Automated transcript
In this event of the Swiss Service Design Network, we speak with Jochem van der Veer a Service Design lovers and founder of TheyDo about Journey Management through a demo of the TheyDo app. We will start with a demo of the tool by Jochem, followed by a Q&A session that covers questions like:
- How do you start to shift towards Journey Management?
- How do involve key decision makers and other team members when in Journey Management?
- What's the simplest way to start using a journey management tool like TheyDo?
- How do you convince clients and stakeholders to move to a digital approach when it comes to Journey Management?
Thanks to Jochem for this lovely conversation.
So Jochem, I'm extremely thankful that you have accepted to join us today.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Can you share a bit about yourself, your company, so that people get a bit of an image of who you are? Sure
Meet Jochem
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I am right now in Amsterdam where I've been living for the last 15 years of my life, almost. So I have three beautiful kids, two daughters and a son, a lovely wife. Love nature, also love technology.
And before starting TheyDo, I was a service design practitioner, basically a UX designer by training and then slowly, went into the holistic path of organizing an organization by doing it customer centric. I've been in the trenches of service design for quite some time and I love it.
I hate it. And before starting TheyDo, we figured out Ooh, it's actually the best way to. Get a company to appreciate the customer, but also take the business perspective. But as like a whole community, like we lacked the tools and this was pre Miro, pre digital whiteboard, we were like stuck with the stickies and that was our tools.
Got a little bit better when we got all the whiteboards, but still it's like very hard to scale service design and the companies that we work with that have practiced this and are doing it and are scaling this, they see like tremendous results. They actually are customer centric at the enterprise level.
I'm talking big companies. So yeah, we've been working on this for the last eight years or so, trying to do this for us as a consulting firm. Now as a product company, I'll probably do it another 10 years or maybe 20 years, like having a ton of fun and being part of the community, being on the edge of it, sometimes rubbing people against the hair, sometimes waving with it.
It's quite fun. So yeah, that's me in a nutshell. Awesome. And, I'm not the service designer who works at a huge scale. And so the topic of journey management wasn't one that. I was particularly super interested in at first and, but could you share with me, why should people care about it and what is it exactly?
Why Journey Management matters
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So it depends on who you're talking to, right? But I'll do it for service designers, because we are actually bringing usually this to an organization and who you want to care is your leadership, right? Everyone today agrees that customer experience or even experience, like That is the thing that we should be focusing on and we want to be different and we want to deliver an amazing experience, a seamless experience, an omnichannel experience, whatever the word is, right.
But it's all about the experience. But what you saw is that over the last decade or so, experience at best was done by product or by user experience, by design, but it was like this part of the business and before that it was like project based or nobody even cared, we were just utility based providing services and products.
Way back then, even before we got to this beautiful world, I think. But as experience is getting more importance, we have a lot of strategy. We have a lot of ideas. We have a lot of measurement, but we don't have a way to execute on it. So what happened? And then the customer journey is this useful lens that people accept as the way to capture experience and to align on it.
But like that ad hoc journey mapping or blueprinting here, journey map there, project here, this team does it this way, this team does it that way. It's a mess and data is all over the place. Insights are all over the place. Who cares about that sticky note with a beautiful insight after the project, right?
It really doesn't scale. But now that the premium is on experience. A lot of the leadership in our organizations, they struggle to see the impact of all the changes they make. So we as service designers now are taking these journeys and say okay, we're done with the mapping piece, but now that we have all these maps and some, need to create these mappings and do all the work, but once you have it, you have this beautiful lens.
We call it the journey framework. But you can use it to look at the entire organization. How's the customer doing? How's our roadmap doing? What are our goals? How are we actually prioritizing? And then everyone in the organization that is above you and below you starts to pay attention. So that is happening now.
So we go away from like this tactical journey mapping. And journey management. And journey management is just a term. A lot of the early adopters of this philosophy in the service design community, but also in the product management community we're using to describe what they were doing.
So we just took that and are driving with it.
The maturity levels of Journey Management
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It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone who told me, oh we're now doing the service blueprints, we're very happy with it. It's been super useful to understand, the whole journey and it's a really great tool to also, diagnose problems and imagine new things.
But then once you use it for a few months, a few years, then you see, okay, now I missed. I make it now like the managing part of that, how can I make that at a scale, which is not just one little project, but how can I make it for the whole company, or how can I keep it so that, people come back to this element, and it's not just a document that is lost somewhere.
