About the Data in Different Forms Series
One of the unintended benefits of my career are the conversations I get to have with experts working in different parts of organizations, bridging needs to knowledge. These posts build on conversations with clients and friends. They come from different parts of organizations (data scientists, business analysts, software engineering, sales, marketing and customer leads). They often think of their customers differently. This is a place to share some of those ideas providing a peek into what is happening on the other side of the organization.
Part 2: Custom Journey Tune-Up
I’ve been having many conversations lately about customer journey mapping and ways to keep it alive within the organization.
For any organization, customer journey mapping is an essential tool for understanding how their customers interact with their organization and derive value.
Many organizations invest considerable money and labour in the creation of these maps, especially if they’re doing it right and including representative voices from across the organization.
However, those maps go stale if they’re not embedded within organizational culture and connected to ongoing business processes and tools like product road maps, service design, or churn management.
One of the most effective ways to keep the customer journey map fresh is to implement customer journey tune-up meetings.
Your customer journey tune-up meetings should bring together representative groups within the organization for a structured discussion of how recent organizational changes, from acquisition strategy to product releases to service changes, have impacted the customer journey.
Each stage of the customer journey, from onboarding to engagement to ongoing retention, should be examined and both positive and negative impacts should be laid on the table.
To take the example of an organization that has made recent product changes:
- A recent release improved functionality such that queries of training materials dropped. Clients became more self sufficient with the tool = win!
- Another release led to deeper user engagement, and over time, this would likely track to higher retention.
- Conversely, another release led to an increase in support tickets which meant more education was needed to manage similar releases in the future.
In order to make this more data-driven, incorporate information you have available and have been actively or passively tracking: support tickets, changes in usage patterns, and actual churn data.
If you run a customer journey tune-up quarterly, you’ll keep the customer journey map alive and show the organization how product changes flow through and impact different parts of the organization, as well as showing customer interactions and outcomes.