Jumbo Supermarkets and PostNl Featured as Pioneers in Journey-Centric Design Operations

We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest research report, Architecting a Journey Management Practice: How Leading Organizations Transformed Design Operations to Maximize Business Value.

This report spotlights the innovative work done by two Netherlands-based organizations to upgrade customers' service experiences and deliver better business outcomes.

About The Report

Over the past few decades, companies have invested in product development to meet the demand for digital business solutions as the internet matured. However, the digital business landscape has changed radically since companies established their approach to digital product development. Digital channels built over time by siloed product teams have resulted in fragmented customer experiences full of inconsistencies and roadblocks for customers traversing these omnichannel ecosystems to complete tasks. 

To stay competitive in today’s digital landscape, organizations must rethink their approach to experience design. This involves designing digital interaction channels and proactively shaping the end-to-end customer journey across channels. However, making this shift can be daunting, and the path to get there hasn’t been clear.

This report will help organizations approach this challenge with proven strategies and prescriptive steps toward journey-centric experience design. We interviewed more than 25 organizations to understand their approach to solving this problem. Our goal was to understand their strategies and solutions in general and highlight the innovative work done by leading organizations.

From this initial exploratory research, we selected two organizations whose pioneering work stood out. This report details their case studies.

PostNL

PostNL is a mail, parcel, and ecommerce corporation with operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. It provides universal delivery in the Netherlands and is publicly listed at Euronext Amsterdam.

PostNL began a digital transformation effort to better serve its customers in today’s digital landscape. With the mission to serve customers better, PostNL’s leadership knew they would need to rethink how service experiences were designed and delivered across their digital ecosystem, which led them to establish a journey-centric design practice.

Highlights from PostNl’s approach:

• Five guiding principles that drive their journey-centric-design initiatives
• Defining different types of design opportunities and striking a balance between quick win optimizations and innovative design improvements
• A focus on performance measurement through benchmarking and goal setting for each journey team’s target metrics
• A journey team support function focused on governance, resourcing, budgeting, goal monitoring, and quarterly performance reports

Jumbo Supermarkets

Jumbo is the second-largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. It is part of the privately owned Koninklijke Jumbo Food Group. Jumbo currently has 730 stores in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The organization wanted to be more thoughtful about customer journeys across its entire channel ecosystem. Doing so meant applying user-centered research and design to these journey experiences, whereas, in the past, it had focused its user-centered design primarily on product development. Jumbo adjusted its design operations to facilitate journey-centric design. This move helped the organization prioritize decisions based on a more unified vision for the customer experience, driven by Jumbo’s business objectives.

Highlights from Jumbo’s approach:

• A focus on facilitating crossfunctional collaboration without introducing significant operational change
• A prioritization framework designed to identify the most impactful problems to solve
• An iterative path toward a mature practice, beginning with a small strategic journey-centric pilot project that was optimized and scaled to additional journey teams
• A journey management playbook to codify their practice and help business teams become familiar with the vision and process

About NN/g

For over 25 years, our mission has been to provide evidence-based UX insights and reliable guidance, empowering design and research professionals and organizations worldwide to create better designs, streamline processes, and achieve their goals.