March 13, 2025 • 35 mins
Ania Rodriguez was trained as an engineer. She is Founder and CEO of JourneyTrack and a self-made entrepreneur. Ania's insights into modernizing journey mapping and reducing customer churn offer groundbreaking, actionable strategies for any organization interested in elevating customer experiences.
Ania shares how journey mapping has evolved into a powerful tool for leaders to drive business outcomes:
- Discover how Ania Rodriguez transformed the CX landscape by moving from outdated manual methods to efficient journey management and how this shift can significantly reduce customer churn.
- Learn about the surprising, low-cost quick wins Ania shares that can immediately improve customer retention and satisfaction.
- Get inspired by Ania’s insightful analogy comparing journey mapping to creating a movie and how it changes your perspective on customer experience....and so many more gems!
We welcome Ania and her team at JourneyTrack as new sponsors of The Delighted Customers Podcast!
Meet Ania:
Ania is a self-made entrepreneur who has made a name for herself, serving as a CX/UX advisor to Fortune 500 companies around the world for over two decades. Known for her focus on actionable results and quality,
Ania’s leadership has resulted in double-digit growth for her first company, Key Lime Interactive, over the past decade. The company has emerged to become one of the leading user experience research firms in the United States. Her work as a CX/UX strategist and researcher demonstrated to her the need for a platform that could take her journey mapping vision to the next level. JourneyTrack is the tool that meets that vision.
Email Ania mentioned: sales@journeytrack.io
Contact Sales form
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JourneyTrack website
Journey Impact feature
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Today's episode is brought to you by Achieve Unite, a global
leader in leadership development, business acceleration and trusted
partnerships. Achieve Unite combines deep expertise, data
analytics and AI to help companies accelerate revenue, control
costs, elevate talent and build trust. They're more
than advisors, they deliver results with their proven three part approach,
(00:23):
talent development, ecosystem strategy and profitable growth
programs. Whether you're strengthening alliances, enhancing internal
systems or optimizing your partner ecosystem, Achieve
Unite is the partner you need for success.
(00:46):
Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast. I am so
glad you're here. We challenge conventional thinking about
customer experience because I believe that improving experiences isn't
just good for business, it's empowering, powerful way to make a meaningful
difference in people's lives. Each week we feature thought
provoking conversations with industry thought leaders from
(01:08):
a variety of backgrounds offering unique perspectives and
actionable insights. Get ready to sharpen your
leadership and transform your approach to customer experience.
Let's dive in.
I am excited to welcome our new sponsor Journey
Track to the Delighted Customers podcast. A big
(01:31):
thank you to Anya Rodriguez and the JourneyTrack team for
supporting our mission to elevate customer experience
and it is just so cool to have someone in the
same spirit trying to lift up CX. JourneyTrack is a
leading enterprise journey management platform helping
organizations create seamless customer centric
(01:53):
experiences at scale and their commitment to
innovation and CX excellence. Excellence makes them a perfect partner
for this show. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce
my guest today who is Anya Anya
Rodriguez. She is a self made entrepreneur who has
made a name for herself serving as a CX UX advisor to
(02:15):
Fortune 500 companies around the world over for two
decades. Known for her focus on actionable results
and quality, Anya's leadership has resulted in double digit
growth for her first company, Key Lime Interactive. Over the past
decade the company has emerged to become one of the leading user
experience research firms in the United States and her work in CX
(02:37):
UX as a strategist and researcher has demonstrated to her
the need for a platform that could take Journey Mapping
vision that she has to the next level that long Intro
Anya, so excited to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
It's great to be here with you Mark. Super excited as well and thank
you for being a sponsor. Excellent. So today we're going to
(03:00):
be talking about this issue that's near and dear to
so many industries which is avoiding customer churn.
Right idea of retention. How do we do it? What's the
role that Journey Mapping plays in it?
And one of the reasons that I'm so excited to have you on the
show. Talking about the solutions that you provide is,
(03:23):
I am a firm believer, someone who started out doing the old
school version of journey mapping. And for those of you who
are old timers, you can appreciate this. For those of you who
are new to this world, be grateful that you don't have to go through this.