I think these are questions that, that And I feel are very interesting because they show, it's like with kids, kids always come with a question that is revealing of their maturity, and the question, the fact that we are today asking questions about journey management, is for me, something which is revealing of the maturity of the service design field, who goes from, Oh, we can be very tactical and fix problems and make things, you And now we can do that at scale and now we can do that on longterm, which is quite inspiring.
Oh, I like that analogy a lot. And I see a lot of kids in that analogy, but I also see a lot of grownups today. And that was definitely different a few years back, where like we had to fight for Convincing people even to appreciate a customer journey map. And I think a lot of us have experienced that in the companies we work at or work for.
It's like socializing a customer journey used to take a lot of time. Now everyone is using customer journeys, so we need to standardize and help them to connect the dots. And ultimately start to align on the experience across all these different teams. So yeah, I like that. That analogy is very good.
The mindsets behind TheyDo
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We see like this whole rise of the experience led organization where. 20 years ago was like done at the project level at best.
And then experience over time with the agile transformations and the digital transformations used to be captured at the product level. And now we're understanding like no. Experience is not how the product is experienced, but it's like the customer experience that matters and our products or service or campaigns or content or operational efficiencies, like everything adds up to that experience.
So how do we capture that? And that's why customer journeys are now the next level that a company is using to align on that. Just to put it a little bit in, in picture, like if you ask one of those kids that that by analogy you talked about, but I think more. Organizations where it's a lot of fragmented landscape.
This is what a customer journey looks like. If you ask them like, what is it? What, just give me a one customer journey. And I go yeah. Okay. So maybe there is something here in the whiteboard or we have a spreadsheet and here's the data that underpins it. It's in Qualtrics or a Tableau dashboard.
Like literally like people have one journey lives in 20 different places. And everyone thinks differently about it. And the best analogy I have for this is the blind monk parable. I don't know if you know this, like there's six blind monks and they're all touching a part of the elephant.
One thinks it's a field of hair. The other one thinks it's a trunk of a tree. They're all figuring out parts of it. Which is true for our CX, our product, our service, our marketing, our operations, our enablement organizations. Each of them is understanding the customer experience or the customer journey from different parts.
So that is like where people are coming from. But what we are now seeing is companies. And these are a few of the companies that we have the pleasure to work with, just to put it also in perspective. We are at the forefront of this entire like evolution of what's going on right now. It's sometimes it even feels like a revolution.
Everyone is figuring this out. Whether you talk to a Lego, an NCR, an IBM or an Atlassian, like they want to put the customer journey at the heart of their operation and organize around this. And that is actually what we are now seeing unfold and where we are doing that. Now, before I go into the product I'll give you two mental models, how we are thinking about journey management and how we got to this.
So the first one is actually the triple diamond, right? You hate it or you love it. Anyone who is in the hated camp, anyone who is in the love it camp today, can can put it in, in the comments here. I'd love to see it. If there's one backbone for service design, it's often design thinking.
Double diamond converging and diverging workflows go from the business goal to the problem statement, go from the problem statement to a validated solution. So we took that, but we also want to align with delivery because before we did. They do, before we started the product company, we were a high end consulting firm.
You would hire to make your teams customer centric. And we struggle with this a lot. We struggle with okay, we do the design thinking workflows. We're teaching people how to be design thinkers. We're enabling everyone to work and act as a service designer, basically how to research, how to interview people, how to validate prototypes, how to design shitty prototypes, like all the crazy stuff.
And how to design journeys and how to use journeys in your work. We always got to the validated solutions and then at best we got budget greenlighted, but most of the times it was like, yeah, let's put it on a roadmap. Let's put it on a backlog and let's figure it out later. So you want to bring that solution delivery in line with your design thinking, service design methodology and connect the dots across them to really make this work.
And we also all know that this is not like this beautiful linear process that you go converge, diverge, converge, diverge. It's really hard to do this at scale because multiple teams will work at different intervals in different parts of this whole like process. Anyway, we adopted this one as one of the key backbones to how we're thinking about it.
But we compartmentalize, and this is the second mental model before we go into data that's useful, into the building blocks, because if you break down a customer journey map, a service blueprint, but also think about like the stages of the innovation workflow, the triple diamond workflow, the design thinking workflow, you always have your business goals, then you go into your.
