Conquering fragmentation: Jumbo’s journey-driven workflow

Fragmented data drags down lots of teams, keeping them from seeing the big picture and aligning on what’s important. Jumbo is successfully using Journey Management to flip the script within their organization.

Executive summary

This article highlights how journey management can improve the innovation workflow, influencing the involvement of product teams and giving everyone a better understanding of opportunities. It emphasizes how a journey-driven approach can ultimately improve quality and suggests key tactics for getting everyone onboard so that they’re speaking the customer’s language.

About Jumbo

• Industry: Supermarket, Grocery

• Revenue: €9.74 billion (2020 annual report)

• Employees: 44,877 (2020 annual report)

• Challenge: Fragmented data

• Key outcome: Opportunity alignment among Product Owners

• Interviewee: Jelmar van Voorst, Manager Customer Journey

Jelmar van Voorst, Manager Customer Journey at Jumbo, explains the shift they’ve experienced in adopting a journey-driven workflow. “Even though touchpoints in a journey still have one owner, we now have a vertical view of how those touchpoints impact other applications, channels, departments and teams. By putting those owners in the same (virtual) room and allowing them to look at a journey, they can immediately spot the impact a change might have”.

quote

Everyone on the ‘change’ side of a company can benefit from working with journeys.

Jelmar van Voorst

Manager Customer Journey at Jumbo

Improving the innovation workflow

Taking a Journey Management approach has changed the way Jumbo involves product teams in the process. They’re now looping them in much earlier so they can better understand which opportunities belong on the backlog, and which need more research. According to Jelmar, TheyDo’s opportunity matrix view really helps guide this process.

“When customer needs do reach our product and delivery teams, Product Owners know exactly what’s happening before and after the touchpoint that we’re trying to improve. This prevents them from going straight into execution mode because they understand that there are also vertical customer journeys that go through their horizontal domain”. 

More alignment, better quality

Although it took Jelmar’s team a few meetings to create this awareness, the time they spend aligning is what enables them to take the entire customer experience to a higher level. He explains that, “Journey Management, as a way of working, does ask for more alignment. So while it’s not really reducing time spent in meetings, it does significantly improve the quality of everything we do”. Overall, he’s seen huge improvements in the quality of their meetings. Furthermore, he’s always confident that his teams are working on the opportunities with the most impact. Ultimately, Jelmar truly believes that “everyone on the ‘change’ side of a company can benefit from working with journeys”.

quote

We literally put everyone in one room to make them aware of what the actual journey is.

Jelmar van Voorst

Manager Customer Journey at Jumbo

Getting everyone onboard

As with most new tools, stimulating widespread adoption is not always easy and has been one of Jumbo’s biggest challenges. While some team members use the minimal functionality, others love the extra features that TheyDo offers and fully embrace them to improve their workflow and data collection. Customer Journey Specialists are the key users, accompanied by UX Designers and Product Owners. 

Still, their number one goal in the next year is to spread Journey Management as a best practice across their stakeholders. Two tactics have worked particularly well for them so far. Establishing regular ‘TheyDo days’, half days where team members can map their most important journeys, has made it really easy to build the customer lifecycle and to maintain existing journeys. Additionally, they’ve invested time in aligning Product Owners from different teams and determining how they fit within the whole ‘discovery to delivery’ journey. “On a monthly basis”, says Jelmar, “we weigh the opportunities of all of a certain journey we want to improve, together with all the stakeholders – most of whom are Product Owners. During this monthly meeting we discuss status and progress, and celebrate victories. We literally put everyone in one room to make them aware of what the actual journey is”.

Jumbo now has 30 main journeys with eight journey specialists who are each responsible for at least three main journeys.

Speaking the language of the customer

Another technique that Jumbo actively employs to enhance the customer experience is encouraging everyone within the organization to use the same words as the customer. Jelmar explains that, “Whenever a customer calls for support we log the call with similar words that we also use for our main journeys. This makes it easier to report on and measure the impact of the changes we’re implementing. We can simply count the words used in the service requests”. 

Jelmar describes how they quantify each journey based on ‘effectiveness’ and ‘ease of use’. Conversion rate and time spent to finish a certain task are used to measure ‘effectiveness’, whereas ‘ease of use’ is assessed through Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score, as well as the number of times customers call about a certain topic.

Onwards and upwards

As a team of journey specialists (and not designers), Jumbo was initially drawn to TheyDo by the prospect of anyone being able to map a journey. Now that they’ve experienced the full potential of a journey-driven workflow, it’s onwards and upwards. 

Journey Management has given them a holistic view of the customer journey, aligning their teams around the customer-centric optimizations that have the most impact. This has also brought their teams closer, allowing them to celebrate successes and explore new research directions, together. We can’t wait to see where they’ll go next.