But we would buy like 100 pound roll of kraft
paper, bring it with us, schlep it with us into a conference
(03:45):
room sometimes across town with a whole bunch of
markers, post it notes, tape, all these supplies. It was
like an arts and crafts expo and
we were the mules that were bringing all this stuff to this place. Then we'd
have to set it up, hang it up and do
everything manually. And some of that still has a place, although now
(04:06):
most of that's been replaced with whiteboards. And Anya's just put
the whole thing on steroids with her tool that really takes
it to the next level. And so Anya, have I done a
decent job of describing the evolution? Yeah, for sure. Thank
you, Mark. That's. Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. We went from sticky notes
to, and messy, you know, boards that took weeks and weeks for
(04:29):
people then to synthesize it and create these like pictures that would just sit in
the wall. To very, you know, to a very live and you
know, constantly updated, you know, tracking of actual actions against
that journey map. And that's really the dream behind journey track. Right. It's a way
for companies, enterprise companies, to not just think about
the one off processes, but to connect them, to really understand where
(04:51):
there's really opportunities and pain points that are really digging
into their customer pain points and crossing churn and
causing major rifts in that experience with
a brand. So let's do some level setting for some people who may not
be quite as familiar with the baseline, which is
journey map. And one of the things that
(05:13):
happened along the way for me was the, and the importance
of language and words is going from journey mapping to
journey management and thinking about it differently. So if you
could level set, I guess one way to do this would be to explain
to the audience in your own words what the difference is between say a business
process map and a journey map. So I was, I
(05:36):
studied engineering, right. And when I went into the working world back
then, 20 something years ago at this point I was
very familiar with process maps. We'd create process map which was really just what
was happening in the enterprise. What were they, what were the steps, what needed to
happen what if A happened, then B happened, if not C happened. Really,
journey mapping as a practice became popularized, if you will, Even
(05:58):
though it was around in the 70s and 80s, it really became popularized the last
two decades because as customer. As companies tried
to move to a customer centricity, really thinking about
that customer in the center. The art of like within design
thinking. Right. I was at IBM at that time, was really just to. To pull
in and think about the customer, not just think about. So journey maps, what they
(06:21):
do is not just map what's happening, but it also maps it
from the customer experience. I always love to have my customers think about it
this way. Imagine you're filming a film, right? And that film, you're
taking the perspective of the actor. Like, what is that person seeing, thinking,
feeling what props are around? So when you create a journey map, you're thinking about
everything that is in that scene, right? If you were designing the movie, that's what
(06:43):
you would do. Right. And so a journey map is not just what is happening,
but what is. What is it causing? What is that person feeling? Where is
like, where's the things that are missing and seen? Did you forget to think about
something and seen what is an important thing that you should think about when you're
in that specific moment? Right. And so I think in doing that,
it shifts the thinking from just like, quite frankly, what is
(07:04):
happening to what is, you know, what is your customers really experiencing? And so
that's that. That differential is really what accelerates
things. And sort of parallel to this, some people will also do what's called the
service blueprint. Right. Which is. Which is an even more, you know, sort of
sophisticated look of not just what the customer's seeing, but what is happening with
your processes in the back end. So, like, if you back to my whole
(07:26):
analogy with filming a movie, what's happening backstage? What. What
is happening behind that front line, if you will.
Yeah, well, I love the movie analogy. I never. I never actually heard
that looking at it from the actor's lens, which is. Which is wonderful.
And one of the things that you talked about, how they think, what they're thinking,
what they're feeling, you're talking about kind of getting in the head and the heart
(07:47):
of what someone going through the journey with you is
like. And I think, what. What. How does
that inform the business? What
is it is that understanding of their emotions and their thoughts. How does that
inform what they should be doing differently?
Yeah, there's that famous saying, people don't remember what you did,
(08:10):
but how you made Them feel right. And so those moments of like,
what they feel with your brand are those what they call moments of truth.
Right. The moment where they're, they're going to either be so delighted or so
enraged that they will either leave your brand or communicate to
others what a great experience they have. Right. And so, so in those little
clips of time where if you can augment the good ones and
(08:33):
really undo the bad ones, is really where you can now, going back to
the whole point of this session, Churn, Right. If you don't handle that
mishap in that whatever point of moment of truth, then you're going to likely turn
that customer because they're no longer going to be delighted and satisfied. And they, and
over time they're going to just say, you know what, this, this brand doesn't care
about my needs. And so why should I, why should I keep giving them money,
(08:55):
period? So let's connect the dots for C Suite
leaders about why this is such a big deal. And obviously
churn matters to anyone sitting in the C Suite. I think
there are other implications as well. Do you want to shed some light on what
you think they may be? Yeah, you know, why I really
build Journey Track and it's why, you know, it's really about also
(09:17):
building a company. Right. There's, you know, where some people think of
customer experiences, maybe fluffy, nice to haves and, or like just, you know, something
to say to, to delight, you know, to, to have to say something out
there. The reality is, is there is financial implications,
right? And I don't, I know a lot of folks like to use some of
the sort of typical customer experience metrics such as Net
(09:38):
promoter score, customer satisfaction. But the reality is at the C
Suite, just, you know, just like I'm managing two companies, you really, you really
care about the financial impact, right? So you know that everyone knows
it, especially in this economy, that acquiring new customers is much more difficult than
it is. And obviously lo is going to cost you five
to seven times depending on how you're doing it. There's also data to
(10:01):
indicate companies that do care about their customers, their customer
lifetime value is like, you know, much higher. Forrester has some data around that, around
1.5, if I remember right. And so the amount, there's,
there's, there's real numbers that play into this. Right. And
so it's not just a soft science in that, oh, great, people feel better. No,
no, no. It's about where are you going to keep your customers and are they
(10:22):
going to be able to amplify your, your brand and your reputation, right.
