Ditch Omnichannel Thinking: Use JTBD for CX That Works
JTBD > Omnichannel | TRUE Consistency
Table of Contents
We've all been there. You wrestle with a chatbot, painstakingly explaining your issue, only to have to repeat the entire saga when you finally reach a human support agent. Or perhaps you found one answer on a company's website, but their mobile app tells a different story. Despite massive investments in "omnichannel" strategies promising seamlessness, these disjointed, frustrating experiences remain painfully common.
The hard truth is that many omnichannel efforts, while well-intentioned, are built on a shaky foundation. They focus on connecting the channels – the website, the app, the call center, the physical store – without fundamentally addressing why the customer is interacting in the first place. True consistency doesn't come from simply patching together touchpoints; it arises from deeply understanding and designing for the customer's underlying Job-to-be-Done (JTBD) across all potential interactions.
Why Traditional Channel Strategies Fall Short
Traditional approaches often stumble because they are built around the technology and the channel, not the customer's goal:
Focus on Channel Features: Success is often measured by channel-specific metrics (website conversion rate, app downloads, call handle time) rather than whether the customer made the progress they needed. Did the customer successfully achieve their desired outcome, or did they just click a button?
Siloed Thinking: Each channel is managed and optimized independently, leading to conflicting information, different processes, and a lack of shared context about the customer's journey.
Technology-Led Solutions: Companies implement the latest chatbot or CRM integration, assuming the technology itself will create consistency. But technology is only a tool; without a clear understanding of the Job it's meant to facilitate, it can just automate the inconsistency.
The Complexity Trap: Adding more channels in an attempt to be everywhere often multiplies the points of failure and inconsistency, making the customer's journey more complex, not less.
Reframing Consistency with Jobs-to-be-Done
Jobs-to-be-Done offers a powerful lens to reframe the challenge. Instead of asking "How do we make our website and app consistent?", ask "What fundamental progress is the customer trying to make that causes them to interact with us via any channel?"
This "Job" might be:
Acquire a product that meets specific needs.
Resolve a complex service issue.
Obtain information to make an important decision.
Manage an ongoing account or subscription.
Once you identify the core Job, the next step is to uncover the Desired Outcomes. These are the customer's metrics for success when getting the Job done, completely independent of any specific channel. They are often expressed using verbs from the customer's perspective (referencing our list of outcome-focused verbs):
Minimize the time it takes to get an accurate answer.
Reduce the likelihood of needing to repeat information.
Increase the confidence in the resolution provided.
Minimize the effort required to complete the process.
Reduce the number of steps needed to achieve the goal.
By understanding these outcomes, you can map where your current channels create friction and fail to deliver a consistent experience relative to the Job. The inconsistency isn't just that the app looks different from the website; it's that one channel helps the customer minimize effort while another makes it worse.
This integrated tech stack empowers me to do the work of many, all from one place. Find out how it multiplies my efforts as a solopreneur.
Elevating the Abstraction: Designing Future-State Solutions
Here’s where JTBD pushes beyond simple channel integration. It encourages us to ask: How can we design a new solution that makes the entire Job seamless, potentially elevating the level of abstraction so that current channel distinctions become less relevant or even disappear?
Consider the Job: "Obtain clarity on a billing charge and correct it if necessary."
Today's Reality (Low Abstraction): This might involve searching website FAQs (high effort, low clarity), interacting with a limited chatbot (repetition likely), calling support (long wait times, potential transfers), and waiting for an email follow-up (delay). The customer navigates a complex web of channels.
Future State (High Abstraction): Imagine a single, intelligent interface (perhaps within an app or website portal) that proactively identifies potential billing discrepancies, presents them clearly with context, allows for one-click dispute or clarification, and confirms resolution instantly. The Job is solved directly, with minimal steps and channel-hopping.
