CHALLENGE & SELECTION

The tool that I use the most within my organization is Customer Journeys, or in the context of

this assessment, Storytelling. Storytelling helps place the customer art the heart of the process

in order to help business stakeholders understand the process of a customer’s journey and the

feelings and connections that they experience along the way. Stakeholders, just as clients,

should always been involved in exploring and defining  a service proposition. Storytelling allows

us to show, at a high level of detail, how a client uses a products or services over time and

across touch-points. It is a client centric, outside in approach, based on customer objectives,

rather than design and delivery. Storytelling shows a journey that a customer has with us, is

cluster-focused and should be rich enough to outline all the pain points and the good moments

of the experience. Usually, the journey is created from real user data collected during

observation and interviews. A good client journey shows objective facts but also aims to

describe the emotions of the client (what s/he thinks, feels, says and does). Later on, client

journeys help drive decisions around what needs to be changed, improved, or continued.

APPLICATION

We start the process of storytelling by identifying a product or service that we want to describe

from a client point of view. From here we pool data and research across silos to frame a

hypothesis. This stage is about discovery. We aggregate data from multiple sources such as

web analytics ethnographic research, and client surveys and build the basics of a client journey

to understand the client, their pain points, and how the clients interact with us. It is at this

point that we develop personas from the data gathered.  A persona is a fictional character who

represents an observed user group. It is created from real user data collected during

observations and interviews and who is designed on behavioral characteristics.

With the above insights gathered we bring together cross-functional teams (which could

include product line owners, channel owners, CX designers, UX professionals, business

architects, digital technologists, developers, and data scientists) to pull together and share all

of the insights and data gathered and improve the understanding of client journey.

The personas used for the purpose of the journey must be empathetic.  We give him/ her a

name, detail his/her life and describe his/her lifecycle with our organization. The workshops

are interactive, with all stakeholders providing different viewpoints and opinions on the

journey. We talk aloud about the product or service that we have chosen, detailing what

happens in the story, step-by-step, facilitating by asking  “What happened next?” or “What

would our persona do next?”.

The purpose is to the co-create the ideal journey by holding workshops with an array of

business stakeholders in order to link both current state and future state journey maps to

multiple layers of processes, capabilities, data sources, technologies, and integrations.

The purpose of the tool is take the customer through and end-to-end interaction with the

organisation. The purpose of that is to identify significant steps that the customer takes, and

illustrate what actions they would be required to within their interaction. It is there that we

start building a narrative, and start unpacking the customers emotions and sentiment towards

any engagement that we would have with them. These journeys help us understand what are

the clients touch points and what product or services are they using. The journey should

illustrate the moments of delight for the client and their problems or frustrations. The journey

should also highlight quotes, insights or expectations, as well as the client is feeling at that

moment  within  each  step.  From  there  we  are  able  to  understand  what

solutions/innovations/opportunities we require or could use to address the identified pain

points.

INSIGHT & APPROACH

What I have learned about this approach is that It is essential to keep the customer at the

centre of story, and avoid moving into a solution state of mind. It is important to note that

journeys are not a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Different personas would require different

workshops with different stakeholder. For example, Fred, a banking client, wants a

transactional account , but may also want a personal loan. These are two distinctly different

journeys that would require a completely different audience when creating a journey map. On

the other end of the spectrum,  Mike an investment client, is looking at investing his family

wealth as well looking for a partner loan for his firm. Again, two very different journeys, but

also a completely different personas. Here you can see you story telling can be applied in the

same way, but very different outcomes will be achieved.