Or, you know, diminish it. And so I always like to. And
part of what we do at Journey Track was try to tie those two things
together. And so there's always, you know, show at Visa vis Metrics if you have
that data. Some customers may not, you know, be a little bit more lower maturity
and they're not there yet, but they get there because the reality is, is what
(10:42):
keeps the C suite up is, you know, what is happening with
revenue, what is happening with cac, what is happening with lifetime value, customer,
lifetime value. Those are the things that are important. And so you have to, you
should care. If you want to really ensure that you continue
to be profitable, growing, you have to make sure your retention is there.
Right. And so, so, and that by in hand, we will increase
(11:04):
your profitability. So these are basics to it. But it's
sometimes the companies that are really customer
focused, customer obsessed, whatever word you want to use, they get this
right. Really, really work out where those areas are. Right. And in
doing so, there's quick ROI to it. And
that is much better than trying to,
(11:26):
you know, go out and try to, you know, look at other business opportunities
in certain ways or if you can fix what you have obviously, and, and
get, you know, customers to stay, that's better than retain them.
That's better than exploring other options. Because oftentimes I see a lot of companies and
I'm even talking the big, you know, sort of, they don't do enough of the
work up front to really do that. Right. And so they end up, it's,
(11:48):
it's a, it's a painful predicament when they need to correct
it, but yet they need to correct it. Otherwise there's brand impact to that.
So we're talking about, we just talked about
churn and understanding these
moments of truth which there may be pain points and then you also shared,
you know, kind of amplify those areas that are really important
(12:10):
in a good way. So potentially building
loyalty might be another benefit. Right? And
potentially, you know, an openness to
more, more, more of your offerings. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. I mean loyalty for me is not just discounts or rewards.
Loyalty is, comes from real value from, from them feeling they can
(12:32):
trust you from ease of use, not just the perks. Right. And so for sure,
yeah. So, so the evolution from roll
paper, craft paper, schlepping that around and post it
notes and so forth, tell us about how your organization,
your tool, your solution can help companies do
this in an efficient way. And a Way that isn't just
(12:54):
an event but ongoing how it can
provide actionable data, even
real time data that shifts very far away
from the soft fluffy feel of a arts and crafts project too.
This is really concrete stuff. How does that happen?
Yeah, I think, I think I like the way you started this
(13:17):
with the whole thinking around business process management. For those that went
through that era and did that, that was really key to
sort of leveling the business. Right. Well, I feel like
this, this journey management as a practice and it is to your point, a
new practice if you will. Even though customer journey mapping has been
around the idea of management is sort of near. Right. And so manage
(13:39):
it by. And I think we did, we were going to define it is really
not just saying here's the. And what's happening and what the customer. All the
sort of core journeys. It's really understanding where
the, where those breaks for are what actions and how you as
a business are going to prioritize that to help you understand like how
important this is for the customer. How important is this for the, the business. So
(14:00):
both looking at both those two different ways to look at it, you know, face
a base in doing so you basically have, you know, you're
able to, to really prioritize what's important. Right. And, and you
can, and very much you can decide I'm going to put the lens of the
customer, I'm going to put the lens of the business and in some
intersection there also based on effort and a couple other factors,
(14:21):
you're going to make decisions on what you think are predictive that's going to move
your especially if you have goals to continue increasing revenue and you know,
reduce losses and things like that. What it helps you do is really create
a strategy that you can track and trace it from any data that's
coming in from your business, whether it's qualitative in nature, quantitative nature
and really sort of pipe that into the actions that your, your
(14:43):
teams are doing to fix some of these if you will. If you will
opportunity, you know, opportunities within the business. It'll give you some, a
real measurable view of what that impact is over time. Right. And I think that's
the difference. Right. So in the old days people just assume map and then they,
everybody was just a piece of paper and some of the things got done, other
things didn't happen. Well now there's a way to really see if it's happening or
(15:03):
not. And that's, that's the first check mark. Next thing it's is it really Moving
the needle in any of our measures, whatever measures are important for you as a
business. So that's the next check mark, right? And then the third check mark
here is how can we look at all signals and triangulate that to see if
we're missing other areas? Because what I commonly see is
the, the friction points is when there's two different departments because
(15:25):
they're so siloed, especially in the enterprise, when they have to come
together and they didn't realize that one was doing this and the other one
was doing that. And those, those, even those conversations are
fun to watch because it's some basic things that no
one expects. So are you. I love, I
love that illustration of silos bumping
(15:46):
into each other. And my own experience with journey maps is
I remember I worked in a bank for a long time and
I remember someone in the deposit operations
side was in the same journey mapping session as
the head of the contact center and they were constantly finger
pointing at one another and the journey map
(16:09):
took it all from the customer's vantage point and their
eyes were open and got to see it for the first time and realized there
was a whole bunch of assumptions that were happening about the other side. It's sort
of a typical writing stories about other people. But the journey
map took it out of, you know, your fault, my fault,
and brought it and took a look at it from the customer's lens
(16:31):
and the silos broke down. I remember that gentleman,
his name was Pat and he said this was the most
productive day I've had here in 12 years. So does that story
resonate? CX
professionals know that every touch point matters, but managing
the entire customer journey can be challenging, especially for
(16:53):
enterprises due to disjointed data, difficulty aligning
stakeholders, and struggling to secure executive support.
