Journey Management as a Capability: From Journey Mapping to Activation

Everyone, thank you so much for joining. It's about 3:30, so we are gearing up for I believe our final presentation of the day. My name is Christa Reid. It's nice to meet all of you all virtually. Hello. I am the director of operations at Accelerant Research and today I will be introducing our speaker, Dr. Nikki Smith. I'm just going to share my screen real quick to go over a few of our ground rules. I'm sure you've heard all of this before. Um, if this is your first time joining us or if you've been with us for several of these virtual conferences in the past, the truth still stands that we're at the mercy of tech no matter what. So, if there are glitches, if doorbells are rung, dogs are barking, um, please just bear with us. That's kind of the norm now when we're living in a tech world. Um, also be respectful of one another. Um, so also of our presenters, if you have any questions or comments, feel uh free to put those into the chat or you can also email them um to us at accelerant and then use the opportunity to network to engage and interact. It's a wonderful platform to be able to connect with like-minded people and even those who can make some suggestions for something that come from a different perspective you may not have considered before. So, thanks again for your time and for joining us. And with that, I'm going to introduce Dr. Nikki Smith. She's going she's going to speak about journey about journey master management. Awesome. Thank you, Christa. Are you able to hear me? Just to confirm that I'm my sound is working. I am. Yes, I am. Yep. I I can see I can see you. I'm gonna go I'm gonna go on mute. Okay. Let me get my deck up here and I am going to share this as a slide. Okay. So, what this means is that I cannot see you all. So, if there are hands raised or questions in the chat, I likely won't be able to catch it seeing how I'm on presentation mode. But if I will make sure that I have intentional pauses throughout the presentation. So Christa, I'll just um just pause um throughout and then ask if there's any questions in the chat just to be sure that I'm um not missing anything along the way. Sounds good. Okay. All righty. So, hi everybody. My name is Dr. Nikki Smith. I am in the space of experience management also called journey management. It's uh just a another fancier sort of discipline within customer experience or CX. My team had traditionally been a UX research team and then we're evolving more into experience management and I'll talk a little bit about what that looks like and what that means. But today we're going to be talking about journeys. And I'm excited because I look through the agenda for today and I know that you all have had a lot of conversations around insights and empathy um as well as UX research. And so I just want to expound upon that and really bring it up to a higher level and talk a little bit about journey management as a capability. and then we'll dig into deeper about what is journey mapping as a capability within that. So my goal for today is to help increase the understanding of journey management with a focus on journey mapping and then also talk to you all about the next steps towards moving towards activation. So this is one of my favorite um favorite quotes here. Sometimes you need to go slow. Sometimes you need to slow down in order to go faster. And really what that means is sometimes you really have to take a step back and look at the full picture and really understand where is it that you're trying to go so that when you get down and you put those spikes on and you start your race, you're going full speed ahead because you know exactly the direction that you're going in. So in order to do that I first want to discuss journey management as a larger higher level capability before we dig into journey mapping. So what is customer journey management? Really what this means is that I am able to not only measure but I am monitoring and optimizing that customer experience. And not only am I aligning it with my organizational goals, but also understanding at a deeper level what are the customer goals that exist within our audiences. Really we like to think about this in two in a diff a couple different ways as we start to process what does it mean to be a customer centric organization. So, first you want to be sure that you can identify the journeys that matter based on your customer's goals and based on what the business is trying to accomplish. And so, a lot of the times in journey mapping, you'll see those phases across the top as those highlevel moments in time in which every customer will likely go through a phase. Whether they're online shopping for a car, whether they're signing up for a new subscription box, or whether they're scheduling an appointment at their doctor's office, they're likely to go through key phases along those journeys. And so, part of being good at journey management is understanding what are those moments that matter. Journey management also consists of being able to manage I'm sorry measure and monitor those end journey signals to predict whether or not the customer is going to be successful in completing that end goal or the ideal experience. And so when you think about those end journey signals, say for instance, I'm online and I'm trying to schedule an appointment at my doctor's office and I go onto the website and I keep having a glitch happen when I'm trying to input my insurance information. So, I'm trying to bypass the paperwork and input all my insurance information, but there's a glitch happening on the website, and I am therefore abandoning the website, and I'm going to pick up the phone, and I'm going to call the doctor's office. And that might cause some frustration because now I'm on hold, and now I have to um manually