At Dreamforce 2014 Blake Cahill, head of global digital marketing at Phillips, shared his experience and perspective on the evolving customer decision journey from a linear funnel to a dynamic loop.

Back in 2011 Philips officially adopted a "Customer Decision Journey" model. They have totally transformed the way they look at customer experiences. As Blake said, "We've made our company and its innovations more focused, more agile, more responsive, and-most importantly of all-more meaningful for our customers." But how did Philips adopt this customer journey model and how can it be impactful to your business as well? Below are some key takeaways from Philip's journey and how they successfully pivoted the business around the customer journey.

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Define what it means to be a digital company.

Philips was looking to create this customer decision journey, but first they needed to define what they meant by becoming a digital company. They define four critical components of digital:

• Digital vision: knowing where we want to go
• Digital value creation: how will what we plan to do make money
• Digital process: use digital channels to connect with customers
• Digital infrastructure: develop the digital backbone and operating system of the business

Accelerate digital transformation across the organization.

A key piece of building the customer journey is cohesiveness across the organization. Your customer's journey will likely span a number of different teams and business units. It's imperative to be on one page with your customer decision journey across the company.

Build the ecosystem of touchpoints around your customer decision journey.

The customer journey contains every touchpoint a customer has with your brand including search, content management, social media, digital ads, digital marketing, analytics, customer service, sales, and more. Phillips had no shortage of digital programs - but there was no common operating model for how they were doing business. Bringing that customer journey to the forefront of their business was necessary to drive relationships with their customers and gain insight from product and marketing. So Philips took the time to pull together the ecosystem around the customer decision journey. Below is a snapshot of how Philips has built out their ecosystem of touchpoints:

Utilize your greatest asset-your employees.

As part of managing their digital network, Philips has also found great success in building a brand ambassador program. They now have over 1,000 employees in the program. It's important to think about how you can utilize your own employees and assets.

If you want to watch Blake's entire breakout presentation, you can check it out here. We recently released our own Journey Builder Success Guide to give you a step-by-step guide to creating 1:1 customer journeys. You can download it here. If you'd like to learn more about Journey Builder and using Journey Builder to craft cohesive customer journeys, you can also request a demo today.