Customer-centric cultures (or not, as the case may be)

Taking a Customer Experience perspective has a canny knack of revealing an organisation’s real culture.

 

A CX maturity exercise I ran for a well-known consumer brand unearthed a shock for the leadership team; contrary to the employee survey, pride in the brand was pretty much non-existent.

I sat down with a number of colleagues and asked what they’d say to someone who enquired where they worked. An unnerving amount of them told me they would rather say they were unemployed or make something up than reveal who they worked for.

The reason they were fielding so many costly calls from customers was that although the team had given plenty of feedback on what needs improving, it was never acted on. They didn’t have the tools or information to help customers, hand-off processes went into black holes and communications were confusing and inconsistent. They’d tried to get things fixed but everything was ‘in next year’s budget’ or not seen as a priority. They’d given up trying to change anything so the cost of failure demand was left to write its own invoices.

And the reason the employee survey was giving a false reading of ‘highly engaged’? The team ticked that box in the belief that the “right” answer would secure their end-of-year bonus. Some interesting conversations followed.

In stark contrast, this year I experienced an employee going not just “the extra mile” for me but, literally, several miles. It’s an often-used phrase with good intent but translating it into colleague behaviours is not easy.

Long story short, my flight from London to Amsterdam was subject to an 8-hour delay. So, it was getting on for midnight when I arrived at the airport’s railway station. I needed information on how to get to an unfamiliar suburb of the city for my conference. The airport’s taxi queue snaked into the night for miles and there was hardly anybody else around. Thankfully, on the platform was a friendly-looking guy in a Schiphol-branded high-visibility jacket.

He explained it wasn’t a straightforward journey to navigate and without hesitation he said he’d go with me to show me the way. I tried to insist that while it was very kind he didn’t need to do it. He was, after all as I found out later, on his way home in a different direction after a long operational shift.

A short train ride was followed by a walk across a park and then onto a bus for a few more stops to the hotel.

He got me there and he made it easy for me.  I’ve lived and worked in cities around the world so am used to getting from A to B on my own but on that dark, wet night after long delays and feeling less than chipper, I was – and still am – so grateful.

His response to my gratitude has stuck with me ever since. As we parted ways he smiled and with a huge amount of pride simply said “We’re Schiphol. It’s what we do”.

With the help of Marcel Stroop of Schiphol’s brilliant innovation team, we tracked him down to make sure his ‘above and beyond’ actions were acknowledged.

I get it, that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day and is fairly extreme. But when we talk about employee pride and about “going the extra mile” for our customers, it reminds me that we should give it a stress-test to understand how genuine it is. Do actions mirror the words?

Even with the poster on the wall with its carefully-worded proclamations, would everyone – really – be willing to do something extra, however small it may be? Not every day, but when they feel it is right.

Or does the culture mean that in reality they dare not do anything outside their process-based remit for fear of recrimination by their manager? Do they think “Why bother?” or “We don’t have time for that”. Are they proud enough to wear your brand’s logo outside of work? Do they look at each other and shrug, assuming and hoping  that someone else will do the extra bit?

It’s important stuff and a telling topic to discuss in your team meetings. What examples of good or bad cultures have they heard about or seen in their own experiences outside work? Should or could the same happen in your organisation and what are the lessons to learn?

Thank you Michel, Marcel and the Schiphol family for a memorable and thought-provoking experience!

 

As a Customer Experience practitioner and now CX consultant, Jerry Angrave supports leaders and managers who are driving forward their organisation’s Customer Experience programme.

He helps shape the thinking and plan the doing in a way that gives structure, influence and momentum to the CX activity.

The real purpose of customer journey mapping

Customer Journey Mapping

This year has challenged the real purpose of many organisations. Some have stayed true to their meaning while others have shown their true colours.

As the dust hopefully settles on the rapid changes everyone has put in place we should, if at all possible, invest in the time to understand what it’s like for a customer. Our underlying vision, purpose or North Star may not have changed but our customers’ priorities and experiences most certainly have.

We always advocate that journey mapping is done and reviewed regularly but the events of 2020 make repeating it necessary, not just an option. Chances are, most existing journey maps were created pre-pandemic and so are already out of date.

How can we build back better if we don’t understand how our customers’ priorities, needs, hopes, fears and expectations have changed?

We therefore have a great opportunity to treat customers as if they have never been to our store or our website. We often make unintentional assumptions that our customers will instinctively know what to do because they’ve been here before. If we assume they are first-timers, we’ll have heaps more empathy and be in a better position to build on what we’ve already done.

However, a perennial issue with journey mapping is that as soon as the workshop finishes, everyone drifts back to their day job. The map gets written up, maybe converted into a neat piece of software, discussed and filed away. A lack of planning beforehand means the momentum comes to a rapid halt. To have so many ideas from the programme of journey mapping can be an uncomfortable reality-check about what to prioritise and what to do next.

There might also be a dawning realisation that this isn’t just a workshop or a project but if we’re going to get it right, it’s a cultural and very strategic way of thinking about our business.

If there are any positives to come out of the pandemic and carry into the new year, one of them is the sense of “We’re all in it together”. Before that feeling dissipates back to those siloed functions where so many managers (because of the lack of a genuine customer-centric culture) find comfort, we should tap into one of journey mapping’s biggest benefits.

It’s not just about the sticky notes on the wall or the Zoom-Mural online workshop. It’s not even always just about the write-up of the journey and list of improvements. Yes, those are clearly important but now more than ever before we should ensure journey mapping stimulates the right conversations across, up and down the business that lead to the right tactical, strategic and cultural actions.

Journey mapping shouldn’t be just about finding ways to fix broken processes or find incremental improvements to the experience. It should give the evidence for asking some tough questions about how committed the organisation and leadership is to the vision.

