Customer Journeys: Involving Customers and Internal Resources in the Design and Management of Services

The customer journey approach is increasingly being taken up by practitioners and researchers to support the design and management of services. As part of this approach, customers and internal resources are often involved as contributors of input in design and management processes. In the current literature on customer journeys, a broad variety of involvement practices has emerged. No coherent framework has been proposed to structure these practices. In this short paper, we provide an overview of the different purposes and implementations of emerging involvement practices with the customer journey approach. We then contribute a simple framework for these practices, where we classify involvement according to its purpose, implementation, and output. Finally, we point out future research needed to further develop the ways customers and internal resources are involved within the customer journey approach.