REALLY Know Your Customers
Why is the future of CX Customer Journey Management? Find out in this episode of the REALLY Know Your Customers podcast.
The Journey Management mindset
In a typical organization, the people involved at the early start of this are mainly focused around service design. Those are the people who already do discovery work, have research practices, and know and use journeys in their day-to-day work. But they now face the challenge of mapping out the end-to-end experience to understand the whole business.
A good example of this is one of the larger global recruiting firms that we worked with in the early days of our product. They figured out that if they want to be journey centric, they need to bring in all of the contexts of different countries. So we set out a pilot in Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands and Portugal, and went there to interview people who were looking for a new job. We found out that across all if these different regions and needs of the people, there were many similarities in how to approach the job search, plus local ways of doing things. They allowed all the different operating countries to have their own localized versions of that journey in place so they could really fit and tailor towards the market needs.
Keeping that local and geographical aspect in place, the same goes for different services and products, if you are tailoring towards. It’s possible to make the same kinds of decisions and the same base, standardize your way of working, and allow for local variations in the teams.
Individual user data vs Aggregated data
There is a big difference between having individual user data to work with versus using aggregated data. It’s basically building a pattern library and understanding the bigger scope of your journey for your different personas or customer segments. They go hand in hand because journeys are a tool to align internally, not necessarily to understand what personalization we should send to every person. That is what is called journey orchestration today. In Europe though, orchestration is also a coordination between journeys. The journey orchestration tools are about personalizing communication flow based on some data from the CRM, behavior, and some AI modeling.
This is more about using journeys to gauge the emotion, the intention of people, and how using your product and service makes them feel. These tools are not only for the designers, but also for product managers and marketeers. They help everyone to understand the same things in the same way. That is more like the solution about alignment and creating a unified version of the customer experience that everyone can understand.
Big trends down the road
In the short term, there are some big data parties that can’t wait to get integrated, which means we can really start to build bridges between what people have – dashboard, whiteboards, and presentations – and bring it all together in the journey framework. And then making smarter tools for prioritization and alignment and making the workflow.
More broadly, there are two trends. The first is the orchestration trend that we’re seeing, where people want to automate and personalize everything. And maybe the bigger trend is that people are gaining more control over their data. Our tools and our gadgets are becoming more sophisticated, measuring what and how we actually feel from heart rate variability to all the other things that we could potentially measure. That trend will grow bigger and together with more control over your data. We’re heading towards a world where brands have to ask customers for permission to use some of their experience data. And that flips things upside down, giving control back to the consumer.
The Journey tells all
The journey is a powerful and easy way to know what happens before and after any aspect of the customer experience. Let’s say you have a bunch of surveys that probably don’t work anymore, but you can read them based on all the call center data and all the interactions with service reps. You can do a sentiment analysis to determine what a group of people were thinking and feeling in a particular instance.
Let’s say one particular step in their journey is to check out whether it’s some service point in their customer experience. You can pinpoint it to one step. So on this point, here’s a sentiment analysis that told us that people are frustrated. It’s still very relevant to understand what journey this is a part of, what people were trying to do, and why they’re not succeeding. And for the people who are succeeding, what comes next? What other steps follow until someone buys the product or finds something as a solution? Always having the context of what it really means is useful, whether it’s data-driven, survey driven, or just based on five interviews.