schedule the appointment instead of having it automatically added to my Google calendar. And so that fallout of that funnel where I immediately abandon the online effort and pick up the phone and call, that's a signal that I'm likely not going to be successful in completing the ideal experience that the that the doctor's office had designed for me to experience. And so that's a signal. How do we measure and monitor those? And so we can better orchestrate that next bullet point. Orchestrate some corrective action when needed. So, if I'm abandoning a website, sometimes you'll see a popup that shows that say you're leaving. Are you sure you want to leave? You'll lose all your information. Um, and then I say yes or I say no and I try again. And so, those are some corrective actions that we can input into the journey to ensure that people are successful. And so, that's one of the big goals that exists within journey management. And then we can start to prioritize some underperforming journeys within um for investment. And so if we're looking at the overall experience that customers are having with us, are there things that are not going well that we absolutely need to prioritize and start putting some money towards fixing those pain points? So journey management in a nutshell means to correlate the customer behavior with the preferred business outcome. And so we're going to be looking at how you might prioritize change. Um you also want to be sure that you're able to actualize some of those results and then continuously improve the customer's experience over time. So, not just looking at a moment in time where we're removing a painoint, but over time, how might we change behavior or how might we innovate or elevate the customer experience as it exists today? So, this is important because customer experience is really driving a lot of different functions within our business. It helps improve customer acquisition, brand loyalty, lifetime value, and then comp companies are trying to strive to have a more unified view of how these customers are interacting with the company. And so you're getting you're likely to see a lot of pressure around personalization hyperpersonalization all those cool buzzwords that are going on right now. is really trying to figure out how do we personalize these experiences across the life cycle of the of the customer experience at each interaction at each channel that the customer is engaging with us in. It truly is a mind shift change. And so it's about not just optimizing a single interaction again at a moment in time, but really looking at each touch point that a customer is engaging in and making sure that we're able to measure, monitor, and optimize those experiences. So I'll pause here and see if there are any immediate questions on customer experience in general and then just a high level about journey management. Okay, I'm not see I'm not seeing any questions right now. Okay, thank you Christa. Okay, well I'll keep going. So monitoring touch points is not enough. Again, we really want to move away from just looking at um phone calls coming in to the call center or emails coming in and we really want to look at what's the unified view of how customers are interacting with the company and how can we improve and personalize those experiences across those channels, locations, and time. And so really, we're trying to shift from that one single touch point into that unified view. And that means transformation. And so to do that, we need analytics, we need research, we need insights to truly help us evolve from kind of a retrospective disparit reporting and and moving towards some real time continuous behavior-driven management. So let's talk about what journey analytics are and let's talk about what journey mapping is, which is which are two different things. So if you think about customer journey mapping, it's increasingly become popular over the past decade and maybe two at this point. But unfortunately, a lot of companies are starting to sink time and money into creating these grand beautiful journey maps and they hang them up so everyone can see and they hang them up in a wall and then that's pretty much it. They collect dust after that. employees go back to work and you kind of don't look at it anymore. Um, again, because it's often a moment in time. And another thing is that sometimes it's not even rooted in research, real customer research. It's rooted in a focus group of a of some maybe some customerf facing employees sitting in a room and saying, "I think these are the steps that customers take when they want to engage with us." Sometimes it's coming from marketing folks and they're saying these are the steps that our customers take when they want to engage with us. And unfortunately it creates a very imaginary journey that fails to reflect the variety of kind of real world paths that a customer might take because if you ask me it may not align with your ideal way that marketing has probably designed it to go. it. I have probably found a couple of workarounds because your ideal way doesn't match what my specific needs are. And so I'm creating workarounds and that's not going to be reflected in a journey map and therefore it's not going to be reflected in any solutions that the design team is going to come up with. And so we want to be sure that we understand to what degree do we lean in on these journey maps. They can be highly effective in two different ways. So they can illustrate a very macro level in understanding kind of from initial awareness to long-term relationship. What are the steps and interaction points within that? Or they can zoom in at a very micro level and talk about specific steps taken on one specific type of an experience such as making an online purchase. So, it doesn't include all the things that are encompassing of me engaging