The role of Journeys in transforming service design: a conversation with Marzia Aricò
An in-depth webinar about why organizations should think about the customer journey when designing holistic customer experiences.
Service design is not about creating Journeys. Journeys exist with or without designers. But with intentional design, Journeys can become profitable, satisfying experiences for customers and businesses alike.
In this webinar, recorded live on February 13th, 2024, design leader Marzia Aricò and TheyDo CEO Jochem van der Veer discuss how to establish Journey Management throughout organizations in a sustainable way.
Marzia’s innovative A.V.O.C framework (Anchor, Variations, Outcome, and Change) addresses the problems with outdated organizational hierarchies, inefficient workflows, and inconsistent service delivery. With her insights and TheyDo’s capabilities, she shows exactly how you can solve these problems, and implement a customer-first service framework in your organization.
Key insights from from Marzia and Jochem’s discussion
Marzia Aricò is a trailblazing design leader who has led service design transformations at companies such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Livework, Adidas, Gilead Pharma, Gucci, and Xero.
In their engaging and wide-ranging discussion, Marzia and Jochem cover several hot topics world of service design and customer journey management. Here are the highlights:
Customer-centricity is poised to take over the world. Globally, organizations are turning to customer-centricity as a way to correct the segmented organizational structure that arose out of Industrial Revolution-era manufacturing. To deliver better experiences, companies need to understand the interconnectedness of various journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.
Companies need both a top-down and bottom-up approach to customer-centric design. Making organizational change is expensive, and requires full stakeholder buy-in to be effective. However, employees working on the customer experience also need to understand the intrinsic value of journeys in order to make the most of them.
Organizational maturity determines the success of Journey Management. If you want to see results from your Journeys, you need a certain level of familiarity with and commitment to customer-centricity in the first place. If you want to assess your organization’s maturity, you can take TheyDo’s Maturity Scan here.
“The journey will happen whether you design it or not”. Marzia notes the difference between reacting to existing customer wants and needs, and anticipating future ones. Journeys are the starting point for intentional design, providing the full context for customer needs so you can better understand them.
When it comes to Journey Management, first find your ‘why’. Is the market changing? Do you want to reduce costs? Or do you want to create space for more customer-centric innovation? Service design and accompanying Journeys look very different when serving different purposes. Anchoring your customer experience in a common ‘why’ aligns everyone around the changes your organization wants to see in the world.
The A.V.O.C. framework can guide you. Marzia first introduced this framework in an article for her blog, Design Mavericks. A.V.O.C., which stands for Anchor, Variations, Outcome and Change, is a powerful tool to guide teams towards customer-centric decisions and eventually, service transformation.
Bonus content: Check out the example journey in TheyDo that Marzia shared during the webinar. (Note: this sample journey contains placeholder elements.)
What is covered in the webinar
Here’s a rundown of what Marzia and Jochem covered, in chronological order:
00:00 Welcome
01:37 Introducing our guest speaker, Marzia Aricò: Marzia explains her shift from in-house design leader to independent consultant, author of the Design Mavericks newsletter and blog, and public speaker.
06:59 Discussing the current global shift towards customer-centricity: Journey Management and customer-centric ways of working are on the rise in 2024, because organizations have to confront the complex reality of ever-connected experiences.
09:33 Journeys in the context of intentional experiences: People will go through a journey, whether it’s intentional or not. However, organizations need to be able to examine their own customers as well as consumers in their sector, and start to anticipate needs within their sector.
10:56 Customer lifecycle vs Consumer lifecycle: Customers ≠ consumers. The consumer level covers a person’s relationship with entire sector, whereas the customer level covers that same person’s relationship with one brand. Marzia uses the example of her own experiences with owning and renting cars to show the myriad ways a consumer’s relationship to a product category can change over the course of their lives.
17:31 The starting point of Journey Management: Marzia always asks her clients what problem or goal they are hoping to address with Journey Management, before they begin doing it. This determines which lifecycle to focus on and what to look for once they start mapping Journeys.
20:22 Bottom-up practical approach: Marzia explains why finding multiple sponsors is important to build momentum for service changes and how to sell Journey Management internally to executives. The key is to tailor the message around departmental goals and return on investment. “The business problem is more important than whatever the journey is solving” — Jochem.
26:51 The A.V.O.C. framework: A.V.O.C. stands for Anchor, Variations, Outcome, and Change. Together, each of these components determine an organization’s customer experience strategy and customer-centric workflow. It also gives service designers an action plan to align leaders and employees around services, products, and journeys within the customer lifecycle.
36:31 The A.V.O.C. framework in action: Marzia takes Jochem through a sample TheyDo workspace with several customer journeys.
51:06 Q&A: Marzia takes audience questions about Journey Management, journey frameworks, and strategies for successfully working with journeys.
55:25 Maturity in an organization: Organizational maturity and momentum is required to effectively and accurately map journeys. Jochem and Marzia talk about how to measure maturity levels in an organization. Hot tip: customers can take our Journey Management Maturity Scan to assess readiness for implementing these frameworks.
59:52 Marzia’s graphic novel and wrap up: Marta shares her graphic-novel-in-progress about design leaders making changes within their organizations. It will be published in November ‘24.
Using Journeys to effect positive change in customers’ lives
While the conversation covered a lot of ground, one common message was woven through: one Journey is just a small part of a person’s experience, but Journeys are a constant of daily life. The power of Journey Management lies in connecting those journeys.
When designing (or redesigning) the customer experience, organizations need to align around the reasons for that experience. Without a clear ‘why,’ your Journeys will suffer a lack of direction, and are destined to be filed away and ignored.
But by preparing your team with a framework such as A.V.O.C., and a clearly defined ‘why,’ you can design positive changes throughout your organization and in your customers’ lives for years to come.