Your customer experience is a reflection of your back end

8 min. read

Podcast

Felipe Camara, Design Director, Digital Customer Relationships at IKEA.

Felipe started out in brand strategy, moved into digital design and studied at Hyper Island in Sweden to understand how companies like Spotify were rewriting the rules. He spent five years at Philips, which he calls his PhD in design, during its shift from selling products to selling services, before joining IKEA to work on service design at the scale of a company with 150 million members.

Today he's design director of digital customer relationships at IKEA, part of Ingka Group, where his work spans rewards and membership and the IKEA Journey Atlas, a company-wide catalogue of customer journeys. He leads teams working in high-level service design.

We got into why your customer experience is a reflection of your back end, how a membership program becomes a relationship instead of a discount engine, the difference between journey mapping and journey management, and what agentic commerce could do to retail when discovery moves off your own site.

Key takeaways#

Why is your customer experience a reflection of your back end?#

Because every team you split your company into ends up claiming space on the screen. Felipe's test: open the checkout page of any large retailer and count the teams fighting for real estate. Delivery has its block. Payments has its block. Membership asks you to sign up, and the personalisation team asks you to add one more thing. A startup on Shopify doesn't show those seams. A big organisation does. The same thing happens in a consent form with three checkboxes. Tick all three and you might get emails from the loyalty team, the collection team and a few others, 20 in a week, until the only thing you want is to unsubscribe from everything. How simple your company is decides how simple your front end can be.

Try this: screenshot your own checkout and write the owning team next to every element. If you count more than four, the customer can feel your org chart.

What does it mean to design around customer goals instead of products?#

It means asking what the customer is trying to get done and building the business around that. Felipe calls his five years at Philips his PhD in design, and he was there while the company moved from selling products to selling services. A hospital buys an MRI scanner, but what it wants is a patient who arrives in pain, gets diagnosed and walks out better. Once Philips followed that patient journey, the MRI became one product inside a much bigger service. His consumer version: Nike can sell you shoes, and so can plenty of others. Nike could also sell you running a marathon.

Try this: write down the outcome your best customer wants from your product, one level above the product itself. Then list what else sits on the path to that outcome.

How do you turn a loyalty program into a real customer relationship?#

By treating membership as a relationship that runs across years of interactions. Discounts do drive behaviour, Felipe says, but mostly in the short term. IKEA members tend to stay around seven years, and the membership base is big enough that he pictures 150 million people doing something positive together. Over that kind of timeline, the useful questions change. If someone bought a baby crib years ago, are they now shopping for a bed? Could IKEA help them sell the crib they no longer need? His role is customer relationship design, and he separates it from loyalty design on purpose.

Try this: pick one purchase in your data that predicts a later need. Design the message you'd send at that moment, without a discount in it.

What do most companies get wrong about personalisation?#

Felipe frames it as a choice about what you're building personalisation for. Recommending what similar shoppers bought is personalisation for revenue, and it does help people decide fast. The bigger opportunity is understanding the goal behind the visit. People often come to IKEA to make the living room cozy for the season, which usually means a bundle of products. G's own example is his daughter's IKEA bed that grows with the child, nine years in and now due for a teenage room. Felipe takes it further: if you allowed it, purchase history could tell IKEA your style, your partner's style and what you bought for your kid, and generate a 3D view of the room.

Try this: next time you scope a personalisation feature, write the customer's goal in one sentence before you write the targeting rule.

What is the difference between customer journey mapping and journey management?#

A journey map is a snapshot. It shows one customer moving through an experience, where the pain points are, and where they get stuck or don't buy what the business expected. Journey management is the system around all those maps. You put KPIs on journeys and, potentially, organise teams around them. Felipe goes back to Philips to explain it. A company organised by product has an MRI team and a CT scan team. A company managed by journeys has an oncology team, a cardiology team and a home health team, each focused on what the patient is trying to achieve.