with this brand, but this very specific task, it's mapping out what my um what my experience is within that task. But they ne they don't ever do both, right? And so, we want to be sure that when you're starting the journey mapping process, when you're starting your research for a journey map, you want to be very specific about what's the output here? What's the outcome that we're looking for? and what is it that we're trying to learn and understand at either a macro level or micro level but never both. So um also by their nature they're very static in point in time representations and so sometimes they also assume that each person each persona or customer type is going to go through the same sort of cadence of steps and that's not always true as well. And so they're they're likely unable to capture nuance and complexity that might exist within the customer journey. And so part of being able to combat that, not saying that journey maps are all bad, they're not. Part of being able to combat that is marrying that with journey analytics. And journey analytics is a different type of tool in which you're using your customer behavior data which might come from your um voice of the customer feedback management tools, your insights, your Google reviews, social media, anything that you're continuously collecting to keep a pulse on the voice of the customer. If you fold that into your research that you're doing specific for your journey map, then you could come out with a pretty comprehensive view and pretty close to accurate view of the actual steps that customers are taking and the actual experiences they're having along the way. So, next I'm going to go into this journey mapping framework. I talked a little bit about journey analytics which I it's highlighted here um as well. Journey mapping being that visualization of the customer experience across those touch points. Um, and we'll dig deeper into journey mapping, but I just wanted to be sure that you saw how a lot of these other different pieces play together when we think about journey management in its totality. So, here we have where I have this uh red box around. We're going to talk about journey mapping. That's going to be our focus for today. It's going to be very experienced driven. You'll see it overlaps with journey insights which are sort of the qual and the quant information um to provide that's providing understanding of your customer behavior. And then you'll also see a little bit of overlap at the bottom there around journey design and that's the process of defining the customer experience um as they seek to achieve the goal in the interactions that the company will take at each step to help promote progress towards that goal. So that's your intentionally designing the pathway that customers will take to reach that goal. And then the experience driven part is what is the actual path that customers are taking outside of what you've designed. And that then folds into what your insights are, your voice of the customer data as well as your qualitative research as well. I'll pause there and see if there are any questions that I can answer. Okay, so let's dig deeper into this journey mapping component. So again, we are using this to visualize and communicate what our customers experiences are across touch points and over time. It is not just used by CX but also by marketing, customer service. this. You'll see experience design do this a lot, product management, and it really helps you to shape that customer first culture because you're grounding yourself in the experience that people are having, both the highs and the lows. You're visualizing that and so it's really easy to activate and understand what your opportunities are. And then you're also seeing some make and break moments throughout the journey. What's really causing some pain? um and what's some really high um high highs in those experiences. Again, the challenge is being that sometimes these things just gather dust and employees go back to their real work that they're going to be measured by. And so a lot of the times this takes a cultural change within your organization to say not only are we going to make it a practice of developing journey maps so that we really understand on a continuous basis what our current state experiences are but also we're going to make a point to update them. We're going to make a point to fold in our journey insights, to reach out to our product teams, to reach out to other research teams across the organization and making sure that these things aren't just static and collecting dust at a point in time. We're revisiting them. We're looking at them maybe every six months to a year and then also making sure that we're thinking about the external factors that might influence a need for an updated journey map. For instance, you can imagine that customer behavior has changed dramatically from precoid to postcoid. And so understanding, wow, we had this journey map from a couple of years ago that may no longer be relevant because customer expectations have changed. How they engage with us has changed and also what they need from us um has changed as well. And that might create different opportunities. One of the things that I want to be sure that I highlight is that again, and I see this very often where companies will get a bunch of their favorite marketers into a room and say, "All right, guys, what are the journeys?" And they started spitballing out what the journeys are instead of doing the research to find it out. And so, we can't just create a journey. We can certainly create an experience that we think people are going to have when they engage with our brand or the ideal experience we'd like them to have when they engage with us. But how they go about it um what channels they choose to take, who they are as what's important to them. Are they