That's where journey Track comes in. JourneyTrack integrates journey
mapping, management and measurement, allowing you to pinpoint
friction, optimize experiences and demonstrate the ROI
of CX initiatives. So you can align teams,
(17:16):
break down silos, and then you can track improvements in real
time. With JourneyTrack, you get visibility across every channel
and touchpoint. No more guesswork, just clear insights and
measurable results. Join the CX leaders who transform journeys
into improved experiences with impactful business outcomes
like reduced churn and increased customer lifetime
(17:38):
value. Visit JourneyTrack IO today and see
how better journeys lead to better business.
That's exactly what happens day to day. That's why we built in the whole
workshop feature as an important that's we're the only one that has that
differentiator because we know those conversations,
(18:00):
what people think think is happening and what's really happening are
just, just they're eye opening. And it's always, I mean
I literally, I, I kind of smiled when you said this because I literally, this
conversation happened with a bank not like two weeks ago. They literally
had, they thought, just in general, they, they, they
had their cards, they, they thought it was a different phone number on
(18:22):
it. And they realized that one other, one other group was getting those calls
and they were like, no, that's not the number on it. And someone said let's
go get the onboarding part and let's look at what it looks
like. And yeah, those are big. You have a moment where
the president says what just happened? How did we do this? How did we drop
this so badly? No wonder people are having a hard time onboarding. And that's new.
(18:44):
Onboarding is one of the biggest friction points in financial services, as you probably know.
And so that's where you need to make sure you don't mess
it up. As simple as a number. This is the
funny thing, this is the irony of it and going through a process like
this. I want to hear, as soon as I'm done talking, I want to hear
more about that feature that you said nobody else has and how it works.
(19:05):
But you know, this kind of, it's a number. I mean
we had something, the change of address process.
When a customer wants to change their address, they wanted to do a journey map
just for that process. And I'm like, are you sure that's going to be enough
content for a journey mapping workshop? And they said,
oh yeah. Because when a customer wants to change their address, there's at least five
(19:27):
different channels they can go through to do that. And then
there's a whole bunch of regulations around like if it's a spouse, if
it's a joint account, you know, it could be a soon to be ex
spouse and they don't want the address change where the bank statements go.
Right. So there's all sorts of regulations around that. And it became a whole journey
mapping session. Part of the journey mapping management
(19:49):
strategy, but a session. And one of the things that
you mentioned, and I think I heard you mention this the, at the beginning of
the show or early on in the show was when you go through this process,
while it sounds soft, touchy feely, it is. There's really
concrete results and we can reduce churn, but if you
are a leader of UNSC suite listening to this, you
(20:12):
need to know that when you go through this, I can promise you and you
can verify this and validate me on this if it's true, Anya. But
I can promise you that there will be low hanging fruit, there will be quick
wins that do not cost the organization a lot of money to fix
and will build momentum. What's been your experience for sure?
100%. You know, there's some simple things that
(20:34):
happen in these conversations that moves a needle like
by so much sometimes surprisingly so. You know,
if you, if you end up looking this, this sort of just the whole
sort of birth of it, you'll probably see an example that was done with GE
Healthcare and Stanford School. I was actually. They
were a customer of us in those years. Right. And the whole like, you
(20:56):
know, everyone's scared of going into an MRI machine. It's you know,
scary the whole journey that's used in that experience. That
example was around little kid going into the, the
MRI machine and sort of all that anxiety that happens. Right. And quite
frankly the solution was just stickers. Making it look like it's like, you
know, we need the pool in or. Cars or whatever, campfire,
(21:18):
campgrounds, campfire. And then give them a little backpack and do
stuff to like really alleviate quite frankly has some real, you
know, high impact. You know, the kids, you know, the likely them to be, you
know, having to take drugs will sort of minimize, you know, the ability
for them to stay engaged will be in there. It makes it fun. I mean
simple tiny things. And this is a well known example. But I'm just
(21:39):
using this kind of showcase how
simple stickers can change a whole process. Right. And that to
me is sort of the epitome of how, how simple some of these solutions are.
But at the end of the story it's, it's those tiny things. Just like everything
in life, there's those tiny things that just do sometimes miracles. And it's when
you pull together and you really just start, you know, thinking about what is
(22:01):
potential simple solutions to this. You'd be surprised how, how
much teams can come up with like low risk, low cost
fixes that really just make, you know, huge differences. Let me double
click on what you said earlier about the unique tool feature
that your program or your tool offers. Yeah, yeah.
