How journey-centric tooling turned Van Lanschot into an opportunities hub

Van Lanschot is using journey-centric tooling to understand the opportunities and solutions that will make the most impact.

Executive summary

This article explains how journey management tooling can promote collaboration within an organization. It addresses the challenges associated with enabling management to see the impact of journey management, further discussing the importance of aligning teams around journeys and increasing their reach within your organization.

About Van Lanschot

• Industry: Banking, Financial services

• Revenue: €594.7 million

• Employees: 1,654 (2021)

• Challenge: Lack of collaboration

• Key outcome: Everyone speaking the same language, from peers to C-level executives

• Interviewee: Mustafa Gurel, Customer Experience Specialist

Journeys are becoming the focal point of Van Lanschot’s ambitions to connect the customer experience with business goals. They’re using journey-centric tooling to understand the opportunities and solutions that will make the most impact. Though it can be challenging to convince management to take journey management tooling on board, for Van Lanschot, it’s been well worth the effort.

Creating synergies

Looking back at how things were before Van Lanschot got started with journey management, Customer Experience Specialist, Mustafa Gurel reflects on the lack of collaboration that existed within the organization. “Before we introduced a journey-centric way of working, every team (digital or product management) worked very hard on their own scope and delivered results, but in silos.”

Now, working from a client perspective and visually plotting the customer journey, Mustafa notes the ease with which they see the connections between what they do for a client and the resulting impact – especially when it’s complicated by budget and law. While the law makes some things mandatory, others are limited by budget. TheyDo acts as a sort of opportunities hub, making it easy for them to identify and prioritize the opportunities that run across journeys and teams. He says, “This is the plus point of TheyDo and something I don’t think you can manage using Excel or PowerPoint. You can tell a story with PowerPoint but in the end, you need specific tooling to work on a client journey.”

Bringing management around

As with a lot of organizations, convincing (upper) management to invest in yet another tool proves to be a continuous challenge. Why would we need tooling in the first place? What does it actually do? These are the questions that both the team leads and those managing the budgets within Van Lanschot explicitly ask, as they already have their own sales and marketing tooling. “But this is the whole thing,” says Mustafa, “these tools don’t show the customer’s perspective. If we want to improve the customer journey, then we have to use feedback from a customer perspective in a frictionless way that enables collaboration.” 

Focusing on this shift in mindset, Mustafa enabled upper management to see the impact of journey management, showing how feedback informs insights, which provides context in the journeys. “It’s a continuous challenge to keep everyone in the loop regarding the added value for both customer and business. Luckily, managing journeys helps everyone to align. We are speaking the same language, from peers to C-level executives. This greatly improves our collaboration process.”

quote

If we want to improve the customer journey, then we have to use customer feedback from a customer perspective in a frictionless way that enables collaboration.

Mustafa Gurel

Customer Experience Specialist at Van Lanschot

Increasing the reach

Alongside getting management involved, Mustafa emphasizes the importance of collaboration among teams, including giving people the space to take on the aspects of journey management that interest them most. He says, “The CX team (competence center) might be in the lead, but collaboration among teams is absolutely essential, as well as showing how easy it actually is to map a journey. In the process of getting journeys from ‘as is’ to ‘to be’, we greatly advocate letting people raise their hand to say, ‘I’d really like to do more customer interviews’ or ‘I need data in a different way than I have it now’. If we can increase the reach of the product management team, align with the segment teams across the organization, and create many opportunities in that process, that would be great.”

quote

Anyone working with a product or a service can benefit from working with journeys and should use TheyDo.

Mustafa Gurel

Customer Experience Specialist at Van Lanschot

Letting the solutions flow

According to Mustafa, Van Lanschot was very quickly able to generate opportunities within their journeys. Now, they’re at the dawn of being able to show which solutions flow out of these opportunities, and he’s proud of the way that the team is implementing this way of thinking. He shares an example of how client segment teams are aligning to add value to both business and customer: “‘Visit the website’ is a touchpoint in a generic journey that is actually made up of a number of different steps, once you peel away the layers from the customer’s perspective. With different journeys and steps crossing this touchpoint, TheyDo enables us not only to show what can be improved but reveals the impact of every opportunity across all these journeys.”

Celebrating every step

Although things don’t always happen as quickly as Mustafa would like, the team celebrates every step. He says, “Of course, as a change manager, I would like to see results rise to the surface sooner, but you’re just dependent to a large extent on your stakeholders. So showing them the baby steps that we take along the way really helps. Anyone working with a product or a service can benefit from working with journeys and should use TheyDo”.