Customer Journeys As A Tool For Cross-Functional Product Innovation

Mall Allpere at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/V6BiXabKs28

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

A hero story: five out of five without the full specs

[00:00:00] My name is Mall Allpere and I work with design leadership and design strategies, mainly for large companies. Earlier I've been at Telia, and today at Swedbank. I have this extra large interest in building capacity for better business through design, by finding ways to truly collaborate on customer centric development across the functions. And in that quest I found by far the best tool to do just that, and it can be the customer journey map.

[00:00:35] So let me start by telling a hero story on what the customer journey map can achieve. This is not the customer journey map. This is a comparison between different mobile switchboards for small companies, made by the most influential magazine on mobile phones in Sweden, (inaudible) and Mobile. Perhaps some of you know how important these comparisons are when selling services to small companies. Small companies just don't have time to do research on different services. They trust these comparisons.

[00:01:13] At this time, some years ago, an unofficial truth was that services got good grades and sold well only if they had as many features as possible. So full specs equals good grades. But for us, who had developed a mobile switchboard at Telia, the largest telecom company in Sweden, this was trouble, because when the magazine was scheduled to make a comparison of switchboards, we had not yet developed all of the features that were thought of as necessary for the specs.

[00:01:48] So what to do? Well, the team sat down and discussed, and came up with a plan that they should try to explain to the magazine that the service that does exactly what the customer really wants is better than one with the full specs. So Carolyn here in the middle, she's the product owner and marketing responsible. She simply went to see the journalist who was going to write this article. And she was armed with our customer journey map, where she could easily point out all of the areas where this service had managed to solve the customer's real problems in an easy to use way, which was not at all the fanciest features.

[00:02:37] This resulted in five out of five in Getting Started and in Daily Usage. The review that came out was as a whole focusing on usability instead of specs. So not only had our sales gone up, but also the reputation of this project and how it worked with design in the company. It became our hero project.

[00:03:01] So today I will guide you through how we got to this point in this hero project, what we learned during the course, and how I have used[?] the learnings in many projects after that. Secondly, I will present four phases of introducing customer journeys as a process in an organization. And finally, I will give you some hands on advice on how to use the customer journey maps to tear down the silos cross-functionally and to gather the organization around the We.

A crash course in the anatomy of a map

[00:03:34] But first, for those of you who don't work with customer journey maps already, I do urge you to Google and research it yourself. You would find that there are many, many ways to visualize and work with them. But here I will give you a short crash course that I like giving to management and cross-functional teams in Swedbank, where I work now.

[00:03:58] Here is one customer journey map. I think you've seen many different versions of it. They have a similar anatomy, and this is how the skeleton looks before populating it. And here is how we populate it. It starts from the left with everything concerning the user before she uses the service, even before the customer has started to think about anything to do with our company, and a need for doing something appears and she tries to find the solution. To the middle, where the customer is using the service, paying a loan, making a payment. To the end, where she's changing the service, getting a larger loan, looking for better interest rates, or even leaving.

[00:04:42] This upper line with a timeline is fully scalable. It can be a full life from cradle to grave, from buying the first house and getting a loan to renegotiating the house loan. Then we continue down with the anatomy. Here is the travel map, a subway map, consisting of activities that they do, marking which ones were really important for the customer. We put in actions, regardless of which channel the user is acting in, not only our own: friends talking, newspapers, web, logged in, branch offices.

[00:05:21] Then there is an area where we describe positive experiences of the current service, negative experiences of the current service, pain points, and how the customer feels about them. And maybe the most important row is what we know about the customer's needs at this point. And when we're done mapping what we learned about the customer from these in-depth interviews, only now, only now can we create ideas on it.

[00:05:49] So here we can continue using the customer journey map by putting ideas vertically that meet the needs and solve the problems regardless of the channel. This way we keep the focus and we remember what we created the ideas from. From this point we can build the backlog for the team. And here below, it's a tier[?] where we put what happens behind the scenes in the company: the underlying systems, the business rules, the regulations, everything that affects the customer experience. It helps us identify the root cause and think long term about what needs to be changed. So there is your populated map.

Five steps that made the hero project

[00:06:38] Back to my switchboard project at Telia and how the team turned it into a hero project that spearheaded all cross-functional collaboration at my former employer. I'll talk about five steps in making it such a success. Because getting five out of five in ease of use just doesn't come by chance. It was made by a systematic cooperation between design and development and marketing, all starting from true customer insights.

[00:07:07] At Telia, the team with UX lead Johannes Bextrom[?] made everything right. They made many field interviews, all summarized in a large customer journey map. But only those closest to the project were able to digest this quite hard to read customer journey map. And when I saw it, I thought that we would get through much better if we improved the visualization, because I knew that it's a simple fact that almost everybody's interest goes up with the level of beauty of the presentation. So I asked the very skilled graphic designer (inaudible) to free up some hours from her day job with the graphic design of the service and put those hours into a very beautiful customer journey map.

[00:08:05] Here, great looking, easy to read, pulls you in, and this was almost magical. The interest accelerated to show it in the company, have it up on the wall with three meters length in full. Many people saw it, and my inbox got full with other projects who saw the need for a customer journey map and real user research. But most importantly, the cross-functional team on this project started to feel proud and more willing to put effort into the cross-functional work.