So we, we, you know, traditionally this work, you know, to your point is done
(22:24):
with a bunch of sticky notes and you probably everybody in this call has probably
at one point been in some workshop of sorts. When, when we were doing that
work with my first company. That's, that's a huge engagement That's a lot of time
and money and strategic money that this is huge to get all these executives,
60 executives in the room to run these workshops over X number of
days. And at the end of the story, you know, they need, they need a
(22:45):
way to synthesize. All right, so as we built this, we're like, listen, there's different
ways that you can bring in what's happen. You can bring in,
you know, all the data you have qualitative, quantitative, and use what's called journey
AI. That's one way. But the way that customers typically do this is
because there's data everywhere and data nowhere at the same time.
They, they run workshops and, and during COVID
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you know, many companies then had to move to like the digital whiteboard kind of
solutions because there was no way to do that. The challenge you have with that
is it's still the same problem. You get done with that workshop and what do
you have to show for it now? Somebody has to translate everything that happened to
go to the next. So having an experience and live that and really just
wanted to capture was really happening and not, you know, we
(23:29):
created a feature right at the beginning which was like, run your workshop just like
you would right within the tool and literally at the click of the button. And
it creates that baseline journey, which is based on what everyone talked about it. And
there's. What's neat about it is there's voting capability. So you can, as a team,
you can, you can do the typical, like, you know, in the past you used
to put like, you know, similar themed.
Yeah, it's on one side and the other. And you
(23:52):
create what the topic, you know, theme was that that's called affinity mapping, if you
want to work out a little bit. But that is, you know, what a lot
of the consultants do. Right. To basically get that baseline journey. Because the reality
is, is, you know, even in the largest companies that you think that they
really get data, they. It's just there's so many different interpretations of
what's happening. Right. So that baseline journey of what everybody think is happening is so
(24:14):
important to capture it, because then you can validate it. Is this really what's happening?
And we have this feature, we built the whole jobs to be done framework, which
for those that don't know what that is, is like how. How important
is. Is this whatever point of the experience to your customer
and how satisfied they are. And so what we did during the workshop, part of
it we have like what we call a presumptive, like what we think the team
(24:35):
thinks how important do they think it's their customers and how, how, how
satisfied do they think? Right. And it's always interesting to see that, you know,
vis a vis, when we, when we, when we, when we track it, because we
give them both, as time passes, what the team thought versus what
is really happening. Because when you do this work, you really want to
focus on things that have, like, that have high dissatisfaction. Like
(24:57):
people are not satisfied but are super important. Right. So there's a little bit of
a triangle. They call this an opportunity triangle. Oftentimes
we'll see that you know what you know, and it works. If this is to
your point of what things are, people get, get really off. People
think this is not important. And for customers it's something very important. And the
things that they feel is, in that the customers feel like it's that
(25:19):
not important. You know, someone internally thinks it's super important. And granted
there's, there's going to be times you're going to have to make a decision for
a business because maybe there's something that you are seeing. Obviously your customers are only
seeing so they're like they're reacting to whatever you're building. So we find that sometimes
you're going to have to say, well, this is important for the business because this
is a strategic, you know, sort of step into this direction we're going to go.
And that's okay. But where it gets interesting is where they totally
(25:42):
miss it because they just thought it wasn't important or they thought it was super
important and it's not important at all to customers. And those are fun points of
those conversations, those productive days where you're like, wow, this is so
interesting days. So, yeah, I mean, what you're
describing reminds me of like the analogy of me out
in my front yard trying to plant a
(26:04):
tree and using a spade, shovel and a traditional
shovel and digging away. And if you haven't dug in a while,
the older you get, the harder it is. But then someone comes along with one
of these bobcats with the front loader on it
and can literally dig the hole in a matter of seconds.
And so planting the tree becomes a fun event when you know you've got that
(26:25):
looking in front of you. And I think that's a difference between the way
we used to do it and now what you've got with your
tool being able to not have to recreate the whole baseline
of the journey map, but you can do it with a click as an example.
