When Journeys Break: Aligning Disaster Recovery with Customer Expectations

Disaster recovery planning often starts with infrastructure. What’s the RTO? Where are the backups? Which systems are critical? But customers don’t experience infrastructure — they experience journeys, and when those journeys break, trust breaks with them.

In our work with global organizations, we’ve seen how technical and business teams struggle to align on outage tolerance. IT may define recovery targets based on architecture, business units may prioritize based on revenue or regulatory exposure, and security may focus on containment, but without a shared view of how outages affect the customer experience, these efforts remain fragmented.

That’s why we introduced customer journey mapping into disaster recovery planning— not as a UX exercise, but as a strategic tool to help teams talk about impact. When teams can see how an outage affects the underwriting process, the claims experience, or the login flow, they begin to understand what’s truly at risk — and what “readiness” should protect.

Customer journey mapping changes the conversation. It provides a visual, narrative, and operational view of how customers interact with the business — and what those interactions depend on. When we introduced journey mapping into DR planning, the goal wasn’t to redesign the experience. It was to reveal the experience and use it to anchor recovery decisions. These insights helped teams move beyond abstract RTOs and into real-world impact. They could now ask: “How long can this step be down before the customer walks away?” And that question changed everything. For example:

• Mapping the underwriting process helped teams see that a seemingly minor outage in a document upload service could stall the entire flow.
• Visualizing the claims journey exposed dependencies on third-party APIs, internal databases, and customer notification systems — each with different outage tolerances.
• Reviewing the login and account access flow clarified which systems needed real-time failover and which could tolerate brief delays.

Bringing the Underwriting Journey to Life

To move beyond abstract recovery metrics, we introduced customer journey mapping, starting with the underwriting process. This wasn’t just a visual exercise. It was a way to help business, IT, operations, and security teams see the same thing: how outages affect the customer experience.

Then we asked a simple but powerful question: What happens if a key system supporting this journey is unavailable for five minutes, 30 minutes, one day, five days, or one week?

The answers were revealing. A five-minute outage in document upload might be tolerable. A 30-minute delay in risk scoring could trigger SLA violations, while a one-day outage in policy generation would halt revenue. A five-day outage in pricing systems could cascade into regulatory exposure, and a week-long disruption in delivery could erode broker trust and customer retention.

This exercise brought things to life, helping teams articulate their true outage tolerance — not in technical terms, but in business and customer impact. It also exposed misaligned assumptions. Some systems thought they had 24-hour recovery windows, but the business revealed they needed two-hour guarantees.

By grounding DR planning in the underwriting journey, we helped the organization move from siloed recovery targets to coordinated resilience. And we gave every team — from infrastructure to compliance — a shared map of what matters most.

Disaster recovery isn’t just about restoring systems. It’s about protecting the experience, and the customer journey is the map that shows where readiness really matters.

By anchoring DR planning in the customer journey, organizations can move beyond technical silos and into coordinated, experience-driven resilience. They can define outage tolerance in terms of trust, not just uptime. They can also build recovery strategies that reflect what customers actually need — not just what systems can technically support.

If your organization is struggling to align DR priorities across teams, CapTech can help. We bring together business, product, IT, and security stakeholders to map the customer journey, assess outage tolerance, and design recovery strategies that protect what matters most. Contact CapTech to start your journey-driven DR assessment.