In the journey mapping sessions people learn about their own colleagues and the job they each do. They learn about their own business and start to piece together the culture from a wider perspective.  It becomes clear that while one part of the business is very much on the “Customer-first” agenda, some colleagues are working to different agendas. They are rewarded for perpetuating the processes that are convenient to the business not the customer.

It’s hard to ignore a colleague who says they come up with ideas but their line manager tells them that’s not what they’re paid to do. It’s hard to ignore the chasm between the “Customer-First Promise” and the reality of the experience they have just articulated.

It’s also hard to ignore the fact that despite saying “We put customers at the heart of what we do”, the Exec team is seemingly happy to get just one set of customer metrics every year. Why would that be? Are they as committed to putting customers first as they say?  What can they do to help make everyone believe in it?

All these issues need to be discussed if a business is to become more customer-centric. Journey mapping is often the catalyst to have those conversations, without it they may simply not happen.

A lot has clearly changed this year. If there’s anything to change about journey mapping, I’d suggest it’s that we try even harder to see things from our customers’ perspectives and make it lead to more of the right conversations. Your boss and customers will thank you for it…

Happy mapping!

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Jerry Angrave is Customer Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company. Jerry is a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and author of The Journey Mapping Playbook published by De Gruyter in October 2020.

[email protected]   +44 (0)7917 718072

Customer Journey Mapping – as relevant and as possible as ever

The headline act of a Customer Journey Mapping programme was always the workshop.

A very visible, tangible demonstration of how an organisation is edging towards its customer-led goals. A group of colleagues coming together to share their views and ideas, learn more about their own business and going on to be active supporters of what you’re doing.

In today’s world though, booking a meeting room and having everyone turn up in person seems so “2019”. Two people in the last week have told me their journey mapping programme is on hold because of necessary restrictions and access to offices.

It’s not easy for anyone right now, I get that. Time, people and focus let alone budgets may not be on your side at the moment. Survival, resizing and restructuring may well be more at the front of your mind.

 

Customer Journey Mapping

 

But, if there’s any way your attention can turn to your customers, if you do nothing else in the name of Customer Experience give journey mapping a go and see where it takes you. Even half an hour with a couple of colleagues on Zoom, a notepad and a healthy dose of imagination is better than nothing.

You’ll leave with a better idea than when you started about your customers’ issues and what to do about them. And that, after all, is the purpose behind journey mapping and customer understanding.

To anyone who’s hesitant about running their first or next session, have faith that it can be done remotely. Believe me. Over the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of running several journey mapping workshops with a variety of companies, all online. Yes, we have to adapt but they’re just as productive as when we were all swapping anecdotes and thoughts in a glassy training room.

Our customers’ behaviours, what they’re thinking and how they feel have all been tested in recent months. So even if you did a journey map last year, while parts of it will be unchanged, some elements – the critical nuances for now – might well be different.

Not surprisingly, using a combination of conferencing platforms like Zoom and collaboration tools such as Mural (other, equally good ones are available), means the facilitation of the workshop itself needs modifying. The framework you use and questions you ask will be impacted by the number of people attending and how long each session lasts. Some may be watching Netflix on a tablet tucked behind their laptop. Keeping everyone involved will draw even further on your facilitation skills if you are to keep their attention.

But journey mapping has never been just about a ‘workshop’. While that session may now look and feel different, the process to prepare beforehand and then unlock the value afterwards remains largely unchanged and every bit as important.

That value is measured not just in terms of prioritising actions to fix things but in changing the culture to have a better balance of a customer-led, commercial focus. It shifts mindsets to always think about and discuss what it’s like to be a customer. It drives better cross-functional cooperation. It creates excitement and involvement in what you’re doing. It challenges the wrong behaviours and complacency. It moves people away from chasing the scores and implementing new tech for new-tech’s sake.

And it gives clarity about how to deliver your CX vision so more customers come back more often, they spend more and share the stories you want them to share.

It’s important stuff.

Just because we can’t all be together physically doesn’t mean journey mapping can’t still be effective, strategic and influential.

When customers’ expectations, needs, fears and hopes are changing as they have done in recent months, it’s as important now as it ever was.

Give it a go if it’s at all possible. Your boss as well as your customers will thank you for it.

I’d love to hear how you get on and please get in touch if you’ve any questions.

 

Jerry Angrave is Customer & Passenger Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company.

[email protected]     |     +44 (0) 7917 718 072     |     www.empathyce.com

Customer Journey Mapping – a fun day with sticky notes or a strategic and cultural catalyst?

Done effectively, mapping the customer journey of today’s experience generates an invaluable list of tactical improvements. Unfortunately, it’s also often the limit of what organisations think customer journey mapping can do for them. There is, however, so much more value to be found.

For example, one of the many benefits is that cross-functional teams work together, sometimes for the first time, focused on one thing that unites them – customers.

They learn about their own business and forge new relationships with colleagues. They see ‘obvious’ things they witness or walk past several times every day.

From years of doing this type of work my advice, for what it’s worth, is simple: make time to explore why things are like they are because it surfaces issues that are more strategic and culture in nature.

Those conversations need to be had but are often drowned out in the noise of our daily work.airport passenger experience journey mapping

But armed with evidence of actions, behaviours and (the sometimes unintended) consequences of decision making, we can hold the leadership team to account. We can invite the CEO in to our sessions, look them in the eye and ask if the company is really committed to delivering the vision and values.

Because if it is, the customer journey mapping shines a spotlight on what needs to change if they are serious about it. The priorities for the overall Customer Experience and Employee Engagement programmes then also, crucially, take shape.

Or, when there’s an excuse for everything that won’t get fixed, it’ll become obvious that saying “We put customers first” is just convenient, platitudinous rhetoric.