Insights, your customer research, your interviews, figuring out what your customers truly need and understanding what your personas are. And you want to mix and match and map that all back to your journey to get to opportunities or the problem statement in design thinking, if you will. And now look at the metrics that underpin the outcomes that you want to have, and then go into solutions and link your roadmaps and make sure that everyone can participate in the delivery of that service.
So these are the building blocks. We created to compartmentalize journey management. And to give service designers, product managers, and maybe even designers at large, a system to build a journey management framework, a journey management system for their organizations. So that's a little bit of the primer, like two mental models.
So splitting them into building blocks, creating a system of databases of repositories, and then. Using the entire innovation workflow, we use the triple diamond to bring it all together to go from insight to implementation against your business goals, but do it in a customer centric way. So that is how we're thinking about layering this on to journey management, but we have to start with journey.
TheyDo demo
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So let me go into TheyDo and show you around. I'll start my story in a journey. So going all the way from like a high end framework to going into more of a granular view of my awareness stage to a customer journey.
And by the way, what I'll show today, because I'm thinking about I'm a telco, right? I'm a T-Mobile, I'm a Vodafone I'm a teller two, I'm a what is the biggest one in Switzerland? What is the biggest provider? Swisscom, obviously I'm Swisscom today. I'm not Swisscom actually, but I'll do it from that.
They're perspective, right? But I'll start with the journey. That's what I, so I think journey mapping. Is one of those things that we all have done and we all do in our day to day. So we said, sure, let's use that as a step. So you have your phases and you would have your steps and you can add steps and you can move steps, basically like you can bring everyone into it, as a modern, like Canvas kind of solution would work, but now it gets interesting.
So I'm in the journey of choosing a mobile subscription. Okay. So that is part of my early stages of becoming a customer or awareness I'm creating. So this is part of that. I choose a mobile subscription from Trigger to find something I like. Okay. Bigger journey. But what you see here are my insights.
Now, what we did back in the days when we were service designers, it's okay, let's capture some insights, some new SDN, Swiss insight. Let's add them to my journey in these steps. So you would map them out like that visually. Okay. But because these are building blocks, we can do some interesting stuff with it.
So in this journey, we'd have comparing alternatives, which is a step. And now we'd see based on our research that users, customers, people struggle with Pricing. They find it hard to understand, but it's an assumption. And we know that Alex from our team... He has found this in his research, but we qualify it as a pain.
So what we are trying to do is really create this little taxonomy of insights and link that back to your journeys. Now, why is it important? Because maybe this insight actually is not only happening Or as a pain in this journey, in this part of the experience, but somewhere else as well. And I think that is true for this one.
So we're starting to connect the dots across journeys. Again, this is one customer journey and here's an insight. And it's now, as I see, also part of the renew and celebrate journeys when people are selecting a phone or choosing a mobile subscription versus sorry, getting a mobile subscription versus choosing one when there may be an existing customer.
So now I'm connecting the dots, or I have seen how people are connecting the dots. Now, the other thing I like is bringing those personas back in because I know that this persona or this insight is matching Skeptical Theo and Deal Seeker Matteo, but maybe not OpenAvery. And we can debate if that's true, but you can actually start to link it.
Now, before I go into one level up where I think this is really important, let me show you one more thing about this, what I really like. building block approach is that we do the same for opportunities. Now, if you have your insights covered and you have your map here, we can also start to understand, like from different personas, like what is their experience or maybe aggregate this experience in a useful way.
So we can see okay, so here we have the biggest, negative experience. Maybe this is what we want to focus on. Our decision is going really well. So maybe we should amplify what goes well there. Okay. So if you have that, we can also start to look at these opportunities. And again, this is a management tooling.
Want to bring people in. And when we have signaled an opportunity, like maybe we should improve our information overview, that becomes a link to my insights, to my step and to my journey. Now, this is pretty cool. I won't go into the details here. We can. Discuss that if that's useful to you, but we have a whole type tagging system so you can build your own model of reality for your company.
But I can do something really cool. I have my journey, I have my insights, I have a whole lot other stuff in this journey that, you can basically add any lane, any type of content that you want. You can even link your Figma prototypes into it. The basics are steps, insights, opportunities, but these opportunities now I'm going to single out.
So now in this journey, I have a few and I can look at that from a customer and a business value lens. And now all of a sudden I can start to understand where the value is for making this journey. Better for improving that experience. And this is one customer journey map. And this is, I think where our biggest breakthrough was when trying to break it through for ourselves was how do we connect the dots?
