Okay, we are pretty good storytellers... but are we telling the right story?

As service design professionals, we nail it when it comes to what I call "Horizontal Storytelling".

We can walk anyone through the customer journey, step-by-step, building empathy for the user's pain and frustration over time.

But here is the somewhat inconvenient truth: As you might have experienced, your CEO or CFO often doesn't know what to do with that story.

They are looking for something else. They need "Vertical storytelling".

They need to know how a specific pain point on the ground connects up to the strategic objectives of the business. They need to know the ROI. They need to know if the needle is actually moving.

In episode 8 of the Journey Management Playbook series, Tingting Lin and Marc Fonteijn are closing the loop.

They are moving from doing the work to measuring the impact.

If you’ve ever struggled to justify or prove that your journey management efforts are actually influencing the bottom line, this episode is for you.

They dive into:

• How can you translate customer empathy into business language to get buy-in.

• Why you can't just rely on churn or NPS as your metrics, and how to find early warning signals that prove your work is having an effect now.

• How to connect your solutions back to the original business challenge to see if you actually solved the problem.

• And how to start measuring impact today without having to wait for perfect data integrations.

This episode provides the missing link between "making mapping a journey" and "driving business outcomes."