Journey mapping – don’t let it be just about having a fun day with sticky notes. Done properly, it’s a compelling tool for customer-led change and a stronger business.

If you’ve not done it before, give it a go. See what your customers see. Talk about how it compares to your vision. See where those conversations take you.

If you have done it before, what did you get out of it – and how? It’s always good to share and learn!

 

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Jerry Angrave is Customer & Passenger Experience Director at Empathyce, a CX consulting and coaching company. Jerry works with airports and travel groups as well as in others sectors such as financial services, professional services, utilities and housing associations across Europe and in the Middle East to build strategic and effective Customer Experience programmes. 

Jerry is also a Certified Customer Experience Professional and trains others for the accreditation.

[email protected]    +44 (0) 7917 718 072

 

 

Making the hidden disability experience visible

How good would it be if this sunflower icon, to help identify people with a hidden disability, was as recognisable everywhere for what it is as the white stick that tells us someone has impaired sight?

It’s brilliant to see Liverpool John Lennon Airport adopt the sunflower and lanyard, the latest in a growing list of organisations, especially in the aviation and travel sectors. To be clear, it’s not about queue jumping or special privileges. The sunflower helps employees identify those who have a hidden disability so they can provide pre-emptive and relevant support in their built environment.

Speaking as a parent of someone with a learning disability, they really make a difference. To know that employees understand you might be just a hair-trigger away from a major meltdown, and the consequences that brings, is incredibly reassuring.

But airports, airlines, rail companies and supermarkets are just the tip of the iceberg.

I’d love to see a day when we’re just walking down the street, in the park or in a shop and the sunflower sends a recognisable yet subtle signal to anyone nearby that there’s a perfectly good reason not to jump to conclusions about the behaviour they see.

I tie a lanyard to my son’s scooter in the hope that, one day, people coming the other way will see it and so diffuse any awkward or unpredictable situation. A quick glance at Charlie may not reveal any signs of what lies beneath. But there are times when his social skills are not typical. I don’t blame employees or other members of the public for judging but it’s not great to know they are wondering “Are they stoned?”, “Are they a threat?”, “Has he got no control over that lad?” or – if they take advantage of support available – “Oh, the cheek of it”.

No alt text provided for this image

So on behalf of people – and the family or carers with them – who might find interacting with the environment your organisation has created a challenge, a small plea: if you have customers visiting you, how might you provide sunflower icon on lanyards or wristbands? Or, at least, train your staff to recognise them for what they are if they appear at your place?

Other symbols and devices are available but there is also an argument for just one to become ubiquitous, to help your customers whether they’re on your site or on their home turf.

The wider its use, the more recognisable it becomes in Society and the better that must be for everyone.

A low-cost, simple design that can make a huge difference.  And for those whose leadership team still needs a business case beyond being the right thing to do, the commercial benefits are there too. If you make the experience easier, calmer and more empathetic for a customer why wouldn’t they want to keep coming back, spending their money with you and telling everyone else to do the same? Get it right for people with a disability and chances are, you’ll get it right for everyone – and your balance sheet too.

Finally, once again, huge credit and thanks to the brilliant, passionate people who are creating real momentum around these issues especially in the aviation world – people like Maria Cook, Geraldine Lundy, Samantha Saunders, Roberto Castiglioni, Chris Wood, Graham Rice, Cathy Nyfors, Eric Lipp, Bonnie Haye, Linda Ristagno, James Freemantle and many more.

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Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in organisations create better and more commercially-minded customer experiences. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), a CX consultant and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions around the wider competencies of CX or are interested in consultancy or training support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

Where to start customer journey mapping

Ok, so we like the idea of it. We’re planning a programme of workshops and we’re thinking about how the outputs will plug into everything else the business is doing. But, just where do we start with customer journey mapping? Which experiences should we focus on first?

After all, there are so many to chose from: do we pick the ones we’re most familiar with? The ones that generate the most complaints? Or the ones that will give us the greatest value? We can’t do them all at the same time so we need to prioritise; in other words, decide “who” is doing “what”.

Start your customer journey mapping

Customer Journey Mapping – a powerful tool but only if it’s strategic, efficient and influential

 

The persona/journey combination you choose will depend on a raft of considerations. That will include your business goals and the maturity of your existing CX culture but taking time now to find clarity will pay huge dividends in the future.

Customer journey mapping must be done in a strategic context, not in a vacuum or rushed. It must be effective in its methodology and its output must drive change. If it fails in any of those things, we’ll have a fun and engaging, but ultimately wasted, time in our workshops. And if that happens, not surprisingly, everyone will drift back to their day-job and next time we mention ‘Customer Experience’, eyes will roll sceptically. We’re also not looking at creating a process map here; rather, it’s about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your processes.

Get it right though and you can share compelling stories that reshape the corporate mindset and behaviours. Your people learn more about their role in the business, you build a narrative around what it’s like to be a customer and you create that all-important internal momentum and excitement. You’ll prioritise your interventions with greater confidence, know where to take out unnecessary costs and know how to focus on creating innovative improvements.

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool. But, back to basics. To get it right, we need to be clear about whose story will the journeys tell.

Deciding that can be easier said than done. Think, “Who, what, where, when and why?”. Just by taking the number of customer, employee and stakeholder personas, factored by the reasons they each might interact, the ways they interact and the products or services they’re engaging with and, at best, the permutations can run into the hundreds.

The first journeys you choose will depend on your own circumstances. It may already be clear but if not, here are a few considerations to help focus on what works for you:

You know instinctively – the one(s) you’ve been thinking about as you read this; the proverbial ‘burning platform’. Where is the investment in your brand promise being undermined? What is the issue everyone talks about or worse, the one everyone just dismisses as a barrier “because it’s always been that way”. If you could map only one journey, what would it be?