[00:08:37] It was also easier to make sure that others in the company, a bit further out from the core team, like marketing and business, could be interested in joining our workshops, in which the extended cross-functional team went through the mapping in detail, agreeing on which pain points or needs to address in this workshop, then sitting down and sketching ideas on how to solve the needs and pain points.

[00:09:07] And through inviting people from different competencies, the teams saw solutions from different viewpoints. One opportunity could be about changing the information the customer support gives about the product. And now there are new ways of selling the product and service. Also key here was to bring in business development, to get buy-in and mandate. And finally, in the same workshops, the team discussed together all of the ideas that each one had created, merging them and actually continuing on other people's ideas, stealing, if I may say. This creates a strong bond, a shared ownership.

[00:09:52] Now, all of these ideas form the foundation for populating the backlog, which led to the next phase: designing for all the different touch points. Both designing for the expected, such as the actual app, which was really the only thing that we were supposed to do from the beginning. Here is a feature in the app that allows the customer to freely select when the service was deployed. But we also dug into pain points that were solved outside the original scope, in other channels. For example, improved sales material, and a new easy to use admin interface replacing multiple old ones.

[00:10:34] Then the final stage, reiterating and keeping it alive. The project team kept on redesigning, making new user tests and updating the customer journey map continuously, allowing everybody to see the current state and celebrate the wins, and also see where to focus next, over and over again until it was self-moving. We were updating the map, and it continued to live a long while after the launch.

Four phases of rooting the process in an organization

[00:11:14] That sounded easy, didn't it. Well, nobody really asked us to make this elaborate map, but it sure helped us to pave the way for a collaborative culture of customer centric innovation. I'd like to share with you four phases of seeding and rooting the process in the organization that I've seen, not only at Telia but also at Swedbank where I work now.

[00:11:40] Phase one, the hero project that I just talked about. Phase two, more projects. More and more projects helps us to really make this come alive in the company. But scaling it for real requires other means than just populating some projects. Three, cross-functional trainings, the next great step. Once we have some showcase projects, it is to train others in the company.

[00:12:11] Now here is how we made hundreds of managers and others from all kinds of functions in Swedbank feel customer journey mapping. We gave them a crash course in which they tried out all of the steps of customer journey mapping, all compressed into one afternoon, where they could really feel the effect of talking to real users, mapping the needs and creating ideas from that. We had made very thorough preparations, with a fictional case and well-made instructions and templates and exact timekeeping. I think we orchestrated about 40 teams who were getting this crash course at the same time, and in the evening a nice get together for all to exchange experiences and to plan future common projects.

[00:13:03] We had several similar training iterations at Telia, and in the end we found ourselves with ambassadors all over. At this point it becomes easier to involve people from all different parts of the company in customer journey mapping. This made it easier for us to even introduce this method when we, as a company, were moving into unchartered territory, into new business areas and even into pricing. Here we would invite business owners into a startup workshop where they could write down their hypotheses of possible new business areas and the problems they were solving for the customer. And we would go out and investigate the true needs from the customers and update the business.

Tricks for getting to a We

[00:13:53] Now, I believe I made it sound like a piece of cake to create a sustainable culture that continuously uses the customer journey map to center the organization around it. But you know, I've really failed several times and I've learned from that, things that I'd like to share with you.

[00:14:16] First, the mindset needs to be that you're looking for true collaboration, the kind of collaboration where the team and the larger unit see this not as anything that's starting or ending with a Me or an I. It must start and end with a We. Your role is to make sure that this We happens, and you can do that through some tricks.

[00:14:45] First, starting with the company's hypothesis. And you know, even if I said that a customer journey map must start from real customer insights by meeting real customers, it can absolutely be worth the while to gather people in the company who think they know everything about what the customer feels and needs, to gather them in a room and let them jot down on post-it notes what they think the customer says and needs at each stage. This makes them feel heard, and in most cases it raises an appetite to actually get real user data and to join in the user research.

[00:15:27] Give access. A second key to getting a We is to make the map truly accessible, both in making it easy to read and, as I said, by printing it large and by keeping the layout the same across the company to help non-designers understand its anatomy, but also to create it in a program that's available for different functions to add into and to change and to keep alive. This is a true invitation to co-creation that's quite often overlooked by designers, which takes us to the next step to create a We.

[00:16:09] Shared ownership. You must see to it that this is not owned by the design team or owned by the product owner. Just try talking about ownership to them. This is really an area where I have failed in my years, so I don't know if I should give any advice, but here it is: get yourself one or several ambassadors who are not of the same occupation as you are. Try to find those people out there who are great at shared ownership and convince them that this is the tool, and that it is the tool that they can use to create shared ownership.

[00:16:52] And the last trick to get the real We is to involve cross-functionally, both when meeting the customer and when designing for them. These cross-functional idea generation workshops can be great if they are stringent and if we get the right people in the room. And when we have them in the room, we make sure that they start drawing and building on each other's ideas, so that they learn that when we share problems and solutions and build on each other's competence, we tend to go beyond our own domain and create lasting customer centric services and lasting collaboration across the functions. Thank you.