And the other thing, for those listening now Back to the strategic side of it
is I remember having Jason Barrow from NPS Prison from
(26:48):
Bain on the show early on and he talked about the ability
to have to know which levers to pull, know which
levers to push and how far to pull or push them. And
this is what your tool can help really in many ways
automate. Right? Yeah, it does. It's exactly
right. And just understanding what if I, if I pull this one. What
(27:10):
historically has happened and what do we do in this case? Like what should we
think about when we're doing these changes? Is that proactive sort of
using data to basically, you know, help you decide and
really pull it. It was very different in the days that, you know, when
we were just doing. Even for those companies are still using whiteboards, you really
can't action on that. You can't do anything. That's the difference between just
(27:33):
doing a simple journey map. And you know, I find it, find it
interesting because I don't, you know, I find one of the things that
I think that I've seen more as I've you know,
been working with a lot more of just both US based and
internationally based companies. Right. It's
really like how important is really
(27:54):
identifying where those areas are for a
customer to really pull in. And, and honestly what I've,
I've noticed is in, you know, there's what I've seen
anyways in the US from a maturity perspective in this practice,
there's still a thinking at some levels that this is a one in, you know,
one kind of year kind of thing. Right. And it's, it's that the practice of
(28:16):
continuously doing this work and really having a tool that lets you
continuously look at this, okay, we're making these strategic changes. It's not this
one and done kind of annual event that we do and
then just kind of set it and forget it. It's really that proactive like let's
see what happens if we do do this shift. Now we've seen these, these outcomes
of based on these actions we took, what is that going to take us to
(28:38):
the next level? I mean a lot of part of getting decisions made,
which is a big part of what I try to help CX professionals with is
getting executive buy in is making it simple and easy for
them to understand what the problem is that we're trying to
solve. And what you're describing there really does
not just for the C suite but for other levels as well provide
(29:00):
those sort of insights that then you can take action on. And it's not Just
a gut feel or putting your finger in the air, but
you've got some solid data that's
triangulated, as you said, that you can then act on with
a certain level of confidence. For sure. We talked about several
different strategies. There's one more that I'd like to kind of end on,
(29:23):
and that is if you don't have a journey mapping
strategy, if you're listening to this and you haven't in
your organization, but haven't done it, but you really like to bring it in,
what are some. What's the steps that they should be thinking about
going through to fully integrate journey
mapping, journey management into their organization?
(29:45):
Yeah, I like to. I guess the
first point of this is understanding. You know, what I've seen most
successfully work is that, you know, there's small groups. It's almost like a small.
And I've seen it, I've seen it happen where there's like 15 people around the
globe. If it's a huge Fortune 500, and that's big because it's a different brands
maybe playing into this, but really sort of pull together almost a small
(30:07):
team depending on the size of the company. What is that? You know, that turns
into that for you, but it's really starting. It starts with just
dipping your foot and just even doing the basic. To me, that's
workshopping has become sort of super important because they all. Some of this
early customers, they will, they'll do is run a lot of workshops because they want
to at least get a baseline of what, what is happening, what they think is
(30:27):
happening. Right. And so that is a simple way and we've
made it so simple for anyone to do that. I think that's why it's been.
We have customers, all they do is run workshops. That's all they do. They don't
even like they run baselines and they just. Because quite
frankly, depending on your size of your business. But we see
that customers in the year one, especially at an enterprise, which
(30:49):
is our typical customer, they're going to create anywhere from like, you know,
60 to like 90 journeys in their first year. And
so sometimes they want to go, you know, sort of breath. I tend to want
them to go like narrow and just really get an ROI case going
for their business. But sometimes that
there's so much excitement that happens, I'm like, wow. We can at least, you know,
(31:11):
create a baseline and at least then we can connect data to it and see
what's happening. There's different ways to do this, but I tend, I'm of the school
of thought that you start small and then you build from it. Right. And so
if I was, if I was just starting, I would create a, you know, create
a, create a small, you know, working group
that's going to do this and then really just, just identify, you
(31:31):
know, sort of the, the top. In our tool, we have templates for
you to start. Right. So that, that's another way to get going. Right. Or quite
frankly, it's bringing in data. Right. So like pull in
a couple of customer interviews that's been done through your teams, through your
sales, through research, whatever you want. And then like create that baseline and
start validating that and understanding is this really what's happening, what's not
(31:54):
happening? Right. And so there's like, yeah, those three ways either start
from a template, you start from a workshop, or you start from your data
and then you continue to build on that.
Yeah, great, great first steps. Great way to get started.
It's been a fascinating conversation. I know we're going to have more of them
this year with you. So grateful for that. But before we
(32:16):
sign off, one final question, which I asked all my guests
now, which is what delights you as a
customer? Yeah, I just said I like, I like to start small. I like little
things. So to me, those little personal touches, like those little, you
know, you don't have to do a lot for me, you just give me the
smallest things and I'm happy. Right. For me, I don't need a lot. I don't.
