The secrets to customer journey mapping success with Jim Tincher

In this interview with CX Network, customer loyalty guru, mapping expert and founder of Heart of the Customer, Jim Tincher, explains what has – and has not – changed in journey mapping, the problem with Post-it notes and how to become a “change maker”.

As an authority on customer journey mapping and loyalty, Tincher has quantitative evidence that confirms a link between the top performing companies and their approach to the customer journey. The best companies are more likely to have a journey manager on the CX team and that person is empowered to drive change.

Unfortunately, only 22 percent of his survey sample fell into this category.

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CX Network: What major developments you have seen in customer journey management over the last two years?

Jim Tincher: Many things have not changed, particularly the basics. We conducted research six years ago that showed two thirds of the time when a company conducts journey mapping, the results look good on the wall, but nothing changes in the organization’s approach to customers. That is a missed opportunity.

Our research also found what makes a difference: customer journey management has to be tied into a business proposition, something the organization cares about.

Additionally, both customers and employees need to be involved in the process. There is still this feeling that, ‘Let’s take our employees, put them in a room with Post-it notes and the magical quality of the Post-it notes will help them understand customer needs and fix the broken experience’.

That does not work.

You need to talk to dozens of customers to understand what is happening and find the solution. Then, involve a big part of the organization, typically 30 to 50 employees in the workshops that you organize.

None of that has changed other than we are seeing a little bit of uptick in most best practices.
What has changed is that there is now a growing understanding of the need to bring business data into the journey map.

You have to surround the journey map with all that business data, which I call the customer

 ecosystem data. This does not come naturally for most CX leaders, which is why it helps your CX team to have a combination of people from the outside who know CX and others who have been with the company for a long time, who know the organization and its data.

If you are only bringing in customer sentiment, it is hard to get your teams to act on the journey mapping results to make the changes needed to improve the experience.

RELATED CONTENT: What is customer journey mapping?

CX Network: In B2B what data sources should be tapped or considered first and foremost?

Jim Tincher: Start with descriptive data, analyzing how the outcome of the journey varies by the categories of customers: new vs. existing customers, or those who buy one product vs. multiple. Is the customer national, global or regional, and does any of that affect the outcome?

Behavioral data is a rich source of voice of the customer (VoC) feedback and is missing from most CX programs. If you are mapping a complaints journey, did the complaint begin with an email? Or did the customer call in and talk to a sales rep? How many times did they call for a status update? Does that affect the outcome? Essentially, you have to determine customer behaviors and use that as another form of the voice of the customer.

Operational data is also important. For the complaint example, you might ask questions like: How long did it take to close the complaint? How many people got involved? How many communications went out and how many came in?

Do not forget financial data. How much did this complicated journey cost you to serve? As a result of a good or bad journey, do customers order more or less after their complaint is resolved?

Surveys, journey maps and other customer sentiment data have an important role, but to create impact you need to combine that with the rest of the data. This allows you to tell leadership things like the financial cost, how much employee time was taken to resolve something, or you have the evidence to say ‘nobody is using our online portal because they do not trust it’.

That is the change we want to see in the industry – a realization that CX is a business discipline, not a survey program. To get that data, you have to talk to the right people.

CX Network: Who are the right people? Are there certain departments that should be involved?

Jim Tincher: You need to start with finance. For example, if the CFO is reporting on annual recurring revenue (ARR) and you are not, there is a disconnect. Once you understand that this is where finance spends time, you can then link your work to their messaging.

If they are talking about retention, someone in CX can say, ‘we retained a higher percentage of promoters than detractors’. That is marginally interesting, but not very actionable.
Instead, by incorporating the behavioral and operational data, you can say, ‘we found that when people open a ticket and have a complaint, their retention is 10 points lower than those who do not open a ticket, but we can also see that if we resolve the ticket in one call, we can make up most of that deficit’. Now leadership is interested.

When you combine behavioral and operations data – for example, how long it takes to resolve a ticket – with financial data such as retention, you can create a compelling story.

CX Network: What does it take to be an effective journey manager?

Jim Tincher: Journey management is in its early stages here in the US, but it is a little more mature in Europe.

We did a survey with CXPA three years ago where we separated participants into two categories: hopefuls and change-makers. The change-makers were able to show that their work was leading to improved retention, sales, and lower cost to serve. Unfortunately, only 22 percent of respondents were change-makers.

That is a wakeup call: three quarters of CX programs could not prove that the work they were doing mattered to business success.

Next, we looked at the roles of journey managers. We found that change-makers were not only more likely to have journey managers, but also that those people were way more empowered. If a hopeful had a journey manager, their primary role was reporting. For example, they might collect and report on data related to the success of the onboarding journey.

The change-makers also reported on the journey, but their journey managers were far more empowered. For example, they had access to executives. They could make limited decisions themselves and often partnered with a journey owner executive who would help them implement change across the organization.

That research was conducted three years ago, and I have not seen the situation change much. The advanced organizations are still using journey managers to drive change, but most are not.

RELATED CONTENT: A step-by-step guide for customer journey mapping success

CX Network: Where are the quick wins for those who are not yet Change Makers. How can they transform their current situation into a win?

Jim Tincher: The biggest successes come from getting your entire team on board while developing your change management skills.

One of the keys to effective journey mapping is involving a large, cross-functional team and exposing them directly to the voice of the customer. Get sales and operations on the same team, and they will start to realize they have very different perspectives on the journey – and that neither matches what the customers say!

The solution rarely involves only one department, but typically requires operations, sales and other groups.

Sometimes it is as simple as sales making promises that operations cannot deliver on. Once other departments are aware of this, it is a quick fix. They are not deliberately overpromising; they just have the wrong information.

The fastest way to a quick win is to get different siloed departments talking to and collaborating with each other.

You need customer service and product to be represented there because, in most organizations, it is a source of power. There is never a customer journey map without technology implications so your IT people need to be there as well.

In my experience, few organizations invite HR to be a part of their CX efforts. While HR does not have a role for every journey, if you are working on the end-to-end experience – and our research shows the change makers do this far more frequently than hopeful organizations – your people have a huge impact on the success of the customer experience. Which means that HR, or whoever focuses on developing your culture, needs to be there.

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