Leveraging Insights to Drive Value with Journey Management: Insights from Polestar’s Olga Kullander

At the recent JourneyOps Stockholm event, Olga Kullander, Global Voice Customer Lead at Polestar, delivered an enlightening presentation on leveraging insights to drive value with journey management. Here, we summarise the key points from her talk, focusing on how Polestar integrates customer insights into their journey management strategy to enhance customer experiences and business outcomes.

Understanding Polestar's Customer Journey Approach

Polestar, a Swedish electric car brand, stands out in the automotive industry due to its direct-to-consumer model. This unique approach allows Polestar to own most of the customer experience and data, selling primarily through online channels. Olga highlighted that customer experience (CX) is a corporate priority at Polestar, with metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) actively monitored by top management and the board of directors.

Olga's team at Polestar manages the customer journey from end to end, encompassing the shopping and ownership experiences. Their work aims to align customer experience with business goals, ensuring a seamless integration of both perspectives.

The Triple Diamond Process

Inspired by their collaboration with TheyDo, Polestar adopted a "Triple Diamond" process tailored to their context:

Understand: Generating insights and defining opportunities.
Explore: Developing and exploring potential solutions.
Act: Implementing and monitoring these solutions.

Olga emphasised that her team primarily focuses on the first diamond—generating insights. These insights are crucial for informing the next steps in the process, ensuring that decisions are data-driven and aligned with business goals.

Generating Actionable Insights

To generate actionable insights, Polestar combines journey measurement and journey research:

Journey Measurement: Monitoring performance indicators across the customer journey to identify gaps and opportunities. This includes metrics from the customer, brand, and business perspectives.
Journey Research: Conducting in-depth research to understand customer behaviour, motivations, and needs. This helps in identifying specific areas for improvement and innovation.

Olga shared an example involving their online purchase process, where they identified a gap in customer effort score and a rise in customer support cases. Through qualitative research, they discovered a split in customer preferences for online vs. in-store purchases, leading to targeted improvements in both channels.

Overcoming Challenges in Journey Management

Olga discussed the challenges of making insights actionable. One key strategy is using different journey visualisations tailored to various stakeholders:

Sales Funnel: For sales teams, integrating CX and brand metrics with commercial numbers.
Business Process Mapping: For operational teams, overlaying customer insights on internal processes.
Customer Journey Maps: For UX and service design teams, using traditional journey maps to identify pain points and opportunities.

This creative approach ensures that insights are communicated effectively and are more likely to be acted upon.

Polestar’s Ambition

Polestar aims to become an insight and impact-driven company, where decisions are consistently based on data, leading to confident and impactful actions. While they are not fully there yet, Olga noted that some teams within the company are already working this way, demonstrating the potential of this approach.

Key Takeaways

Identify Leading Indicators: Use journey measurement to find key performance indicators along the customer journey.
Combine Improvement and Discovery: Integrate continuous improvement and discovery to manage the journey effectively.
Engage Stakeholders Creatively: Use tailored journey visualisations to communicate insights effectively.
Allow Time for Transformation: Recognise that becoming insight and impact-driven is a gradual process requiring time and effort.

Olga’s presentation offered a comprehensive view of how Polestar leverages journey management to enhance customer experiences and drive business success. By focusing on actionable insights and effective stakeholder engagement, Polestar is setting a strong example in the automotive industry.

Start Your Journey Management Transformation Today

If you are interested in exploring how journey management can transform your organisation, I would love to hear from you. Let's discuss how we can tailor these strategies to fit your unique needs and drive success in your business. Please feel free to contact us to start this exciting journey together.