Which customers do you want more of? – use the insights from your data to identify which customers or partners are most valuable to you. Where does your revenue come from? The most profitable? The most likely to be active advocates? Work backwards from there, understand what they value and what the nature of their journey with you is.

High profile or political issues – it may not be a customer’s most significant journey but there’s an internal imperative for getting this one right. While the platform might not be burning as such, you know beneath the surface it’s smouldering and could ignite at any time. Showing the customers’ perspectives will help nudge everyone into action sooner than later, reducing the associated risk and snuffing out any complacency.

Be guided by your purpose, ambitions and CX Strategy – your values, strategic intent and corporate objectives will direct you to where your priorities are. How does today’s journey compare with what it should, ideally, be? Where are the gaps between today and how good you want to be? For example, if you set out to be “Earth’s most customer-friendly business”, you might look for the journeys where customers have the greatest interaction with your people.

Complaints, customer feedback and operational metrics – an obvious consideration, but your data analytics and qualitative feedback will be a good signal of where to focus effort. However, we know most unhappy customers don’t complain so don’t ignore the journeys where there may be less obvious signs of frustration. You might (should) also consider mapping the journey of when a customer complains or goes to the effort of giving you feedback.

Look beyond typical customers – thankfully we’re not all the same but processes tend to assume we are. For example, people with a disability and their families need to interact with the environment you create; I’ve often seen that if we get things right for people with a physical or cognitive disability we get right for everyone else too. And how do you deal with customers who are apoplectic with rage? They might be spitting blood because of the downward spiral created by your processes’ lack of any empathy rather than because they are simply nasty people who deserve to be ignored.

Not just customers – employees, partners, third-parties and stakeholders will all benefit from having their journey mapped. For example, it might be you can map a Customer Success Manager’s experience of getting a new client up and running. Or map what it’s like to go through your recruitment process to joining on day 1. If your employer brand talks about being a ‘meritocracy’ or simply a funky place to work, mapping out the journeys gives you plenty of evidence and stories to showcase your promise. If you outsource part of your branded experience, how easy is it for them to deliver the experience you want?

Be realistic about the scope – your customers’ journeys rarely begin at their first contact with you and most likely will continue well after their last. This is about how you fit into their lives, not the other way around. Keep it focused on understanding their experiences, not auditing your process maps. Often, today’s journey begins at the end of their last journey with you; a passenger turning up for a flight may still be seething about the lack of information from their delay last month or still has anxiety caused by an emergency landing the previous time. Can you show empathy there?

Still not sure? – get your team together and jot down the typical interactions a customer has with you over the life of your relationship with them. Organise them by themes and in chronological order. Some may last months or years; others may take minutes or seconds. But make a list and begin to pick them off one by one. If you do nothing else in the name of customer experience, do some customer journey mapping and see where it takes you.

 

Although we’re at the start of your journey mapping it’s also worth thinking about what happens afterwards; a journey should have a destination after all. So, some final thoughts:

  • Accept that you will need to build a programme of customer and employee/partner journeys to map over time; it’s not an overnight fix
  • What governance framework will you pour your outputs into? How will you keep the momentum going, communicate internally and avoid the maps gathering dust?
  • When and how will you get the journeys validated by customers? Until then, the maps will still remain an internal view of the world.
  • How will you use journey mapping as a stimulus for innovation using Design Thinking or ethnographic techniques?

Journey mapping is well worth the time and effort. It can be fun and creates ready-made cross functional teams of customer supporters. But, it does need careful planning if it is to support your strategic priorities, if it is going to be effective in its questioning and if it is going to influence what actions you take next.

 

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Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in organisations create better and more commercially-minded customer experiences. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), a CX consultant and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions around the wider competencies of CX or are interested in consultancy or training support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

When the sales experience falls into, rather than bridges, the gap

Depending on your definition of a customer, their experience starts well before they actually buy anything.

It might be what they’ve heard from others or what they’ve seen in the news. But if the brand comes knocking on their door that first impression is also a critical experience. Many get it right because it’s based on a real empathy with those they are trying to engage with.

However, it’s not always the case. Absent a clear customer experience strategy, what we think do as a business often looks very different when looked at from the customers’ perspectives.

 

For example, if any CEO is wondering why their Sales teams are not getting better results, maybe a quick look at how their initial engagement makes yet-to-be customers feel will give some big clues.

The quotes below are all real examples I’ve had in my inbox just this last week. There are others and I’m sure you’ll have your own ‘favourites’.

They are not trying to sell me something I don’t want. In fact, I could be interested. Just not with them. If I was ever asked for feedback about the Sales experience (a rare thing indeed), it might go along these lines:

  • Putting “Our 9am meeting” in the subject heading doesn’t spur me into replying out of panic.  Sorry to burst your bubble Sales folk, but changing it to “Our 10am meeting” in the follow-up really doesn’t make any difference either.
  • Saying “I’ve tried to reach you” is just lying – technology is quite good these days so I know if you’ve tried to get in touch as often as you claim. And when your colleagues use the same line every week, several times a week, it becomes very transparent.
  • Gasping “I can’t believe you’ve not signed up yet” and “I’d hate for you to miss out” is at best patronising and lacks any sincerity.
  • What’s more, should I be interested a reply to the email will go into a generic mailbox, not to the person who is (presumably) trying to create a relationship. It just shouts even louder about how you really don’t care if I get back in touch or not.

Does somebody seriously believe this type of approach is going to create an experience I want to repeat, share and pay a premium for? If these companies had any genuine interest in what I do and how they might help me achieve success, they’d look at their Sales activity as a meaningful experience not a bullying, volume-led, can’t-really-give-a-**** transaction.