a person with a family? So they might approach it differently. Are they a person nearing retirement? And so they might engage in a different type of channel and have a different type of interaction with us. Those things are important for us to be able to understand and illustrate and those only happen when we do research and really start to figure that out. Um and so in order to do that we must ba basically understand what our customer journeys are. We summarize how they interact with our company and then from a global perspective we're able to see how these things are fitting together. How do they inform the broader experience? How do they fit into our customer experience vision? And how does it fit into our strategy when we map the thing out? Is it is it doing what we thought it would do? And if not, is there some opportunity for us to tailor our strategy so that we're more customer centric um and not just focus on the business outcomes. Both of both are important um but it must be grounded in customer centric research. Okay, always start with the research. I know I'm talking to a bunch of researchers and so I just wanted to be clear that I am a fan. Um, and we always want to start with research and end with research. And so, how do we do that? When we're thinking about creating a journey map, where do you even get started? Well, I would say first start by looking at your existing data first. There's a lot that probably already exists within the company that you've collected uh qualric surveys or intercept surveys on your websites or emails um from customers or even social media comments as well. And so look at what you have uh already and start to think about okay how do we sift through this and find out what's relevant towards what our goal is for this map. So this information is always going to be disparit information. It's going to be kind of buried throughout various internal efforts. And so this research effort was focused on this and these were the insights. And this one was focused on something different. It has different insights, but there may be some themes there that might inform what an overall journey or a phase of the journey could look like. And so start to think about what's already at your disposal both from a qualitative perspective such as your call logs and things like that as well as your quantitative that's your analytics that's going to be your customer satisfaction scores things like that. Um and that can give you clues on how to shape and focus your content for your research efforts. So for instance we use a platform at my company called XMD. It's experience management platform through Qualrix and it's really really robust and it's pulling in millions of pieces of customer feedback data into this one singular platform and it's helping to identify what are some positive what are some key positive drivers and some key negative drivers. But that's pretty much it. It just tells me people hate that they don't understand what their invoices mean and what exactly that they're paying for. What I then can do is then go step two conduct some qualitative research and begin to dig in deeper to understand what's the under what's the why that's driving that what's what are some root causes and so your quant data is going to give you that highle understanding of customers attitudes and levels of satisfaction but then your qualitative data in step two is really going to help you understand those emotions those mindsets and those motivation ations that are depicting that journey. And then step three is then this is wrong. This a typo here. Step three is where you're going to marry those two things together. So you're going to marry your qualitative data and your quantitative data. Um, so your qual um, yeah, your qualitative is going to um, help add another layer of evidence and your insights and really help make your narrative more compelling. So you would also maybe look at again that example that I used of I got some feedback data um from call logs and things like that maybe some surveys that we have done to help me kind of picture what's a starting place for me. Um and then we can go into marrying that complementing that with our qual through some customer interviews to understand maybe some frequency. Uh we also can do uh if you start with qual and end with quant you could do digital analytics to find out uh I is it credible that you know as I'm interviewing people as I'm talking to people they're saying these are the emotions that they're feeling um how frequently is that going to be happening um across different customer types and things like that. It also can help supplement some high or low areas depicted on the journey map with some satisfaction metrics along the way. So, not only are you sort of visually showing the smiley face and sad phase as customers are going through the journey, but you're aligning that with some key metrics that you may have gotten from quantitative um data sources. What questions can I answer for you all? Okay. Well, we'll get through this quickly. All righty. So, now let's dig into what are some components of a journey map. Uh I have a couple one example here that I've broken up a little bit to help us understand what these different components are. First, we're going to look at this top row here where it has the stages of awareness, consideration, decision, delivery, and use, and then loyalty, and advocacy. This is where you're pulling in all of your relevant sources. um whether it's behavior analytic tools or um again you know if you have some voice of the customer data anything that's going to help you identify what are those highlevel stages that customers are going through irregardless of what their personas might be um and what their customer type might be. But this helps kind of create some broad categories uh within that