This involves setting higher standards of consumer protection and embedding the Duty across all business areas, from marketing and sales to post-sale service, covering all communications and channels. Some suggest it's the first legislation making customer centricity a legal requirement.
Meeting this obligation requires firms to deeply understand and consistently deliver positive experiences for their customers. This is where journey mapping and management become invaluable tools.
What’s journey mapping?
At its simplest, journey mapping is a visual tool that plots the entire path a customer takes when interacting with a product, service, or organisation. It illustrates their actions, goals, touchpoints, feelings, pain points, and moments of engagement, and is used to understand and visualise the user's experience, needs, and emotions. For a more basic understanding, check out our article on the basics of journey maps.
What’s journey management?
Journey management takes it a step further: it goes beyond static visualisation. It's an approach focused on operationalising journey maps to continuously manage and improve the customer experience across all touchpoints and channels. It involves using data, analytics, and technology to understand customer behavior and needs, and using maps as an information system for better decision-making. Essentially, it's about keeping maps dynamic, setting up a governance structure, integrating data, and using them as living tools for continuous improvement. If you are looking for a more comprehensive overview, learn about journey management and what it is here.
How journey mapping and journey management support FCA Consumer Duty Compliance
Journey mapping provides a structured way for financial firms to meet the core expectations of the Consumer Duty:
Deep understanding of the customer:
By mapping journeys, companies gain detailed insights into customer behavior, needs, expectations, and pain points across their entire experience. This understanding is crucial for identifying where customers might be vulnerable or experience pain points. Collecting qualitative research data from them and integrating it into maps helps to empathise with users and make their voices heard within the organisation.
Identifying and addressing pain points:
Journey maps highlight areas of friction or difficulty for customers. Customer journey analytics, which collects and analyses data on customer behavior, can help uncover the reasons behind issues, such as why customers abandon a process. Identifying these pain points is key to streamlining journeys and removing unreasonable barriers or 'sludge' that prevent customers from acting in their own interest, which the Consumer Duty seeks to avoid.
Supporting the Consumer Support Outcome:
The FCA's Consumer Duty includes a specific outcome related to customer support. Journey mapping is explicitly mentioned as a research method to help firms research their compliance with this outcome. Maps can help ensure customers are aware of and can access support channels and receive the necessary help for tasks like changing products or leaving a service. Firms should ensure post-sale support is as accessible and effective as pre-sale support, and journey mapping can help visualise and compare these end-to-end support journeys. Firms also need to ensure their end-to-end customer journeys deliver good outcomes, which ideally involves testing.
Enhancing information provided to consumers:
Another key outcome of the Duty is ensuring consumers are equipped to make good decisions by providing timely and understandable information across all channels. Journey mapping can help firms define personas and map out how information is provided at each step, ensuring it is clear, visible, accessible, and relevant to the intended recipient. Understanding the customer journey helps firms identify appropriate points to provide relevant information, particularly for complex products.
Data-driven decision making and monitoring:
Metrics on journey maps enable firms to collect and unify data from various sources (e.g., website, app) to make decisions based on real customer behavior and feedback. The Duty requires firms to monitor the outcomes customers are experiencing and take action. Journey management incorporates metrics and KPIs. It also uses the Journey Performance Indicator (JPI), a simple traffic light system, linked to maps to track journey health and prioritise areas needing attention. This provides empirical evidence of efforts to deliver good outcomes.
Operationalising and scaling customer centricity:
Journey management provides a framework for embedding customer centricity as an ongoing operational activity. Creating a hierarchy of journey maps allows firms to view the overall customer lifecycle and zoom into specific detailed interactions. This systematic approach, supported by governance structures like journey coordinators, is essential for managing CX consistently across diverse products and segments in large organisations and demonstrating how the Consumer Duty is embedded. Up-to-date, contextual maps are a powerful way to help prove compliance.
Breaking down silos:
Journey maps serve as a common tool and language across different teams and departments that impact the customer experience. They help bridge organisational silos and align efforts around the customer perspective, which is vital because customers do not differentiate between business departments in their experience.
Context and Example
Expand the image below to see a financial services map visualising the journey for a customer setting up a new investment account online.
By building a journey map hierarchy and operationalising this map firms can monitor journey health, identify problems proactively, prioritise resources for improvement projects (e.g., simplifying the T&Cs communication), and demonstrate to the FCA how they are actively working to deliver good outcomes at every stage of the customer's interaction.
In essence, the FCA Consumer Duty demands that financial firms demonstrate a genuine focus on customer well-being. Journey mapping provides the necessary framework to understand the customer's world, and journey management provides the operational engine to consistently improve that world, making it easier for firms to comply with the Duty and build lasting customer trust.
Tools alone don’t create customer-centric organisations
Customer-centricity is not something you achieve simply by meeting regulatory checklists. It is a mindset and cultural foundation. When organisations approach Consumer Duty as a compliance obligation rather than a genuine opportunity to improve services, they risk superficial implementations. True customer-centricity requires a shift in perspective, where understanding and serving customers become embedded in everyday decisions, not just in documentation prepared for auditors. However, compliance can become the starting point for your journey to customer-centricity!
Tools like journey maps are only valuable when supported by the right mindset. The real value lies in how they foster empathy, cross-silo collaboration, and ongoing conversations. Besides the implementation of journey management, a cultural readiness to listen, adapt, and iterate is crucial. Then, journey management can become an enabler for ideation and prototyping.