Elevating the abstraction means focusing innovation on solving the higher-context Job in a novel way. This often results in solutions with fewer visible features or steps for the customer, because the complexity is handled behind the scenes. It might even change who performs parts of the job – shifting workload from multiple human agents to a more efficient automated or AI-driven system. The goal is to make achieving the desired outcome dramatically easier and more reliable.
Developing Your JTBD-Driven Consistency Strategy
Ready to move beyond patching channels? Here’s a JTBD-informed approach:
Define the Core Customer Job(s): What fundamental progress are customers trying to make when they interact with your various touchpoints? Focus on the underlying goal.
Uncover Desired Outcomes: Interview customers or use other research methods to capture all the metrics they use to judge success when getting that Job done. Use clear, actionable outcome statements (e.g., Minimize the..., Increase the..., Reduce the...).
Analyze Current Performance: Evaluate how well each of your current channels and the overall journey deliver against these desired outcomes. Where are the biggest gaps and inconsistencies in meeting customer needs related to the Job?
Innovate Job-Centric Solutions: Brainstorm ways to better achieve the unmet outcomes and fulfill the Job more effectively. Think beyond channel tweaks – could a new interaction model, a proactive service, or a redesigned process (elevating the abstraction) solve the Job more directly and consistently?
Prioritize: Focus development and resources on the solutions that address the most important, underserved outcomes related to the core Job.
Job Consistency Trumps Channel Consistency
Stop chasing the illusion of perfect "omnichannel" integration across flawed processes. True, lasting customer experience consistency doesn't come from making broken channels talk to each other better. It comes from redesigning the experience around the customer's Job-to-be-Done.
By focusing on the progress your customers are trying to make and the outcomes they use to measure success, you can identify the real points of inconsistency and innovate solutions that deliver value reliably, regardless of how or where the customer interacts with you. Shift your focus from channel management to Job completion.
🚨🚨🚨BONUS REPORT 🚨🚨🚨
If you’d like to take a really deep dive into this topic, check out the article below.
The Unified Commerce Revolution
What do you think? What's the biggest cross-channel inconsistency you see in your industry? How might focusing on the customer's Job change the way you approach it? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you’d like to take action, I would love to help. Here’s are some steps you can take to make that a reality for us:
Join my community and get access to more content and tools
Apply for coaching so we can do projects together and build a new business-as-usual with someone who will share the knowledge, and hold you accountable. (I have limited seats so hurry!)
I do project work as well. Use the coaching link and we can discuss.
Why Me?
I’ve been trained by the best in Outcome-Driven Innovation. Part of that training involved how to understand what the future should look like. As a result, I’ve taken what I’ve learned and begun innovating so I can get you to the outcomes you’re seeking faster, better, and even more predictably. Anyone preaching innovation should be doing the same; regardless of how disruptive it’ll be.
How am I doing this?
I’ve developed a complete toolset that accelerates qualitative research to mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. It’s been fine-tuned over the past 2+ years and it’s second-to-none (including to humans). That means we can have far more certainty that we’ve properly framed your research before you invest in a basket of road apples. They don’t taste good, even with whipped cream on top.
I’m also working on a completely new concept for prioritizing market dynamics that predict customer needs (and success) without requiring time-consuming and costly surveys with low quality participants. This is far more powerful and cost effective than the point-in-time surveys that I know you don’t want to do!
I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:
Get more of the job done for our clients
Get the job done better for our clients
Get the job done faster for our clients
Get the job done with with fewer features for our clients
Get the job done in a completely different and novel way for our clients
Get the job done in a less costly manner for our clients
You could be an early tester of the latest developments, but at a minimum take advantage of an approach that is light years ahead of incumbent firms that are still pitching a 30 year old growth strategy process.
All the links you need are a few paragraphs up. Or set up some time to talk … that link is down below. 👇🏻
Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
Why fail fast when you can succeed the first time?
📆 Book an appointment: https://pjtbd.com/book-mike
Update your small business tech stack: https://effectivecrm.ai/gohere