Drive Stakeholder Value: the customer journey and stakeholder engagement
The customer journey is the spine
Drive Stakeholder Value follows value as it is co-created with customers and other stakeholders. Learn the journey stages - explore, engage, offer, agree, onboard, co-create, realize - and be able to say which practices matter at each: marketing and demand shaping early; service level management and supplier management around agreement; onboarding and user enablement in the middle; relationship management and feedback at the end.
Stakeholders
Separate the roles carefully: the customer defines requirements and owns outcomes, the user uses the service, the sponsor authorizes budget, and suppliers and partners contribute resources. A service relationship always involves a provider side and a consumer side, each with responsibilities.
Experience
Know touchpoints, moments of truth, customer experience and customer satisfaction. Experience is the accumulation of interactions; satisfaction is an evaluation against expectations - they are related but not identical. Managing expectations aligns perception; shaping demand changes what customers ask for. Do not treat them as synonyms.
Traps
Most wrong answers come from attaching a practice to the wrong journey stage, or from treating every stakeholder as 'the customer'. Another common trap is assuming more communication always improves engagement - relevance and timing matter more than volume.
Rule of thumb
Before choosing an answer, name two things: the journey stage and the stakeholder whose perspective is being described. If an option only fits one of those two, it is usually wrong.