If you have one customer journey, this can be done in any tool, right? You love your web board, you love your, when we back in the days had the brown paper rolls, this could be easily done. But in reality, Most of the teams that we work with, most of the companies we work with have hundreds of journeys in this like never ending, ever dynamic framework, whether they have the customer life cycle or the B2B versus B2C journey framework, like there's hundreds of these journeys that make up for the experience.
This is one of the cool things that we figured out and that a lot of people love doing is that looking at a simple stage like awareness, now saying that these journeys together make up for the journey framework there, we can now start to pull in all the data from it, look at, okay, what is the overall experience, filter it down on what personas we have, or look at what groups in our organization are responsible for our different types of journeys.
But the cool thing here as well is then now we've narrowed it down, we can look at the opportunities from multiple journeys together and do that same mapping, right? And this is where journey management kicks in because now you can move up into the organization and start to have a productive discussion on what really needs resources, what you want to get funded, what you want to start to align against and where people should actually.
Care deeply about the customer experience. So that part unlocks big benefits. Okay. So this opportunity is now linked to different journeys and this is where it's coming from. And now I can actually have this mapping based on the awareness stage, or I can even go one level up to the entire customer experience and do the same.
So making the connections using those building blocks is a super useful way to bring everyone in the fold. And what you see here is like the highest level of like journeys to the stage and then layered up in this customer experience framework. So all these journeys bubble up the right information.
Look at these opportunities. Again, start filtering down on my Persona, like what is OpenAvery like really experiencing? Oh, we don't know much about her actually. And Deal Seeker Matteo, yeah, we've done a lot of research that covers his tracks. So you can even make those high over decisions pretty fast, unifying all your journeys.
I think that is the second thing that we try to uncover as we are uncovering journey management as well with our customers. So this is really cool what teams are using. So go from map to building blocks to using those to make the connections. And again, I can also single this out, right? I can also go to my repositories, really bring it in, go to all my opportunities, go to all my insights that we've captured, really looking at.
How everything is nested.
Daniele's favourite feature
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And that's the part where I'm getting, you said it in a, you said it for me, there is the part about the mapping is the part where I feel many of us are already comfortable in a tool or not. And we say, okay, sure, it has a few specific elements that can be quite cool.
And then for me, when you showed the zoom out feature, where you say, okay, now I can have multiples one and it does a calculation for me. That's the moment where I say, ah, now I get the management. Now I get the, we can be different teams working on different parts and still it all benefits all together.
And I think there, I see. Personally, that's where I see like a huge value in in this approach of the being. Sure that, obviously, in my experience, so people always say, oh, we want to have the end-to-end journey on one service blueprint. It's ah, no, but that's gonna be, it's gonna be a brain funk, want work.
But we have to take the different parts and then we can do a meta summary of all of it and what you're providing here. For me at least, that's the value that I get instant is. Oh, I don't need to do the summary after, I, it does it on the fly and I can then say, Oh, Hey, that's how the different initiatives that we have worked together and built together.
Yeah. I like that. That's a really good summary. And that's exactly what happens. Like you don't need to do this like super abstract end to end thing. Or, you don't need to do this very granular, detailed, micro journey, nano journey of I'm adding Spotify to my Swisscom package because I'm renewing, right?
It's also a journey, but if there's a big problem there you can focus it and then have the journey in, in, in the framework accepted as truth.
Thinking in blocks when building journeys
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And this is the other cool thing, like using the building block analogy, we're also thinking about journeys as building blocks. If you're a big bank.
How many of your customers need to go through the KYC to know your customer process? If you want to open an account, people need to do it. If you want to get a mortgage, people need to do it. If you want to, add an insurance from the bank, you need to do it. So if I'm a bank and I'm looking at that just as the product feature of identifying.
Myself using a passport online is a feature that we reuse. Not every bank reuses that. There's also like cases where there's five different versions of that, but typically like they reuse that it's the same with journeys. Like you don't want to map out that part for every part of your business, for every department over and over again.
No. The KYC journey standardized, and it influences the experience here, there. And there, and I think that's another huge benefit to make it easier for people to, research and work on these journeys once and then start to evolve them over time and not do it over and over again. I think this block thinking, I'll do a kind of like a, there's a parenthesis here, on, on the methodology, because I know we have some nerds in the place and who will love that.