I'm not one of those people that I get feels like they need to like,
(32:39):
be showing. So it's those little personal touches you call
me through, you know, my birthday. It's silly, right? You call me my birthday or
you if I get there. Like the other days I went, it was my birthday
here in February. So that's why it's sort of really happy birthday. Yeah. And we
went to dinner and it had my name printed on the menu. I'm like, I
know that a lot of people do that, but I always find it so, like
(32:59):
such a daring kind of thing. It's like, oh, they printed something for me. It's
silly. It's those personal touches. And I,
yeah, I, I really pull to those kinds of
differentiation experiences. Well. And I
don't think it's a little thing. I think it's a really important thing to make
it personal. And I'm sure that is a solution that would come out. A lot
(33:21):
of journey mapping sessions is to make, to amplify this
particular point. You know, it could be on the plus side
where it's something they love and they want more of, or it could be on
the negative side when they feel like a number and they feel like they're being
ignored. And you could do something to make that special. So what a great, what
a great tip. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for being
(33:42):
on the show and for being a sponsor, a new sponsor of
our show. If somebody wanted to, first of all, if
somebody wanted to get a hold of you will be the best way. And then
do you offer either a demo or a consult that they could
have to get, get more information? Yeah, for sure. You
know, I can be reached either via LinkedIn or even just
(34:04):
writing to salesurneytrackIO even though I don't do
day to day sales, I get those emails. So we know who's in. But if
you. Yeah, for sure. On the website on JourneyTrack IO, you can sign up
for a demo, I'm happy to show you. For customers that need
to kind of play with it, there's a 30 day free version that you can
get on, which is really great if you're just trying to dip your toes and
(34:25):
understand what this is for. And then I'm happy to have one of someone on
my team walk you through a more extensive demo. And
we also have a couple of partnerships with a couple of folks who do different
trainings and so if you're just new and trying to get in,
happy to help you and get that going. Excellent. Anya,
thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you, Mark for having me. It's
(34:46):
always fun talking to you. I
hope you enjoyed this episode of the Delighted Customers podcast. It
would mean so much if you would take a moment to subscribe. You can go
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(35:08):
others. While you're there, I'd love it if you leave a five star
review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday.
Today's episode is brought to you by Achieve Unite, a global
leader in leadership development, business acceleration and trusted
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(00:23):
talent development, ecosystem strategy and profitable growth
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(00:46):
Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast. I am so
glad you're here. We challenge conventional thinking about
customer experience because I believe that improving experiences isn't
just good for business, it's empowering, powerful way to make a meaningful
difference in people's lives. Each week we feature thought
provoking conversations with industry thought leaders from
(01:08):
a variety of backgrounds offering unique perspectives and
actionable insights. Get ready to sharpen your
leadership and transform your approach to customer experience.
Let's dive in.
I am excited to welcome our new sponsor Journey
Track to the Delighted Customers podcast. A big
(01:31):
thank you to Anya Rodriguez and the JourneyTrack team for
supporting our mission to elevate customer experience
and it is just so cool to have someone in the
same spirit trying to lift up CX. JourneyTrack is a
leading enterprise journey management platform helping
organizations create seamless customer centric
(01:53):
experiences at scale and their commitment to
innovation and CX excellence. Excellence makes them a perfect partner
for this show. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce
my guest today who is Anya Anya
Rodriguez. She is a self made entrepreneur who has
made a name for herself serving as a CX UX advisor to
(02:15):
Fortune 500 companies around the world over for two
decades. Known for her focus on actionable results
and quality, Anya's leadership has resulted in double digit
growth for her first company, Key Lime Interactive. Over the past
decade the company has emerged to become one of the leading user
experience research firms in the United States and her work in CX
(02:37):
UX as a strategist and researcher has demonstrated to her
the need for a platform that could take Journey Mapping
vision that she has to the next level that long Intro
Anya, so excited to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
It's great to be here with you Mark. Super excited as well and thank
you for being a sponsor. Excellent. So today we're going to
(03:00):
be talking about this issue that's near and dear to
so many industries which is avoiding customer churn.
Right idea of retention. How do we do it? What's the
role that Journey Mapping plays in it?
And one of the reasons that I'm so excited to have you on the
show. Talking about the solutions that you provide is,
(03:23):
I am a firm believer, someone who started out doing the old
school version of journey mapping. And for those of you who
are old timers, you can appreciate this. For those of you who
are new to this world, be grateful that you don't have to go through this.
