From Hold Music to Cities That Don’t Exist Yet

After eight years of customer journey mapping across retail, hospitality, home appliances and giga projects in Saudi Arabia, I have learned that the strongest journeys start with evidence and succeed through organisational ownership.

Last year a client asked me to map a customer journey for a place that was, at that point, a drawing in the sand. No guests, no data, no building. Just an ambition and a deadline.

Eight years earlier, my job was the exact opposite. I was being paid to return products and complain to call centres in US airports, so brands could see where their experience broke.

Everything I know about customer experience sits somewhere between those two jobs. This is the story of how one led to the other, and what each stop taught me along the way.

Evidence first, opinions later

My first CX job was ordering products just to return them. BVA Insights, 2019. I was still studying, and someone was paying me to mystery shop airports, call service lines and take notes on hold music.

Here is what I didn't expect. The big brands, with all their slick automated processes, kept losing in my scorecards. To small specialist retailers. Because the small guys still had actual humans in the journey.

Efficiency alone wasn't creating better experiences. That idea never left me, and it still shapes how we design with AI today. In 2023 we helped a retail brand redesign its post-purchase experience around exactly this principle: AI where it helps, a human where it matters. Six years after those airport shifts I am still asking the same question. Where does a person make the experience disproportionately better?

The deeper lesson from that first job was about method. Nobody at BVA asked for my opinion. They asked for evidence. Before we design a journey at TCXA, we still go and live it first. Call the line. Book the room. Return the product.

A persona doesn't exist outside its culture

In 2020 I joined Plantish, a three-person startup building a plant-based salmon fillet. My job was researching the US market to shape the go-to-market strategy.

On paper, our target was identical to the one in Europe. Young, environmentally conscious, plant-based. Same age, same values, same shopping basket. In reality, the Americans wanted completely different things from the product. Same demographics, different culture, different motivations.

I have never built a persona the same way since. Motivations and behaviours first, demographics second. And when culture materially changes the experience, it goes on the map. A tiny team also teaches you every function at once: research in the morning, sales in the afternoon, operations before dinner. The best crash course I never signed up for.

Customers should lead technology decisions

My first real agency project had a great ambition and a brutal reality check! Late 2021, a hybrid hospitality brand mixing hotel, coworking, student housing and a bar under one roof. The brief, more or less: make the app feel like walking into the lobby.

We designed recognition across every interaction. Connected touchpoints. Physical and digital as one journey. Then we met the systems, the integrations, and the data that lived in five places.

That project gave me a line I still repeat to every client: understand your technology, but never let it design your experience. Start from what customers need. Then work out what the stack has to do about it. Not the other way around.

The moment an organisation starts speaking customer

From 2022 to 2023 I worked across one hotel group and five very different brands, from low-cost to resorts to luxury, across Europe, Morocco and the US. It was my first real end-to-end CX transformation rather than an isolated project.

There is a moment when you know it is working. Mine happened in a workshop. People from completely different functions were making decisions together, and they were all using the same words. Personas. Journey stages. Customer needs. Nobody told them to. Like an orchestra that suddenly plays from one score.

I remember thinking: we are getting somewhere. Followed immediately by a harder thought: the real work starts when the workshops end. Alignment fades without culture, governance and budget behind it.

Luxury added one more layer. Working on 5-star properties forced a question my process maps never asked: not what customers do, but what they feel, and what they carry home. Operational excellence gets you into the game. Emotion is where brands separate. I still believe psychology is the next frontier of this discipline.

The leap, and what it opened

In 2024 I left a secure job to co-found TCXA with Arnoud Maas. My mentor. The person who had been part of nearly every CX project in my career, from a different generation, with exactly the same conviction about customer value.

People warned me about the risk. Nobody mentioned the reward: the sheer breadth of the work. A normal month at TCXA might involve hotel guests booking experiences, residents facing a three-year wait for their new home, and a programme helping corporate employees quit smoking. Completely different industries, same fundamentals: understanding people, their expectations, their emotions and their journeys.

That cross-sector exposure has been the biggest accelerator of my learning so far. Every sector hands you an idea you can carry into another. And apprenticeship compounds: a decade of working beside someone who has seen it all before is worth more than any promotion I skipped.

"Yes, that's my touchpoint"

Some projects turn on four words. We were mapping the customer lifecycle for a leading European home appliance brand, across business units, functions and channels, everyone with their own targets. On paper, the silos should have won.

Then, in a workshop, someone said: "Yes, that's my touchpoint." The journey stopped being an abstract diagram on a wall and became something teams owned. People could see exactly where their function shaped the customer's experience, and where they depended on the team next door.

It held for one reason. Leadership kept the customer voice on the agenda, every single week. Journey maps don't make organisations customer-centric. Ownership does, and ownership is granted in the leadership meeting.

Designing for places that don't exist

Which brings me back to the drawing in the sand. On giga projects in Saudi Arabia we have been structuring journeys across more than twenty personas and over a hundred experiences, for destinations that have not been built yet. Zero guests, zero data, zero past to learn from.

At that scale, something unexpected happens. Journey work stops being only about understanding the visitor. It becomes the way programming, operations, design, technology and service teams understand each other. Someone on one of the project teams told us: "You're the glue to the entire program." The visitor's journey turned out to be the one thread running through every discipline.

It also exposed the limits of the standard toolkit. Most CX methodology assumes a past to learn from. When there is none, you rebuild: behavioural analogues from other sectors, scenario design, prototyping moments before the architecture is fixed.

Culture is the last mile

"Customer-centric" might be the most loosely used term in business right now. A value on a slide. A journey mapping exercise. A transformation programme with an end date.

After eight years, here is what I actually mean by it. Customer impact comes up when leadership decides. Teams talk about what customers experience, regularly, without being prompted. Someone is allowed to challenge an initiative because it makes internal sense but creates friction for customers.

That is what we want our clients to achieve with TCXA. Not prettier journeys. Organisations where thinking about the customer is simply how people work. Customer-centricity is not a project. It is a management habit.

If you think for your customers, customers will feel for your brand.

If your organisation needs to turn customer insight into an owned, operational journey, explore TCXA’s Journey Mapping work.