Organisations focus on particular points of the customer journey, looking at the experience of a wide range of customers at each point and trying to improve performance bit by bit.
There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but sometimes it's worth stepping back and looking at the customer experience in depth rather than width. Doing so can reveal bottlenecks in your processes that you've been completely unaware of. It also gives you an insight into what it feels like to be a customer, helping you to see ways round the way things have always been done.
How do you do this? It's often valuable to use an "adopt a customer" scheme, where senior people can adopt an individual customer and follow them through their journey, understanding how things work for one person. Following the processes inside the company, which are usually opaque to customers, can reveal where things are being slowed down unnecessarily. "Why has my customer's order been sitting in your in-tray for 3 days?"
In my book, anything that gets senior people closer to customers is worth trying.
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