within the buying process or the engagement process. And so that's what you'll see at the top there. And then that second row where it has the customer activities and those customer goals, those are the things that the customer is doing or and wanting to accomplish as they're doing the task. And so sometimes this is called jobs to be done or something to that effect, but essentially it's what is the customer trying to accomplish and then what are the touch points? sort of the channels in which they're leveraging to accomplish that goal. And so that's where you'll see touch points and then experience. Those are the emotions that the customers are feel feeling as they navigate through those journey phases. And you can't guess at that, right? You have to go through your data. You have to either say um our voice of the customer feedback is saying these are some key pain points across the board or you're using your qualitative maybe interviews, focus groups, things like that to identify what those highs and lows are. But you definitely, and this isn't ideal, this is actual what people are actually feeling and going through. So your journey map, you might say customer activities um should be reflective of the things that customers are actually doing, not the things you want them to be doing in these phases. And so that's really really key is that we're not making assumptions here. This is rooted in actual research. And then sometimes you'll see on a journey map, it might not just include what the customer is going through, but also what the business is attempting to accomplish in each of those stages as well. So you'll see um business goal and KPIs. What is the business looking to accomplish during this journey phase? And what are the success metrics for that phase? And so we sometimes call this like your front of the house. These are the things that the customer is doing and the customer is interacting with. And then your back of the house is the things that the business is doing that the customer may not ever be aware that this is happening but it is happening in order to enable that customer experience. And so you'll have here you'll want to list your organizational activities, who's doing those things, and what systems are in play to deliver um that experience to the customers. The reasons why this is this is important to include in a journey map, and you won't see it all the time. A lot of the time, it's just the customer stages and and emotions, but I love including kind of that back of the house because you see how these things are all playing together. If you're seeing across especially with the systems if you're seeing across multiple systems that we're using some sort of marketing automation but it's causing a it's it you're seeing in those key phases that it might be a negative experience or a negative emotion coming from the customer because they might feel like I'm getting too many communications and I feel like you've automated a lot of things but I'm having to repeat myself in multiple places or input my information in multiple places and it doesn't feel automated at all actually. And so those are the things that you start to unpack when once you realize what systems are at play, who's doing it and what are those organizational activities. So this is how it could all look together. Um, again, I just broke it up into pieces to talk through those different components, but obviously you would, um, put those things together and create a full map. And this is something that again, you this just a moment in time. This is today, March 30th, 2023. This is what our customer experience looks like. A week from now, a month from now, a year from now, it may look different. And so it's important for us to have um a cadence in place in which we're continuously updating these maps. Okay, before we get into this last little bit, I just have a few slides left, but I'd love to answer any questions that may exist. Okay. So, how do you scale journey management? Um, when you start to peacemail these processes, it breaks your ability to scale. That's important. So, you have to be intentional from the front end and think about, all right, we want to map out the experience. We want to have some injourney signals to understand if we're delivering it well or not. And we want to be able to understand what are our metrics for success and do we have cadences in place to continuously update. And so you want to be very intentional about that on the front end so that you can continuously scale. What also might help you scale is that um you have a journey management platform that is helping you sort of connect the dots between those interactions and those outcomes. And so when I talk about Qualrix and their experience management platform, um there's a couple of different other ones that you can use as well, those really help you uh remove a lot of the manual work of updating it and using those journey analytics to continuously inform your maps. This is important because um journeys may share certain characteristics or differ wildly from the norm. And so some customers may go through each phase and path as they complete the goal while some may zigzag throughout it. It's not as streamlined and nice and pretty as you might like it. And so that's important to to note as well. And some of these journey platforms really help uh remove a lot of that manual work, removing that guesswork. You also can see the interconnectivity between the journeys as well. how people might engage online with you. And then if you have an in-person aspect of your interaction, what influences that in-person interaction? So, for instance, say you're renting a car from, let's call it Avis. And Avis has like a quick pass. And so, you might say, "Oh, I'm going online on this app and I'm putting in my information. I'm putting in my credit