Make Customer Experience Management easy for real people

It seems like the world has suddenly woken up to the concept of "the customer journey", the idea that users have specific processes and tasks that they go through to achieve their goals via multiple touch-points & channels.
I must have heard the phrase more in the last few months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's like every middle manager thinks they have only just invented the term... But that's OK, these people can catch-up with the online industry. We've been using: personas, customer process flows and transactional funnels for over a decade, with great success.

But now things have changed in that time. The idea that the user follows a linear journey is a simplistic model that takes no account for the multiple user types, needs, loyalty, etc. There's also a lot more data available via analytics now can be interpreted, analysed and even processed in real-time to create a dynamic site experience (e.g. product recommendations and multivariate testing) and automate various marketing processes (retargeting, etc.).

However, for all the fancy integration and mathematics behind the scenes, these complex systems still need a non-technical person to manage the experience day-to-day. Normal humans (not rocket scientists) are needed to change assets, conduct conversion experiments and approve content updates. In short, the very person who has now got excited about the improved user experience, now needs a simple way to manage the data-driven customer experience.

Funnels

I'm a believer in the use of diagrams to depict complex situations (or just those where a picture paints a thousand words). And the diagrammatic use of funnels to show a development, progress or evolution is something I've come across quite a lot in my work.

Here's a few that have caught my eye:

1. The ecommerce Funnel:

Also known as the conversion funnel, this diagram shows the visitor drop-off at each stage along the online purchasing process, from homepage to sale confirmation.

2. The marketing funnel:
Also known as the 'advocacy' funnel, this plots user relationship along reducing path of engagement. There are numerous different versions of this funnel and each roughly follows the AIDA(s) marketing steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)

Thanks to http://www.relationship-economy.com/ for image

3. The Twitter Funnel

In an interesting article recently on Mashable, Tim Trefren covers the Twitter sign up funnel and plots the 5 stages of initial usage:
1. Hit homepage

2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form

3. Browse suggested topics

4. Add e-mail friends

5. Search for someone

4. The Social Media Funnel:

Taking this to a higher-level, John Bell from Ogilvy360 has created his version of the Social Media Funnel.