It's. This way of thinking about customer journeys or service blueprints, whatever you want to call them, in blocks is something that is super strong. For those who don't know that kind of thinking, I would highly recommend that you check out Practical by Design. From Erika and Megan, because they are the ones that for me, changed my way of thinking about service blueprints, from the classical front stage backstage and classical lanes to, Oh, no, you can have several different blocks and you don't need to have the same blocks in every stage.
And you can be quite pretty creative with those blocks. And I think that's something that I see in your, in, in, in they do that. It reminds me a bit of that way of working, and I think it can be a very good primer for people who are interested in your tool to also see that part, of the methodology and to realize, ah, okay, there is another way of thinking about it.
These these blueprints. Carlos Ancelade let me show you something really nice, what I love, like tiny workflow there. It's a sidestep, right? But let me just pull up a Figma link. Okay. I have a Figma link of a project we're doing. Who cares? I'm going to do it anyway, but this is exactly what we want, right?
By using these building blocks, you can do magic in a way that is useful to you. So you can use this standard building blocks, but. Let me just plop in my prototypes, and we're just getting started with this whole idea of flexible building blocks for anything. So let me see if this works.
Maybe I need to log in, but I'm going to try it. So here I have a prototype I'm working on and I'm actually. Put it in here. Oh yeah. It's loading. It's called journey nesting. There we go. It launched the first page. So I can dump in my Figma files. I can put in a Loom video. I can we don't have all sources yet, but I can bring a lot of the content I'm working on and even bringing dashboards from Tableau right into my journeys, so that block thinking.
It's really good. I still need to figure out I know from practical service design, they have the vertical layout. We still use the lane layout. Like I can geek about this for hours. We're even thinking about like each of these quadrants is like a mini canvas. But anyway, we'll get to that. But that's really cool.
What I love is that this is now visual, but now we have this other thing that we call solutions, right? And if you want to talk about prototypes or actually talking about solutions, there's a whole way that you can set and do this prototype thing and make different solution types. So if I'm not saying this is my big proto, I'm creating a solution right now.
Now I've actually created an entity in my database, a solution entity. So actually that's a better way of using it. Now let me just add my prototype here. So now all of a sudden I can start to assign some properties to it and start to track the status. Like maybe this is part of an Epic. It's linked to, pajara, Epic, that is already like being created. Now I'm going to push it as new. So now all of a sudden you're connecting the dots between your product management suite, design suite, and literally start to track it against your journey. And remember, like we're thinking of what journey step does this prototype actually touch?
I have some questions. Okay. So maybe this prototype is actually solving that. So you can be like very creative. And again, this is not for the kids, this is for the purists that want to rock on and for the adults that know what they're doing. But that's how we're like now trying to be like extremely creative of making journeys, the sorrows of truth, like the way you can operationalize anything, the way you work.
So yeah, sorry, a little digression here, but I also get excited to geek out on this. I see that we're both, we're very geeky. I see we have a ton of questions,
Where do I start with journey management?
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I think a very good one is this one coming from Soledad, which is, okay, that's all good.
Where do I start with all this? Start small please start small. At the beginning of the day, we were like, okay, we're going to fix this. Mr. Company, we're going to do this end to end. Everyone's going to get along. No, start small. So where is the pain currently? Do you have a term problem?
Do you have a revenue problem? Are people like saying, Hey, CO2 reduction is important. Do we have an expansion problem? Whatever it is, tie your journey work to your business goals. And I think that is what I've seen work really well. Just start with a handful of customer journeys, make sure they are mapped and start to connect the dots.
What I just did, like your insights, your opportunities, your solutions, and really start to connect the dots across them, put them all in, in a little hierarchy, even though if they are not necessarily exactly in the right place, maybe show the gaps. That is your starting point. Cause what you want to do is prove like, Hey, if we do this in a way that is.
Connecting everyone. We can align faster. We have less time. We don't need to have another meeting. We can make decisions on the fly. Everyone is brought into the fold. Here's the comments. Here's the decisions we make and everything is there. Doing that on a few journeys is already like. Eye opening for a lot of people that you want to bring into the fall.
So start small handful of journeys, focusing on the problems, the pains, the things that your business is currently willing to go into is what works best. One thing though, that framework, thinking about what it is for you, like a customer lifecycle, a service architecture, a journey ecosystem, a journey Atlas, whatever that is, that is commonly used in your organization.
