Journey Management: the evolution of mapping tools
TheyDo Co-founder and CEO Jochem van der Veer shares the latest on how mapping tools have evolved.
What are the core differences between Journey mapping and Journey Management?
The Journey is a great tool to bring in what the customer experience is like and then look at what we as a company are offering in terms of features, processes, and the roles that company employees play to support that journey. What you actually want to do is to be able to manage the customer experience as one. To even change something as simple as an onboarding journey you need to work cross-functionally. What we can show today is a process of going from insight to implementation – across teams, and across a vertical organization. Journey Management is a new philosophy of organizing your company around a customer journey.
How do you go from mapping to management?
You have many tools to get to an outcome, but what you really need is to get the context of what the customer experience is at any given moment. In product organizations, you can tinker with the product. If you have the staging environment, you can test out new features. You click around and really interact with it and understand what the customer experience is like.
But in service organizations, the customer experience is far less tangible. Even in a simple journey, you need to understand what’s going on, what you can measure, and where you actually track events. But you also want to understand what’s happening in the minds of the customer and what is happening behind the scenes. So in recreating reality using journeys, all of these journeys need to be in some form of hierarchy – in a journey framework. So you have the customer experience represented in a digital environment that you can start playing around with. Basically in this evolution, if you have that in place, you’ll move away from mapping.
How can you build a team around experiences rather than products?
True revolution is coming and product experience is just not going to cut it. We want to do customer experience. If we’re going to organize journeys, we need to be right in having a vision of how all these journeys fit together. But usually, you don’t want to start top down because then you’re going to overthink it and it’s going to be way too complex. So, start small, take 3 to 4 journeys, where you can implement end-to-end with one team. What you need from the top is a sponsor. Usually, it’s the CXO, sometimes the CTO or CPO.