I often come across businesses who fear the Sales team always over-promise because of the way they are rewarded. They then disappear off the face of the planet while everyone else tries to rally-round, clearing up the mess to deliver something close to an unrealistic promise.

On the flip-side, maybe the Sales team is frustrated that everyone else can’t keep up. Maybe they’re just doing what they’ve been told is best. But to create a first impression experience that is confrontational, misleading and deceitful creates no trust, no relationship. No commission.

They say the experience on the outside reflects the culture inside and they’re right. In the middle of a busy day, to be on the receiving end of these type of messages says heaps about what it must be like to work there. No clear strategy, just a numbers game where some very talented people will be wilting under the stress.

Intended or not, what they are saying to me is that it’s clear their focus is just on revenue, not on me as a potential customer. They don’t care if I buy or not, there are plenty more fishes in the sea. Friend and colleague Ian Golding wrote about a similar mindset very recently in this blog.

These companies are not some anonymous outfit in a far-off land that’s acquired an email list; often they are large, global businesses who should know what they are doing. These companies will make some money for sure but that short-term approach breeds complacency and stores up problems for down the line.

If they applied a dose of customer experience thinking they could, however, make a whole lot more money. If only they didn’t push their potential customers away before they’ve even got close.

 

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Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), a CX consultant and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation.

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

Ten hidden benefits of customer journey mapping

The benefits of customer journey mapping are well documented; it’s an incredibly valuable exercise that gives the business a shared understanding of what it’s like to be a customer. And, therefore, a clear picture of what should be celebrated, what should be done differently and why.

Journey mapping is a means to an end. It’s not, as some people see it, about having a pointless happy-clappy day with Post-it notes and Sharpie pens.

Done effectively and on an ongoing basis, what customer journey mapping tells you can be one of the most effective strategic and economic tools a business has in its armoury. But not everyone sees it that way and as CX professionals we often need to help sceptical stakeholders ‘get it’.

So, for what it’s worth and to help anyone trying to convince a non-believer to begin mapping customer journeys, I’ve put together a list of some of the additional pleasant surprises – sorry, “commercial benefits” – journey mapping delivers.

 

1 Catalyst. It’s a great place to start.

Companies often struggle to get momentum behind a fledgling customer experience programme. If you do nothing else in the name of customer experience, map a customer journey and see where it takes you.

The beauty of journey mapping is that it’s easy to do and even just a couple of hours or a day’s workshop can set things on the right path.

It will challenge dangerously complacent beliefs that there is no burning platform. And even if it becomes apparent that today’s customer experience isn’t inherently broken it will provide plenty of ideas for how to keep up with expectations in future.

 

2 Engagement. Hey presto, you’ve created a CX focused, cross-functional team.

At a recent workshop I facilitated, one participant stopped in her tracks when telling her persona’s story to the group. She observed that this was the first time that organisation had brought everyone together who had some involvement across the entire journey. Pennies dropped, dots were joined and new relationships created there and then.

They’ve stayed together as a group ever since and have created mini-task forces for other journeys.

Involvement in these types of workshops creates excitement but also an expectation that things will change. That has to be managed carefully but what you do have now is an army of internal CX champions who will help spread the word.

 

3 Value. The outputs have all sorts of uses, just make sure they’re not filed away.

The biggest risk to journey mapping is that once the journeys are mapped, the persona stories are told and the findings are documented, they get filed away and never see the light of day.

Make it a living beast so it never fades away. Put the journey on a wall or on the intranet so it’s visible to everyone. It’s a great opportunity to get thoughts from other employees who can to wander past and add their thoughts over a cup of coffee. Keep it alive, use it to generate interest and action.

It prompts all sorts of conversations about the issues and opportunities. And it’s also a great visual to show new employees what their customers experience too.

 

4 Simplicity. As they say, simplicity is a very sharp knife.

It doesn’t have to be complex to be value-creating. As with many things in life it’s easy to over-engineer. Journey mapping does need to work hard to be from a customer’s perspective but often the simpler the structure and framework the better.

One client told me they were keen to do some mapping but couldn’t take the team out for a whole day. Instead, they took a bit of time in a team meeting; better than nothing. The format was quick but follows the same approach as a full workshop; sketch out what the customer is trying to do and why, then across the stages, look at what they are thinking, doing and feeling.

Then ask what you measure; do you know how well you do the most important things?

Review what you’ve written down and agree some actions. First journey map, done.

 

5 Themes. Over time, helpfully, common issues rise up to the surface.

Journey maps should never be reviewed in isolation. Whether you run one journey from the perspective of several personas or you look at multiple journeys, it’s very likely you’ll find common threads emerging.

So, while one specific issue raised may not be critical to that journey itself, we should take notice when that same issue appears in other journeys for other customers, employees or third parties.

A quick example from a mapping programme I ran late last year. Although they weren’t cited as major challenges in their individual workshops, it became apparent in every one of a dozen or so sessions that three themes stood out; there was a lack of understanding about what the brand stood for, employees desperately wanted/needed a good CRM system and there was a genuine concern about a lack of consistency in delivering the experience across all touchpoints.

 

6 Education. For me, the biggest benefits in mapping customer journeys is often the conversations happening between colleagues during a journey mapping session.

It’s common to hear things like “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you did”, “Does anyone know what happens if…?” and “If you can get that information across to me in a different format I’d be able to do my bit for the customer better”.

Because we have people from all steps of the customer journey in the room, those conversations can happen and are invaluable. They might not be the conversations you want in front of customers, which is why I’d always advocate bringing them in to the process once you have your initial draft journey. Which brings me to the next point.