It is okay to start building that. Putting a little skeleton in place and see where these journeys that you work on stick so that people also become aware okay. You've got to invest in this. We want you to do more of it. So that's my, it's a longer answer than the question, but that's a rapid fire answer.
Lovely. And I think it's the one that always comes back is prove that it works. And the best way to prove it is to start small, to then get traction by people seeing, ah, Okay, now we got it, but the point is that you should get pretty quickly to the point where people can have the reaction of seeing the results.
And that's why you have to be quite tactical to hunt for the kind of more low hanging fruit stuff.
How to convince people to transition from PDF to a tool like TheyDo?
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Here we have another question. Which comes from Cindy, which says, how do you encourage companies that are 20 years behind PDF or etc to take a first step and start their journey?
So I don't know, Cindy. What the thinking in your company is, because I have seen some really good service designers or product managers that think holistically fail because. There just wasn't enough maturity in the rest of the organization to even think and consider the customer experience to be the most important thing.
So it depends if that is true, if that's there in your organization, then it is actually maybe not too bad that you're coming from Excel and PDF because you can skip a lot of in between steps and you can start right off the bat in a good way and say Hey. We are moving into this idea where the experience is the thing that we want to manage.
So how are we going to connect the dots across our teams? Let's put a customer journey in place and let's start to link it. Cause it's like impossible in Excel, impossible in PDF, that would be a nice way to do this, but I don't think there is anything like an old company starting, like the majority of the customers that we work with are considered old, NCR has 800 journeys under management.
They're 130 years old. I think I have to fact check that on, on Wikipedia, that is not a reason not to do it. It's more do people in your organization believe the customer journey is a better way to align rather than, or whatever the silo has as a reporting structure. And if that is true and people are willing to take a plunge, that's the kicker that will set you up for success.
What part of a journey map do you share with leadership?
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Awesome. So maybe let's jump a bit on now the TheyDo part. I think one question that comes. And the one that Alexis has, and I think a few other all too, which was, what parts of the tool would you share with executive leadership? And then what there was a kind of a technical question is, can I share it with people who can't edit, and still can see?
Will that mess up my pricing? Because we know pricing by users can be pretty, pretty heavy. What, how does they do work with this kind of collaboration sharing? Sure. I think there's two parts of this. One is we don't want to make it expensive, but we want to make it really good. So viewers. You can bring anyone in today to any time, but as soon as they start to become editors and they want to have like controls, then they will be paying users.
That's as simple as we do it. But that was also a big learning for us. Like we need to bring everyone in the fold. So let's make that free. So that is easy and you can share out your journeys. But I think the part to bring leadership in is the journey framework that we saw, but there's an other thing that is super useful for them.
By the way, we're working on like more rigorous data reporting on top of what is happening in the journeys. But if you would allow my screen back on for everyone to see is the goals part. So I just have three goals in this demo, but I think this is where you can easily bring okay, what do we want?
What do we want to achieve this year? What do we want to achieve this quarter? And there's always goals. There's always clear goals communicated, whether you agree with them or not. So if we want to increase onboarding MPS from 60, what? So that's a high MPS, 76. 6 to 80. What are we going to do about it?
This telco is acing it guys, pay attention to this. Anyway, if you want to increase that onboarding to 80, link those opportunities from the journeys that you have found and mapped out and understand to that goal. And then you can start to track progress, like by linking those opportunities, maybe nested opportunities and then solutions back to progress and really understand like, Oh, this cashback thing, that it was an epic and it was pushed live because the team delivered it. Then you have progress on your opportunity. That is progress on your goals. This is what your leadership wants to see to put that customer centric strategy into action and setting this up, having the right taxonomy and understanding the rituals around this obviously requires.
Some work to do on how we want to work as a team, but this is unlocking the journey management aspect even more than managing journeys. So I like to say first, you're going to map it out and then you have your journeys that you manage, but the next step would be using your journeys to manage. So you're actually using them to find these opportunities, influence your goals, even set your goals.
And that is the part that. We're now very excited about to see management get adopted. So Oh, now I can have an overview that is simple enough for me to action on that is linked to all my journeys so that I know everything is in a good place. I don't know if that was answering your question, but it's another way to think about it.
What habits and mindsets do you need for Journey Management?
