A journey-centric organization doesn’t happen overnight. Understanding your organization’s maturity is a great starting point to set realistic goals. When you are ready, it’s your job to take your organization with you.
In this article you’ll learn how to:
- 1. Assessing your own customer-centric maturity
- 2. Make an inventory of journey related content
- 3. Set up roles and permissions
- 4. Align your way of working with TheyDo
- Bonus: creating a business case
Co-founder Martin Palamarz explains how you can use Journey Management that reveals the path you took to end up with a set of opportunities for CX improvement.
1. Assessing your organization’s maturity
As Journey Management is rapidly evolving and becoming a standardized approach to organize an entire organization, it can be very useful to set goals in line with your organization’s level of journey mastery. In principle we see that the changemakers in an organization, like you, have a better overview of what Journey Management is, and can do. Naturally you are going to master Journey Management faster than everyone else in the organization. Understanding where you are versus your organization is the key to making a plan of approach.
Do the 5-min maturity scan to see where your organization is.
TheyDo provides a key part of the puzzle to scale up customer journey management in organizations, but other factors play a role as well. Think of your way of working, the experience level of your teams, and the way you are organized. To help you understand where your organization is, use our free maturity scan to help you create an action plan.
2. Make an inventory of all journeys and related research
To make sure you don’t start from scratch entirely, it can be good to do an inventory across teams and departments to see what has already been created.
In most organizations, many journeys already exist in different shapes and forms. Most of our customers have a ton of Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files to consolidate, in addition to heaps of Miro or Mural boards full of those pesky post-it based journeys. The first step is to sift through the mess. Start by collecting all journeys, personas and even (journey-contextual) research in one place. Don’t worry about structure – having a folder or whiteboard full of everything is a great starting point. It will give you a feel for what is there, what is missing and what needs to be updated.
Three good places to start digging, if you haven’t already done so:
- UX designers: especially within the last few years, before ‘experience’ became a company priority, the UX team (or product team) was responsible for being the voice of the customer.
- UX research: capturing unstructured, qualitative data is the domain of the R in R&D. Maybe there is a whole repository going on in Airtable or other research tools you didn’t know about, or people tracking insights the old fashioned way. In a lot of organizations there is usually a treasure trove of useful information hiding in plain sight. All it needs is context and structure.
- Agencies/consulting firms: typically they are more structured in keeping content than your teams. Ask your company’s go-to agency or agencies for service design, CX or strategic consulting to share their journey and persona related research.
3. Set up roles and permissions, and involve the right people
TheyDo supports 3 permission levels, as mentioned below. More on these permission levels can be found here.
- Admins can manage users, adjust billing settings, edit all content, and edit taxonomies and journey templates.
- Contributors can edit any content in any workspace where they are editor.
- Viewers can view content in any workspace where they are viewer.
When it comes to who to involve in your organization, keep the following in mind. Journey Management creates cross-team collaboration. The customer journey cuts through the artificial walls (like marketing, sales and product) all the time, but at every level of abstraction it helps different levels of management make decisions . When there’s people involved from different teams it can be good to make an inventory of the most important stakeholders you need to involve to get your customer journey management up and running.
“When one small facet of that journey is adjusted and you recognise there is a point of friction, is there something in the software that makes it instantly visible to other stakeholders?”
“We introduced journey managers to get notified of all changes that happen to the journey….”
A few thoughts on who needs and does what:
- Executives and C-levels: if NPS or another metric is a leading indicator for success, you need a single overview of the customer lifecycle showing the biggest opportunities and who’s doing what.
- Domain managers (i.e. marketing / digital / eCom ): if your job is to manage the customer experience through the lens of a business vertical, you’ll want to know what customer problems in which journeys map onto your conversion goals.
- Product / Service managers: if your job is to manage a part of the service portfolio, you’ll want to align your roadmap with the opportunities in the customer experience, and make sure your peers are also focusing on the same things for the same reasons.
- Service designers: it’s usually your job to research new parts of the journeys and create that consistency of journey-centric thinking across the organization. Journeys, blueprints, opportunity mapping → your company needs your thinking.
4. Align your way of working with TheyDo
The next step is to understand how TheyDo can support your way of working. TheyDo is more than just a mapping tool; it can enable journey management all the way from customer research to service delivery, as mentioned in our workflow guide. Many organizations have already implemented some form of customer journey management, but often use their own process variations, terminology, and unique deliverables.
“Tell us what it does and how do you make this broad enough and customisable for a wide range of industries?“
Maturity also plays a role; some organizations simply don’t have all the key process steps in place yet. For example, we often see that organizations don’t have an ongoing process for customer-centric prioritization and validation in place, which means they go straight from research into solution mode.
Mature organizations often follow a Journey Management workflow as pictured below. They often have their own variations, but all the main processes and deliverables are accounted for.
As our platform grows, we will integrate all data from the customer experience right into the journeys, but you can already sync your delivery tools (like Jira) with solutions in the journeys.
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Get the template
So how do you put this workflow into practice? We created examples for every stage of the Triple Diamond. But before we go and see how you can use TheyDo step-by-step it’s useful to understand how your existing processes, tools and teams fit the journey management workflow.
Identify the gaps
Take a moment to review your way of working. What does your customer journey management process look like from customer insights all the way to service delivery? The better you understand the status quo, the better you’ll be able to pinpoint how TheyDo can support your way of working.
To help you map your way of working, we have created a template you can download here.
This template is aimed to help you answer the following questions:
- What steps do you currently take in your customer journey management process? Specifically, how do you:
- Decide what CX projects to focus on?
- Do customer research and create insights?
- Define and prioritize opportunities?
- Ideate and prioritize solutions?
- Develop/build solutions?
- Measure impact?
- What deliverables do each of those steps result in?
- What tools and repositories do you use for each step (besides TheyDo?)
- Who is involved in the steps above? Specifically:
- What teams or roles?
- Who owns journeys?
- Does anyone need to review or approve along the way?
- Who needs to know when work is delivered or shipped?
- How are your CX teams organized?
Let’s get started
Now that you’ve collected your first inputs, given your workflow a first thought and have the contours of the journeys mind, we’re ready for the fun part.
If you haven’t already, create a workspace and invite collaborators who will help build your journey management system in TheyDo.
If you need help setting this up, we offer a series of workshop modules for our Enterprise customers to help you kickstart your Journey Management.
Bonus: create a business case
Sometimes an organization can use a little nudge even if they know that Journey Management is the way forward. Using the inputs you generated above, you can get a long way. However, sometimes it helps to make a real business case. To save you some time, we’ve put together a template you can use to make your own.