card. So when I get to the Avis branch, I can just get get in the car and go. They can just scan my barcode and I can get in the car and go. And so that's one interaction, one online interaction that's influencing an in-person interaction. And those things are hard to capture um without doing research and actually sitting down and talking to customers about did it work? Did the barcode work or did you still have to go to the counter or were the keys in the car or did you still have to talk to somebody to figure out, oh, there's not a midsize sedan on this lot. I don't even know what car to pick anymore because the availability might influence my in-person interactions. And so these are things that are nuances that you want to be sure that you capture within your research. And so when you're creating the journey, it's an accurate depiction of whether someone is zigzagging or streamlining or what have you is an accurate depiction of the paths um that customers might take. And then these journey platforms can help enough of that data being put into these platforms, you start to start to see some more frequent paths being taken. Um and then you can compare and contrast. Is this path leading to the ideal customer experience and the ideal business outcome or is this other path doing that? And are people finding workarounds? And so those sorts of things can be put input into these platforms and sort of sorted out rather than it being a huge manual task. So here is just a little quick illustration um that I've come up with to make sure that we understand um these three key steps in transforming customer journeys at scale. And so you'll start to first identify customer interactions across channels. And so that's where you see website chat back office mobile app. All of those things are going to help you understand or build out what a customer engagement profile could look like. So step two, we're going to anal we're going to engage analyze in real time to understand the customer behavior, intent, and the opportunities. And so that's going to give you your analytics. Your analytics are going to be those actionable insights that help you predict the next best action. And then those things are going to be what you fold into what we call journey orchestration. So I won't dig too deep into what orchestration is, but think of it as basically these are the inputs. Now that I know what I know and I can sort of predict what customers might do based on data, then I can sort of orchestrate an a better pathway for customers to take that's going to lead to better business outcomes and better experiences. And so that's where you see that customer experience optimization happening and it's all within that that loop there. So you're going to collect, engage, and optimize and then your outbound communication. Um and hopefully that leads to better actionable insights along the way, better orchestration on the way and more optimized customer experiences. So who's doing this well today? Um, a couple of examples here. We have, um, Trader Joe's is doing really well in terms of making sure that they reinforce that they are, um, thoughtful, they are creative, they're constantly reinforcing their brand's persona. Um, and it's easy to contrast them with some of those major players like Whole Foods and others because you know who they are. They're very visual. They're very verbal about their identity. Um, and they make it very clear even within their packaging how they engage with you in the store. Every touch point is driving home the fact that they are serious about food and not serious about anything else. I don't know if you've been to Trader Joe's, but I love their packaging and just how um creative and and really approachable and cool they are. Nordstrom also is doing this really well um because they are thinking about uh who their customers are and making sure that they're taking care of them. That's really been the core basis of their experiences that they deliver is making sure that people have um they know that they're going to be taken care of and that they want to exceed all customer service expectations. And so they've been able to do that through various different e efforts and understanding what their customer journeys are as well as optimizing those experiences. So one of the things that I wanted to be sure that I notated here is that journey managers and marketing leaders have the transparency of real time KPIs. They know customer satisfaction scores and they know the different journey interactions and what those company outputs are. And so you can use this to hyperpersonalize those experiences by audience. You can um optimize your products and services and communication tools. All of this while you dynamically are testing and listening to customers across your journey. So, not just thinking about again the map as a point in time, but how do we leverage um things like journey mapping, things like journey analytics to really fold into what's the holistic view that we might have about how customers are engaging with us? And that's all that I have for today. Um are there any questions or what questions can I answer? Dr. Nikki, Dr. Nikki, I'm not seeing any questions in the chat. Okay. Okay. Well, that was quick. Didn't take long at all. I will be sharing a PDF of this deck if you guys I know there was a lot of content on the slides. uh feel free to uh read through it if you have any questions that might arise through reading the content. Um I'm sure Excel will help you get in touch with me so that I can answer those questions. But that is all that I have today. Thank you all for your attention and um I look forward to participating in future conferences. Thank you so Thank you so much for your presentation and thank you everyone for joining. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good one.