 

7 Connection. As if you needed one, it’s a great excuse to connect with customers.

The good news is that you now have a journey map. The better news is that it needs validation by customers to have any credibility.

So once you’ve had those awkward educational, internal conversations you can invite customers to give their views. Even if they end up not participating, the act of asking their opinion goes a long way.

 

8 Outliers. Small sample sizes should always be treated with a big degree of caution.

However, journey mapping can unearth some behavioural outliers that are worth noting and following up on.

I recently ran an employee experience mapping session where one of the personas was that of someone getting promoted. In the “What are they thinking?” section, a comment was made that they hoped their previous peers would now “fear me”. The sticky note was written and put up on the wall. No-one challenged it despite many internal communications extolling the values of ‘our family’ and ‘camaraderie’.

Likewise, one comment from a senior executive who said they – a company who claimed to give “exceptional client experiences” – would only ask clients for feedback if the client can be billed for the time.

Such anecdotes might be limited to one or two people. They’re easy to brush aside, but if there’s a latent attitude problem – especially if that’s coming from the leaders of the business – it’s better to find out and address it.

 

9 Focus. The whole point of journey mapping is to generate ideas and be confident in what you do next.

That said, the workshops will give you tens if not hundreds of suggestions. It’s a nice problem to have but can also feel overwhelming. Where now?

Part of the solution is right there on the day in the journey mapping workshop; your colleagues. Make the most of the opportunity and ask them to vote on the issues that they think are the most important.

You might have a thousand sticky notes, but voting will give you an instant proxy for where the top issues lie and which warrant further investigation.

One word of caution though. Be prepared that when you validate the journey with your customers, they may highlight different priorities. Far from being frustrating, treat it like gold-dust. Without going through that process you wouldn’t know what’s important to them. You’d have everyone doing lots of stuff, just not necessarily the right stuff.

 

10 Fun. Seriously, have some fun.

One of the best benefits of customer journey mapping is that it’s simply a great way to bring people in your business together. It’s far from being a dry exercise and is, unintentionally, often a great way to foster employee engagement.

They’re on their feet adding value, not being talked at. They’re being asked for their opinions, to role-play personas and to think creatively. They’re asked to think about different scenarios and “What if…?” ideas.

It might stretch a few people who haven’t totally bought in to why they are there. Look at journey mapping workshops as you would a customer experience though. You want them to come away engaged and enthused, telling everyone else about it.

So if they get distracted, go off on wild tangents and have a laugh they’ll share the stories.

Before you know it, you’ll be everyone’s best friend and more and more people will want to get involved in helping you making your business customer-centric.

 

If you set out to convince a sceptical stakeholder to do one activity that increases employee engagement, deepens customer empathy and prioritises finite resources all at the same time, you’d really have to go a long way to beat journey mapping.

I hope that gives some food for thought but I’m sure you’ll have other benefits of customer journey mapping too – let me know!

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. 

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

Using journey mapping to understand and measure employee engagement

This post first appeared as a guest blog of Rant & Rave on using customer journey mapping methods to create employer brands and a great employee experience

Fewer than half of employees would recommend their employer to a friend according to Glassdoor. Would you? Have you? Allegis found that 69% would not take a job with a company if they had a bad reputation – even if they were unemployed!training journey mapping customer experience

The employee journey has many parallels with the customer journey and tolerance of a poor experience is lower. Businesses need to know that their reputation is now shared more widely than ever before. Expectations of how a company will drive our own personal agenda are high and, should they fall short, the ability find out about a better alternative and change is much easier now than in the past.

So if you’re looking to create an “employer brand”, one where top talent shouts “I want to work for them!”, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that whether it’s intentional or not, if you have employees you already have an employer brand. The bad news is it may not be the one you want.

The first step is to know what that is today, be clear about what you want it to be in future and get creative about closing any gaps.

This must be done in the context of your company’s purpose. Why do you do what you do? (beyond making money), what do you do that no other brand does? What makes you excited about working there?

Thankfully, journey mapping can help define what a ‘great place to work’ looks like.

It’s a valuable tool that gives us an understanding of what it’s like to be a customer and it helps organise the thinking and prioritise activity. It shows how well the brand promise is being kept, or not, and it brings people together from different functions to see the impact of their combined efforts.

I see many organisations map their customers’ journey successfully and reap the benefits of doing so. Far fewer, however, apply the methodology to their people, resulting in a missed opportunity.

The perception of your brand, and of your employee’s engagement with it, will vary depending on what stage they are at. A graduate looking across the sector for reasons to work for you will see things differently to a new hire going through the recruitment process, versus an employee who’s been in their job for 10 years or a high level employee who’s just been promoted into a director’s role.

Understanding the importance of employee engagement is one thing but knowing how to go about it is another. This is why journey mapping is effective, it helps to create empathy and understand around how they might be feeling, the challenges they face, or how they will change depending on the employee and how big the gap is.

 

A familiar methodology

The methodology for mapping an employee’s journey broadly follows the same structure as mapping customers’ experiences:

  1. Define the journey Be very clear about the journey they’re on. You may have a particular experience in mind such as the recruitment process, the first 30 days or going through a restructure. To help you find that starting point, you may want to map all of the events across the entire journey from brand awareness, performance reviews and ‘a typical day’ to promotion, exit and retirement. Then you can choose which one(s) you want to drill down into to become a journey in its own right.
  2. Who are they? Whose perspective do you want to map the experience from? Employee personas will be much the same as for consumers – who are they, what are their goals for that journey and why, what are their pain points?
  3. Map the journey Set out the stages, and for each one look at what they do, think and feel. What do they hope for, wish you would do, or provide? Are they motivated more by flexibility and support than money? How can work fit around their lives better? Capture the internal issues you have as a business that help or get in the way.
  4. Metrics What data or information do you have access to that shows how well you’re doing the important things?
  5. Validate Sense-check the journey and conclusions with other employees and overlay other relevant feedback you’ve captured elsewhere.
  6. Do something Take action. Agree the priority areas that need focus and who’s going to do it then keep people updated on progress.

