Customer and data-driven work with customer journeys
Article
Customer Experience
Insight-driven optimisation
Chantal Snijder
Customer Experience Consultant
5 min
15 Sep 2025
Implementing customer journeys in an organisation is a milestone. You celebrate it, share it, and feel the energy. But then comes the real challenge: how do you scale this success across multiple teams and multiple journeys?
Together with Digital Power, KPN has firmly embedded the customer journey in its way of working. The goal: delivering the ultimate customer experience, based on the principle Digital First, Human Assisted. During the Data Expo, we took visitors through KPN’s digital transformation.
The initial question KPN asked Digital Power was smaller: can you optimise a specific self-service tool? Soon we discovered that isolated optimisations were not enough. To truly make an impact, you need to understand and improve the entire customer journey, placing the customer at the centre and working with data.
Using Kotter’s 8-step change model as our guide, we began the transition to a journey-based approach. We used it not just as theory, but as a practical framework to stay focused on the right steps.
1. Create: Creating urgency for a journey-based approach
At first, the focus was on optimising individual pages to deliver quick wins on key metrics. In team sessions we switched between perspectives, like page, flow, touchpoint, journey, proposition, and uncovered opportunities that had been invisible before. This revealed valuable insights the teams would otherwise have missed.
2. Build: First successes with one multidisciplinary team
One pioneering team adopted the insight-driven optimisation (IDO) approach. The biggest achievement? Customer journey thinking was no longer seen as a project, but became a new way of working. With insight-driven optimisation, developed by Digital Power, continuous optimisation was structurally embedded in the organisation. All improvements were data-driven, combining customer feedback, usage data, and experimentation. Different disciplines worked together towards one shared goal.
With this multidisciplinary team and a clear purpose, the first results came quickly: the number of experiments increased by 54%, while the success rate rose from 37% to 43%. The value was measurable and visible.
3. Form: The insight-driven optimisation vision
The proven results and strong vision gave confidence to use the upcoming reorganisation as an opportunity. Working in multidisciplinary teams was a major shift. Where disciplines once worked separately, data analysts, UX researchers, content managers, and CRO specialists now collaborated towards one seamless and intuitive customer journey.
4. Enlist: Kick-offs, workshops, trainings and systems
All team members were assigned to a customer journey team. To onboard everyone into this new way of working, we organised training sessions and a kick-off for all teams. It was also crucial to set up systems to support the approach. This made it easier to prioritise with stakeholders. We also introduced a quarterly focus on a sub-journey and adopted sprints, with all activities tracked in a shared overview.
The result: better communication, sharper prioritisation, and a big step forward for the teams.
5. to 8. Enable, Generate, Sustain & Institute: Scaling and embedding the tooling an WoW
Not everyone was immediately ready for the increased focus on customers and data. That’s why we invested in ongoing training—in tools, skills, and supporting processes. By using different tools more effectively, we ensured stronger embedding of the approach across the organisation.
FigJam for collaborative journey mapping
TheyDo for documentation and journey management
Airtable for backlog and experiment management
Jira for development
Optimising the toolstack proved crucial for effective collaboration.
Three challenges to keep in mind
In our collaboration, we brought many people together, worked purposefully on journeys, and created impact on key organisational KPIs. Alongside the positive results, we also encountered several challenges. Below are three examples, though challenges will vary by organisation and maturity level.
1. Acceleration and scaling: Automating with AI
As the customer feedback programme and number of experiments grew, so did analysis time. By using AI for topic and sentiment analysis, we significantly reduced the workload.
2. Collaboration beyond your own transformation
Since other departments were not yet undergoing the same transformation, dependencies arose that slowed down progress. The next step: involving more disciplines in the journey approach.
3. Resource allocation
Different backlogs and priorities across departments made it difficult to deliver large initiatives. By demonstrating proven value, the journey teams secured dedicated resources for their experiments, such as 20% development capacity.
What does this mean for you?
Working at journey level requires multiple disciplines, new skills, and a fundamental change in approach. KPN has shown that it can be done—and that it delivers real value. KPN grew from 73% fully digital customer journeys in 2024 to 77% in 2025.
The question is: are you ready to move from isolated optimisations to scalable, data-driven journey impact?
📩 Let’s connect to explore how we can accelerate your customer journeys together.
Want to know more?
Danny will be happy to talk to you about what we can do for you and your organisation as a data partner.
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