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And to me, it brings up a question, which is very personal, for me, often people come to me and say, we have a problem, Daniele, could you provide us a tool that does this? And over the years, I'm a geek, so usually I always have a tool to share. And what I've learned with years, because, gray hair makes you a bit smarter, I think, is that usually it's not a problem of tool, it's a problem of habit, mindsets, and shifting the way of the culture, and what are things where you say, if you don't have these habits, these mindsets, It will be very hard to do journey management, even with TheyDo. Because I think there is this misconception that the tool will save you, but there is a big part which is having the good habits, having the good culture.
What is this? Hidden parts that that people need to have. There's two hidden parts to it. We are uncovering this. So we see this as a maturity roadmap. And again, like I'm not talking about individuals, it's more like your entire company where you go from like journeys are all over the place.
Like at the bottom, like everything is siloed, nothing is connected. So hey, we're doing. A bit of the journey work, we're starting to coordinate across teams, using journeys as the way that we do this. And that typically happens in many different tools, but if you want to start to integrate it and move away from like this tactical decision making that I was talking about, that's when tools like they do come in, where you can really take a next step and start to align, standardize and work.
Now what is below this, and like our team is crazy good at this, right? They have service designers, they have CX managers, like they are going to help you with whatever problem to, to make a next step. And it is different for every type of business. Now we don't have all the answers and we're not being this consulting firm that is going to give you all the answers.
But working with all these companies has learned us a few things and there's basically, and that's the other thing I can say about this is there are six dimensions that we have seen that helps you to mature and tools is just one part of it, right? It's just only one of those six levers, but you need to have.
Leadership, vision on a customer centric strategy, on a journey centric strategy. There needs to be processes in place, which usually need to be created. And you need to have a unified framework that everyone says okay, I can live with that, I can agree to it. It has levels, it has layers, and this is the useful thing to have.
Then of course your data needs to speak the same language. So not only needs it to be connected to your journeys, but we have seen some companies take the journey framework and go to a tool like Power BI and say, okay, all our data reporting signals, customer signals, like everything needs to like now match the journey framework so that everything speaks the same language.
And that is a cultural thing and a people thing. And that's the hardest part to crack that takes a lot of time. So these six dimensions make up for maturity profile of the organization. And we are codifying this, we are developing tests around this, and we're coaching teams to go through these steps. And some are great on one, one dimension and crap on the other.
And that's always like, where do you want to invest and how to do it to grow and widen the spider graph here. And I think this is the part that I'm super excited about too, because I think this is often the part which we are missing, we all get excited about new tools if it's the fancy new thing, but also seeing that behind the scenes, there are these deep questions.
And if you want to make the most out of the tool, you also need to tackle these elements.
Does TheyDo offer consulting services?
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And so from my understanding, so you also support the companies with consulting on that part. Is that correct? No, we don't call it consulting. So we don't sell time. But we believe that you can do this at scale successfully and it doesn't happen overnight.
So we are going to help by coaching, by asking really good questions and by giving you all the tools around the tools, the frameworks, the methodology. It's really like part of our glossary. That we give away to teams and say here's what we have learned. And by doing also these kinds of talks and by being at the forefront of figuring this out, by giving our customers a stage to talk about this we're trying to do this together and basically codify everything we know.
Turn it into useful artifacts that, that people can actually appreciate. And of course we're a commercial business, so we earn money by selling software licenses, but all the other things around it. To make you successful, practicing a modern customer-centric way of working, using the journeys that is all coming part of the deal.
So that's what we love to create. I'm still like a little bit of a service designer there, so we will keep on doing that. Lovely.
What tools do integrate well with TheyDo?
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Let's come back to the tools and data part. Someone asks what about Get Feedback Insight? Is that a tool we can use with TheyDo? I would make that question a bit larger.
Can you maybe just give a few names of the tools that work and play well? I have a personal favorite, which is Dovetail. So how do they play well together? Is it just connection? Can I reuse that stuff? How does that work? Because you said there is integration of other tools. I saw Figma is quite a an obvious one because it's very visual, but outside of the visual stuff, how does those data come in, maybe the insights or the interviews and all of that stuff?
Yeah. So this is a big topic, right? It's not like we're starting from scratch for a whole company. There's a lot of those tools. There's a lot of feedback capture, insight capture, data capture around customer experience, but also broader like performance metrics, business metrics, everything gets Collected.
And there's a lot of tools. So what we want to do and what we are doing but I'll first answer your question on what we integrate today. So you have data from Qualtrics. You can like directly through API, get ERMPS in, we have some local tools like XPoints here in the Netherlands that have your entire CX organization.
