Customer Service Secrets by Kustomer
TheyDo Co-founder and CEO Jochem van der Veer shares tips for effectively managing journeys, on the Customer Service Secrets podcast.
From mapping to management – why is that so important?
If you take a journey map as they teach it in courses, you get a beautifully designed thing with a lot of insights, and then you’re stuck with the journey. But that doesn’t work because it’s like an old artifact.
We should manage journeys the same way we manage products because ultimately the journey holds the key to how people do things and how we as a business align our services, products, and communications to support that journey.
In today’s technological world, you can start connecting the dots around your journey, turning it into something living. In larger companies, there are hundreds of interconnected journeys, and you first need to unify them in a framework. So you need to set up not only a journey framework, like a customer lifecycle, but also a management process. Start working from insight to implementation, and not once but continuously.
What would be a sample framework?
The easiest way to think about a framework is by looking at the customer lifecycle. Where does it start and where does it end? Then, think two steps before – when people are not even aware that they need your solution or service. That’s the lifecycle, all the way from purchasing a product to renewing it, to becoming a loyal customer, to recommending it to a friend.
And when you start to break it down, there’s one thing that most of our customers think of as an “Aha! moment”. The lifecycle is based on the time from left to right. But when you look at it vertically, you look at it from different dimensions. These dimensions, which are relevant to your business, could be different regions, different customer types, new customers versus existing customers, and product or service groups. There are many ways to do this, and that is a little nugget that people can use.
What happens after frameworks are nailed down?
So we have a group of people in the organization who already think big and can oversee this from the service design, UX design or CX perspective. This small group of people is building basically the whole framework, setting up the guidelines and rules for the rest of the team. Then we need to define how we want to work with journeys. We want to understand when and where our customers interact with our products. We also use those journeys to understand what we plan to do next, how it relates to these journeys, and which steps it influences or impacts. Then, it’s time to create a bunch of templates that your teams can start using. That’s the next step that we see companies do.
How do you get more alignment from teams?
Let’s stick to the product company example. So you have your journey, a messy feeling-driven experience. And the products have all these features, epics, roadmap, priorities, and metrics. We want to bring those two worlds together.
For example, we have integrations with common tools like JIRA. So you already have a roadmap or some priorities, some sprints, etc. And then we look into the journeys and define the opportunities. The first thing you do is to define what you’re trying to build. Do you need to reiterate that strategy? And by integrating those things together, teams are aligned. Because the product team will need to deliver on spec on time within the frame, within the cadence of the company. It already flows, so you don’t want to throw that away. You just want to enhance the process by making it focus on the customer or making it even more focused on the customer.
What’s your advice to people who want to move on from journey mapping?
Start small. You don’t need to have a whole big complete journey framework with all the journeys and teams before you can start. The only thing you need is a unified framework, at least in your mind. Then start thinking: where do you have leverage? What are the current needs of your organization? And then deliver a project that benefits the customer and the business, and make a little business case for yourself. Then you can start doing more of it and get more resources to build it out within the framework.