One simple exercise to help prioritise your next steps is to plot out everything your employees have said, identifying the most important against an axis of ‘how well do you do them?’. Assuming you have collected this data, figure 1 below shows an example.

 

employee experience and journey mapping

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig1: Plotting out the areas that employees view as important -vs- how well you do them

  • If you have an issue in the top right quadrant, where it’s important to employees and you do it well, make sure you protect it and share the stories.
  • If there’s an issue bottom right, where you do things well but employees don’t much care for it, either explain where the value is and why it must be done that way or consider if you are wasting resources on it.
  • Bottom left, where it’s not important and not done well, ask why you do it at all.
  • The key area is top left – if there are things your people say are significant but you’re not meeting their expectations, that’s a key area to start.

When running journey mapping workshops you should also consider:

  1. Be aware of the possibility of opening a cans of worms, which in a way is what you want but make it clear that none of the comments need be attributable to an individual. Remember that any suspicion that confidentiality is not protected will suffocate the quality of insight.
  2. Make the session fun but keep reminding people of the need to stay in character and role-play the personas. Help them to avoid drifting back to their subjective selves.
  3. Ensure you invite people from similar levels across the business. It may mean doing several workshops but, depending on the culture, having your boss in the workshop is one thing; having their line-manager too (or beyond) can be intimidating. People either say nothing or say what they think others want to hear.

During the mapping activity, your line of questioning should be aimed at identifying what they care about most. These are good discussion topics for team meetings too. For example:

  • How do potential employees find out what it’s like to work for you?
  • What makes you distinctive as an employer and how are you communicating that message?
  • What are your employees saying in terms of what you’re getting right? What do they find most frustrating?
  • What would employees never say? (positive or negative)
  • How many of your employees engage with your social media activity, have ‘liked’ your Facebook page or follow your LinkedIn page?
  • Why don’t more of your employees share their views? (for example Glassdoor)
  • What perceptions do your employees have in terms of how their customers think about them?
  • If employees were given a branded t-shirt or jacket to wear in town at the weekend, would they be proud enough to do so?

Brands want their employees to be true brand advocates; telecoms giant O2 talks in this video about their challenges and how they rewarded employees for being brand ambassadors.

Measuring employee advocacy can actually be straight forward. If one of your employee value propositions is that you are ‘innovative’, ask them exactly that, to what degree do they think you are innovative? Make sure you link your questions directly back to the values.

The NPS approach is also commonly used as a form of measurement: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?”. Brands can explore what employees are scoring them and dive into the relationship further; those who are promoters perform one set of behaviours, whereas passives and detractors tend to display a different set of actions.

 

Journey mapping unveils the real culture

Brands need to ensure they’re not just paying lip service, putting up posters around the office that speak to being ‘a ‘great place to work’ is not a solution or way to drive engagement. The impact of what your ‘leaders’ do and say cannot be underestimated, their actions build evidence for employees of what the company culture is really like.

During a journey mapping session I facilitated, a leader of a professional services firm said defiantly that he would not make time to go out and talk to his clients to understand them better unless he could bill the client for that time.

This was also a business with stated values of giving exceptional and distinctive client experiences. You can imagine the deflated feeling in the room this then created. Worse still, the good talent will recognise this and potentially move to a competitor who is delivering the promised experience.

Some time ago, I was consulted on the customer experience of a utility company’s contact centre. Their leadership team was satisfied with the apparent high-levels of engagement reported by their internal survey. However, the reality couldn’t have been more different, their people were totally disengaged because they had to compensate for the persistent problems that management wouldn’t address.

Employees would type out feedback rather than leave it on a post-it note because they feared their handwriting would be recognised. They would rather tell friends they were unemployed than say who they worked for and they only ticked the “I’m highly engaged” box in the survey because they believed it was a prerequisite to getting a bonus.

 

Beneficial journey mapping outputs

Complacency can be real damaging force. Business leaders may say: “We’re doing well, we’re making a profit, customers are satisfied and we have talented people who know what they’re doing. Why change anything?”.

Journey mapping will however help you surface what to change and why, the activity itself isn’t the end-game but far from it. It’s a means to an end where it gives a business the evidence as to why it should do things differently.

These insights will generate engaging stories to showcase your employer brand, take these examples from L’Oreal, Zappos and Cathay Pacific. Other leading brands such as Homeserve actively encourage their employees to leave reviews online, using metrics such as their Glassdoor score as a key performance indicator.

There are real commercial benefits too, TemkinGroup helped quantify those last year in a research study that looked at the difference between genuinely engaged and disengaged employees:

87% of engaged employees will recommend your products and services to someone who might need them, versus 21% of disengaged employees.

82% of engaged employees would do something good for the company even if it was not expected, versus 19% of disengaged employees.

60% of engaged employees will make a recommendation about an improvement, versus 15% of disengaged employees.

 

Journey mapping the employee experience creates clear tangible benefits. A brand that does what it promises, attracts better talent and drives retention, this is something that doesn’t rely on paying top salaries. Employees are then empowered to give the best customer experience possible and proud to tell friends that they work for a great company.

For your employees, customers and the bottom line, this truly is the best news you can hear.

———————

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope you found it thought-provoking.  

I’m Jerry Angrave and I help people in Customer Experience roles do what they need to do. I’m a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and am one of a handful of people globally who are authorised by the CXPA to train CX professionals for its accreditation. I founded Empathyce after a long career in CX and Marketing roles and am now a consultant and trainer. 