Try this: take your top three KPIs and ask which customer journey each one belongs to. A KPI that belongs to no journey is measuring your org chart.

How do journeys and sub-journeys fit together?#

They nest. Felipe's example is a kitchen. You're moving into a new apartment, you need a kitchen, it costs €10,000, and you're not sure you can pay that up front. You spot the option to get a loan from IKEA. Your journey was buying a kitchen, and now you're in a financial services sub-journey. Choose a loan and you drop one more level, into the loan application. So IKEA can have a financial services experience team that owns the loan journey and the credit card journey, each with its own application journey underneath. Someone orchestrates the end-to-end experience while sub-teams focus on the systems behind each step.

Try this: pick your most expensive product and map the sub-journeys a customer can fall into on the way to buying it. Then check who owns each one.

What is a journey atlas?#

A catalogue of all the journey maps in a company, arranged in a hierarchy. Felipe leads IKEA's Journey Atlas and describes it like a real atlas. You start with the map of a country, zoom into a province, a city, a neighbourhood, a single block. In journey terms that's a high-level map, a mid-level map, a meso level and a micro level. The point is a complete overview of every journey at IKEA, so the company can compare things at the right level and manage by customer goals. Felipe is candid that the rollout follows a change curve. Making that change in a company of around 200,000 people is slow, and some areas are further along than others.

Try this: list every journey map your company already has, wherever it lives. Sorting them into levels is the first draft of your atlas.

Why can a perfect touchpoint still create a bad experience?#

Because the customer judges the whole journey. Felipe's example: imagine IKEA spends a fortune building the best checkout in the world. You walk out with your watch, everything handled by RFID. Then you get to the car and the sofa doesn't fit. Back to customer service, two hours in the queue, and the next delivery slot is Friday next week. Your evening at home is gone. The goal was a cozy living room and IKEA didn't deliver it, however good the checkout was. Teams working on the same part of a journey often don't know about each other, and without a higher-level view, the handoffs are where things break.

Try this: follow one order past the point your team owns it. Write down the first moment the customer has to fix something themselves.

Where should you start with journey management?#

With the goal your customer is trying to reach. Felipe's example is an IKEA team building online ordering for spare parts. Ask why people order a spare part and the answer is that they're repairing furniture. That moves you from the business of spare parts into the business of repair, which opens up products to make a table shine, or the question of whether an IKEA repair shop would make financial sense. He's clear you can still choose to serve the lower level. But you make that choice knowing the bigger goal. IKEA's decades of home research feed the same thinking. Life transitions bring people in: a child growing up, moving in with a partner, splitting up, moving country.

Try this: for one feature on your roadmap, ask "why do they want this?" twice. Write down the business you'd be in at the second answer.

How will agentic commerce change the customer journey?#

Discovery may move off your own site. Felipe sees AI as the technology that will disrupt retail most, with agentic commerce as the big area. People will ask an assistant for the best shoes to run a marathon and do their research there. For IKEA that could mean much of the exploration happens outside ikea.com, and the data on how a customer arrived disappears. The signal just came from an AI. He's mostly excited. The more the team explores, the less unknown it feels. AI is already useful inside journey management too. Some journey management software can take raw customer feedback and route it to the piece of the journey that's broken, so a team can spend the next quarter fixing that one step.

Try this: ask three AI assistants the question your customers would ask before buying from you. See whether your brand shows up, and what the AI says about you.

How do you lead a design team when the tools keep changing?#

Like a coach. Felipe's style hasn't changed much. He gives people space and tries to help them be their best selves. What changes is the subject matter. During the digital transformation, designers were the ones explaining Twitter. Now it's how to build agents and give them skills. He borrows a line from a North Kingdom design director he met through Hyper Island, and still uses it a decade later: treat this place as a platform for self-development. In practice that means asking people what they want to achieve in the next five years and finding the Venn diagram between that and what the business needs.

Try this: in your next 1:1, ask where the person wants to be in five years. Then name one project this quarter that moves them closer.