Brands spend considerable time and money building purchase experiences for customers. But most of these experiences do not support the customers’ situations (or the contextual requirements that accompany the wide variety of settings where buying is possible). So, buying a milkshake in the morning could be a very different experience for the customer than buying a milkshake after dinner. Situations are what drive so much purchasing. To support customer situations, focus your purchase experience strategy on modes.

Qualtrics X4 Summit finished last week and one of the most exciting things introduced were ‘experience agents’. Zig Serfin, CEO of Qualtrics, made the announcement about Qualtric’s new AI features that understand context, preferences, and journey touchpoints—and that can take action in real-time on concerns that people have. Bravo! Well done Qualtrics. This is exactly what experience management needs, and, if I may, exactly what I described in 2017 in  The Collaboratives as the future of channel strategy.

Most taxonomies of JTBDs focus on the differences between big jobs and small jobs. And like Christensen’s model, they tend to emphasize functional needs over other needs. The Stone Mantel taxonomy starts from a different place. Instead of defining the types of jobs to be done based on the size or importance of the job, we focus on what expectations people have for different types of experiences.

As I have mentioned in other articles in our newsletter, journey mapping must change to address the realities of today’s customer-centricity. We work in a very different business environment today. Generative AI is changing how people interact with products. Augmented and Virtual Reality is burgeoning. Technology, in general, is exploding.

Companies are so used to thinking about the customer’s experience as a journey that they miss the greatest opportunity to personalize the customer’s experience. The reality of what the customer is doing right now is the most important opportunity and with a mode map, companies can be prepared for the customer’s now.