Do get in touch if you’ve any comments on the blog, any questions or are interested in training or consultancy support.

Thank you,

Jerry 

[email protected]   |   www.empathyce.com   |   +44 (0) 7917 718072

 

Customer Journey Mapping, done. What next?

Here’s a familiar scenario in the customer journey mapping process.  Your workshops went well, everyone was engaged and the team is bursting with ideas. You added extra value by creating an environment where people from across all functions shared their behind-the-scenes stories. In doing so they learned a lot more about their own business, which wouldn’t have happened without you. All in all it’s a good result.Customer journey mapping process

With plenty of actions and food for thought there is now momentum. Expectations are high but the ‘journey of the journey’ has only just begun.  So as you unplug your laptop, switch off the light and leave the workshop your attention turns to what happens next.

 

In the first part of this series I explored ways to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders for customer journey mapping workshops.  Last time I looked at how to make sure the workshop stays on track and is efficient use of time.  And for this last instalment I want to share thoughts on what to do after everyone’s gone back to their day job.

And that’s part of the challenge we now face.  We’ve got people interested and we’ve flushed out some great initiatives. However, the reality is that whatever gold we uncover and however energised we feel, we have to make it part of their day job before the wave of enthusiasm loses its energy.  We don’t want it lost in the noise of inboxes and meetings.

A large utility company I worked with recently told me they’d done some journey mapping a couple of years previously. They’d had it illustrated and they’d dig it out to compare then with now. Only they couldn’t find it. After much searching the mystery was eventually uncovered. In a sea of hot-desks at corporate HQ was a line of table-high storage units.  Beneath the glass top, but also barely visible under stationery boxes, photocopying paper and a guillotine was a cleverly illustrated customer journey. Had it been on show it would have been a powerful way to engage stakeholders. It told a compelling story and could have been a catalyst for badly needed change. But all the effort had, literally, been shelved.

So what can we do to make sure the path down which we’ve just started doesn’t wind on aimlessly?  Here is my take on just some of things we can do.

Share it

First things first, thank everyone for attending and write up the journey (s) you’ve looked at.  Beyond that, share it personally with other stakeholders who you need to be involved and demonstrate the momentum you now have, inviting them to be part of it.  Get everyone to share the outputs with their own teams and make it part of the governance process to have them reviewed and critiqued.

Sharing it widely increases the collective ownership. It will also then keep evolving into a more accurate picture of the real-world customer experience.

Show it off

Customer journey mapping isn’t, as some organisations seem to think, all about creating a pretty picture.  It’s important but not the end-game, far from it.  What it looks like will depend on what works for your own business and who your audiences are.  Some will be at a high-level and others more detailed but if you can turn the brown paper and sticky notes into something pleasing to the eye that’s great. Make it large and put it somewhere that will stay visible. Ask passers-by in the office to comment on it.

Unless you have easy access to a graphics team, my experience is that, at worst, it’s better to have a well-organised table made in PowerPoint, Keynote or Excel to tell the tale than to lose time trying making it look like a storyboard for the next Peter Jackson film.  The aim is still to help colleagues understand what they need to change and why.

Validate it

When you feel it’s in good shape, try it out on a few customers who match the persona from whose perspective it was done. Ask them if they recognise that as their journey and their issues as they pass through it. Play it back to them so they know you’ve understood and ask them what they don’t want to happen at each stage. Having that extra layer of customer validation gives enormous credibility, something that’s hugely beneficial when dealing with stakeholders, especially the one who love to pick holes in things.

Act on it

It’s the most obvious and important thing to do with a journey map but there’s simply no point in doing the maps if there’s no way of using them.  It must become a regular feature of the CX governance.  Or, as I’ve seen a few times, the creation of a journey map is the very stimulus needed for creating oversight in the first place.  The maps need nurturing and harvesting if they are to continue growing and yielding more insights.

Prioritising what to do next is then the issue. Hopefully you’ll have no shortage of possible actions but the mapping exercise will reveal what to do first. You will have identified what’s most important and how well it’s done and that then gives confidence about what to do in the short, medium and long term for customers, colleagues and stakeholders.

Picking off those things that are easy to implement and have a big impact will also demonstrate the proof of concept for when you are seeking greater investments in time, people and money.

Do more of it

It’s not a one-off exercise. The world keeps changing so the mapping will need repeating to stay relevant. That might be at least annually if not more frequently, especially as your changes get implemented and the experience evolves.  Even if nothing within the front-line business changes, customers’ expectations shift, competitors up the ante and an IT systems upgrade always seems to have an unintended consequence somewhere down the line.

It’s likely you identified several other personas in the workshop so map the same journey for them.  You’ll also have different journeys, some made by yet more personas, to map out too.  And time spent mapping what it’s like for a colleague and/or third-party to deliver the experience is as invaluable as it is necessary to complete the picture.

 

The customer journey mapping process is an essential competency of any business. It’s only part of the CX mix and without it the risks, wasted costs and commercial consequences can be significant.

But with the right engagement and preparation, with robust facilitation and with the resilience to build the momentum you’ve created, your influence will be greater, the connection between CX and the bottom-line will be clearer and the cogs of the business all fit together neatly to deliver the right experiences. A good result indeed.

 


Follow Jerry Angrave on Twitter @jerryangrave


Thank you for reading the blog about journey mapping, I hope you found it useful.  I’m Jerry Angrave, a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP).  I’m a Jerry AngraveCX consultant with an extensive corporate background and I also specialise in professional development for those in, or moving to, customer experience roles.  Feel free to contact me with any questions – by email to [email protected] or by phone on +44 (0)7917 718072.  More details at the website www.empathyce.com.