, the journey feels integrated, on-brand, and customer-first.
Key Strategies for Transforming Customer Journeys
Develop a Customer-Centric Vision
Organisations that deliver exceptional experiences consistently are aligned around a shared purpose: serving the real needs of their customers. McKinsey emphasises the importance of defining a clear aspiration that resonates across all teams and informs daily decisions. To illustrate: Disney’s well-known internal mantra—“We create happiness”—is more than a tagline. It’s a unifying principle that empowers employees at every level to deliver a cohesive experience.
The best way to adopt this approach is to understand what your customers truly value at each stage of their journey. Platforms like Resonate’s Customer Experience Management solution can help translate fragmented feedback from individual surveys into actionable insights. The data you gather across different touchpoints will then give your teams a clearer picture of what matters most—and where to focus.
Use Behavioural Psychology to Shape Experience
It’s not just what happens during the journey that counts, but how your customers perceive it. Leading companies apply behavioural psychology to design experiences that feel better—even when the actual process hasn’t changed. McKinsey notes that structuring interactions to end on a high note or combining steps to reduce perceived effort can significantly boost satisfaction.
You don’t need to overhaul every process. Simple adjustments—like being transparent about how long customers may have to wait for service or giving them the choice to receive a call-back instead of staying on hold—can help them feel more in control. The key is to design with perception in mind, not just efficiency.
Leverage Digital Transformation
Digital tools play a critical role in streamlining customer journeys and removing friction. McKinsey asserts that the best practitioners digitise their most important journeys and continuously refine them through rapid testing and iteration. Think self-service portals, intelligent chatbots, or AI-powered feedback systems—all these tools ultimately reduce effort for both the customer and your teams. If you’re aiming to modernise your customer journey, look first at where technology can simplify—not complicate—the process.
Don’t Overlook B2B Journeys
McKinsey’s research shows that B2B journeys tend to be more complex and fragmented than B2C ones, as they involve multiple stakeholders, systems, and service layers.
Neglecting these journeys can lead to churn even when product performance is strong.
To improve B2B CX, identify the moments that matter most for each segment and remove friction wherever possible. One global IT services firm McKinsey studied, for example, reduced client churn by addressing small but frequent support issues. These efforts helped them improve satisfaction and loyalty substantially without a major overhaul.
Measuring and Improving Customer Journeys
The Importance of Journey-Level Metrics
You need to measure customer experience if you want to improve it—and not just at the surface level. Start with journey-level indicators like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES)—but apply them with context. These metrics serve as signals that tell you how well your organisation is delivering against customer expectations at key stages of the journey. According to McKinsey, journey-level metrics are far more predictive of business outcomes than isolated touchpoint measures. High scores often correlate with greater customer loyalty, higher retention rates, and increased spend. Hence, when you improve key journeys, you’re not just creating happier customers—you’re driving measurable ROI.
Tracking these metrics also helps prioritise where to act. A strong NPS after onboarding but a weak score post-purchase, for example, points to a breakdown in continuity. Meanwhile, a high effort score at a particular stage could suggest process friction or unclear communication. Used correctly, these insights help you target improvements where they’ll have the greatest impact on both experience and organisational performance.
Visibility and Governance
The most successful organisations use feedback to take action at every level of the business. That requires visibility. With a CXM platform like Resonate’s, your teams can map journeys, track live sentiment trends, and link customer feedback directly to internal processes. This kind of insight makes it easier to identify where friction builds up and what’s driving outcomes like churn or loyalty.
McKinsey also highlights the importance of strong governance for turning insight into impact. Many high-performing companies appoint a Chief Customer Experience Officer or senior executive sponsor who supervises journey performance across functions. They may also embed cross-functional teams to oversee key journeys, which breaks down internal silos and ensures that the organisation can respond to customer needs consistently.
Leveraging Feedback Loops
It’s especially important that CX improvement efforts happen within day-to-day operations, not off to the side, and that’s where feedback loops come in. Leading organisations differentiate between the inner loop of customer experience management, which aims to address individual customer feedback quickly as they occur, and the outer loop, which targets broader, systemic issues requiring cross-functional collaboration.
The inner loop is reactive and immediate: for example, when your system flags a negative survey response, a customer service manager may contact the customer directly to resolve the issue on the spot. The outer loop, on the other hand, uses aggregated insights to guide strategic decisions—such as redesigning a recurring process that drives dissatisfaction across multiple customer journeys.
Resonate CX’s platform supports both loops: it acts as a kind of “smoke detector” for customer pain points, while also helping leadership surface patterns that lead to long-term change. When your teams are empowered to act on both levels—tactical and strategic—customer experience stops being reactive and starts becoming transformational.
Transforming Insight into Action
At the end of the day, customer experience isn’t about fine-tuning isolated moments—it’s about understanding and optimising the entire journey from the customer’s point of view. You don’t achieve that level of impact isn’t achieved through guesswork. It requires structured feedback loops, meaningful metrics, and a commitment to cross-functional collaboration.
If your organisation is still operating in silos, now is the time to connect the dots. Map your key journeys. Examine what your customers are actually experiencing. And once you’ve studied the situation thoroughly, empower your teams to respond with purpose.Want to learn more about how to transform customer journeys and improve performance? Resonate CX is ready to assist your organisation. Don’t hesitate to consult our wealth of reports and whitepapers for further insight into how effective CX works across a range of different industries, or join us for an upcoming webinar. You’re also welcome to request a demo if you’d like an up-close look at how our solutions work in practice—and how they can potentially benefit your business.