Bring your data into TheyDo, we have Jira, we have DevOps to bring your roadmaps into TheyDo, into Journeys. So those are all connected. Figma, Power BI, Tableau. These are all like what you just saw me do with the blocks, link your dashboards into default. So we call them rich media links or embeds, and these are all possible.
Now for the insight capture, that's a bigger topic. What we are seeing there is. Dovetail, Mural, Miro, and they're all even EnjoyHQ. They are used to capture research and to process that and turn it into insights in many different ways. So bringing those in is just a matter of importing, right? So you export from Dovetail, you import to TheyDo.
And you basically have the right level of insights because you prepare them in a tool like Dovetail and then you bring that into TheyDo. So that's all possible. You can start to fill your repository. And I think that is the key here, insights, opportunities, solutions. Journeys themselves, where the metrics live, they're all like these grappling hooks that you can start to infuse with the data.
And that is where we are seeing the first batch of journey management getting unfold. And the next batch would actually be, and this is more interesting. We see a lot of companies now go directly to their data warehouse, whatever data capture tools they have, they pump it into their data warehouse. And then they ask us like, okay, can we bring it back into the journeys?
So that it's enriched, it's clean, it's right. So now it's in the journeys. And I think that is the bigger. The bigger part that we're figuring out, because then you can even thinking about the Dutch railroad, for instance, you want to have the same data about people checking in, using the gates, how that goes, what kind of service they use.
Do they use the phone? Do they use the card? How are these events playing into your journeys? And I think like bringing all of that together, not just your CX metrics, like MPS or CSAT or customer efforts scores, is going to unlock this whole different ways that we think about journeys. Now that is thinking about integrations.
The future of journey maps with AI
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But I think really where we want to go and what is exciting is you want to talk to customers and based on your conversations with them, you want to go to a journey. You don't want to go to go to the transcript, figure out like, Oh, this highlight is an insight and I'm classifying it with this persona and I'm actually adding it as a, I don't know, something around the use of WhatsApp, something around the use of the web app.
Do all that work. No, you want to talk to a customer, design your interview in a really smart way. So you get value from it. You want to observe them, talk to them.
So we want to go from doc to journey in a minute. And I think that mapping part currently takes weeks on average. Like we researched this with our customers.
It's 42 hours, just the mapping part on average, right? And you have people do it faster, slower, but like mapping your qualitative research into a journey, putting it it takes 42 hours. We're building a beautiful model using AI. So you can go from transcript to journey in minutes, right? At first it will be like 15 minutes, but we're going to go down to less than one minute, so you can focus on what you do best.
And then all of that, like haggling around the insides. It should be done by saying is it right? Is it correct? Rather than do all the grunt work yourself. So you have time to do actual service design. That's how we're basically thinking about it. So there's three direct APIs possible, embeds possible, and now we're unlocking a whole new dimension of what you thought a customer journey map could be using AI. From what I'm getting, it's just a start.
What are resources to learn Journey Management
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For people who say, Oh, I like this idea of journey management.
What are theoretical bits, maybe key authors to know that I can go back to just to get my thinking right about journey management? So the basics are obvious, right? A lot of this is inspired by, the amazing Marc Stickdorn, who has been pioneering this space with service design doing and has a lot of work on journeys.
But I think what is interesting is getting people into the mix. Theresa Torres has a beautiful book on product discovery and talking about opportunity solution trees, which you saw, which is inspiring. And the other bit I will say is Bob Musta, one of the founding fathers of the jobs to be done framework has this book called Demand Side Sales misleading title, but it's all about figuring out the.
Timeline of a job to be done, which is a journey. So highly recommend that, which is adjacent, not specific to journey management, but those two were huge inspiration for our team to. Think outside the box.
A big thank you to you. And I'm extremely thankful to you and to your team for making this happen. Amazing. Thanks for having me. It was great fun.
Summary and closing words
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I will highlight two parts that I really loved. The first one is the zoom out.
That's been something that I really appreciated. And the other one... is the seeing that tools are just one part of the grand scheme and that you're helping people, coaching people, so you are understanding that. And for that, I'm extremely thankful. That's a great highlight. And I'm extremely thankful for being here, being part of this community and yeah, sharing a bit of what we're working on.
Cheers. Bye bye.
This webinar transcript was generated automatically, so it will contain errors and funny sentences.
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