But we would buy like 100 pound roll of kraft
paper, bring it with us, schlep it with us into a conference
(03:45):
room sometimes across town with a whole bunch of
markers, post it notes, tape, all these supplies. It was
like an arts and crafts expo and
we were the mules that were bringing all this stuff to this place. Then we'd
have to set it up, hang it up and do
everything manually. And some of that still has a place, although now
(04:06):
most of that's been replaced with whiteboards. And Anya's just put
the whole thing on steroids with her tool that really takes
it to the next level. And so Anya, have I done a
decent job of describing the evolution? Yeah, for sure. Thank
you, Mark. That's. Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. We went from sticky notes
to, and messy, you know, boards that took weeks and weeks for
(04:29):
people then to synthesize it and create these like pictures that would just sit in
the wall. To very, you know, to a very live and you
know, constantly updated, you know, tracking of actual actions against
that journey map. And that's really the dream behind journey track. Right. It's a way
for companies, enterprise companies, to not just think about
the one off processes, but to connect them, to really understand where
(04:51):
there's really opportunities and pain points that are really digging
into their customer pain points and crossing churn and
causing major rifts in that experience with
a brand. So let's do some level setting for some people who may not
be quite as familiar with the baseline, which is
journey map. And one of the things that
(05:13):
happened along the way for me was the, and the importance
of language and words is going from journey mapping to
journey management and thinking about it differently. So if you
could level set, I guess one way to do this would be to explain
to the audience in your own words what the difference is between say a business
process map and a journey map. So I was, I
(05:36):
studied engineering, right. And when I went into the working world back
then, 20 something years ago at this point I was
very familiar with process maps. We'd create process map which was really just what
was happening in the enterprise. What were they, what were the steps, what needed to
happen what if A happened, then B happened, if not C happened. Really,
journey mapping as a practice became popularized, if you will, Even
(05:58):
though it was around in the 70s and 80s, it really became popularized the last
two decades because as customer. As companies tried
to move to a customer centricity, really thinking about
that customer in the center. The art of like within design
thinking. Right. I was at IBM at that time, was really just to. To pull
in and think about the customer, not just think about. So journey maps, what they
(06:21):
do is not just map what's happening, but it also maps it
from the customer experience. I always love to have my customers think about it
this way. Imagine you're filming a film, right? And that film, you're
taking the perspective of the actor. Like, what is that person seeing, thinking,
feeling what props are around? So when you create a journey map, you're thinking about
everything that is in that scene, right? If you were designing the movie, that's what
(06:43):
you would do. Right. And so a journey map is not just what is happening,
but what is. What is it causing? What is that person feeling? Where is
like, where's the things that are missing and seen? Did you forget to think about
something and seen what is an important thing that you should think about when you're
in that specific moment? Right. And so I think in doing that,
it shifts the thinking from just like, quite frankly, what is
(07:04):
happening to what is, you know, what is your customers really experiencing? And so
that's that. That differential is really what accelerates
things. And sort of parallel to this, some people will also do what's called the
service blueprint. Right. Which is. Which is an even more, you know, sort of
sophisticated look of not just what the customer's seeing, but what is happening with
your processes in the back end. So, like, if you back to my whole
(07:26):
analogy with filming a movie, what's happening backstage? What. What
is happening behind that front line, if you will.
Yeah, well, I love the movie analogy. I never. I never actually heard
that looking at it from the actor's lens, which is. Which is wonderful.
And one of the things that you talked about, how they think, what they're thinking,
what they're feeling, you're talking about kind of getting in the head and the heart
(07:47):
of what someone going through the journey with you is
like. And I think, what. What. How does
that inform the business? What
is it is that understanding of their emotions and their thoughts. How does that
inform what they should be doing differently?
Yeah, there's that famous saying, people don't remember what you did,
(08:10):
but how you made Them feel right. And so those moments of like,
what they feel with your brand are those what they call moments of truth.
Right. The moment where they're, they're going to either be so delighted or so
enraged that they will either leave your brand or communicate to
others what a great experience they have. Right. And so, so in those little
clips of time where if you can augment the good ones and
(08:33):
really undo the bad ones, is really where you can now, going back to
the whole point of this session, Churn, Right. If you don't handle that
mishap in that whatever point of moment of truth, then you're going to likely turn
that customer because they're no longer going to be delighted and satisfied. And they, and
over time they're going to just say, you know what, this, this brand doesn't care
about my needs. And so why should I, why should I keep giving them money,
(08:55):
period? So let's connect the dots for C Suite
leaders about why this is such a big deal. And obviously
churn matters to anyone sitting in the C Suite. I think
there are other implications as well. Do you want to shed some light on what
you think they may be? Yeah, you know, why I really
build Journey Track and it's why, you know, it's really about also
(09:17):
building a company. Right. There's, you know, where some people think of
customer experiences, maybe fluffy, nice to haves and, or like just, you know, something
to say to, to delight, you know, to, to have to say something out
there. The reality is, is there is financial implications,
right? And I don't, I know a lot of folks like to use some of
the sort of typical customer experience metrics such as Net
(09:38):
promoter score, customer satisfaction. But the reality is at the C
Suite, just, you know, just like I'm managing two companies, you really, you really
care about the financial impact, right? So you know that everyone knows
it, especially in this economy, that acquiring new customers is much more difficult than
it is. And obviously lo is going to cost you five
to seven times depending on how you're doing it. There's also data to
(10:01):
indicate companies that do care about their customers, their customer
lifetime value is like, you know, much higher. Forrester has some data around that, around
1.5, if I remember right. And so the amount, there's,
there's, there's real numbers that play into this. Right. And
so it's not just a soft science in that, oh, great, people feel better. No,
no, no. It's about where are you going to keep your customers and are they
(10:22):
going to be able to amplify your, your brand and your reputation, right.
Or, you know, diminish it. And so I always like to. And
part of what we do at Journey Track was try to tie those two things
together. And so there's always, you know, show at Visa vis Metrics if you have
that data. Some customers may not, you know, be a little bit more lower maturity
and they're not there yet, but they get there because the reality is, is what
(10:42):
keeps the C suite up is, you know, what is happening with
revenue, what is happening with cac, what is happening with lifetime value, customer,
lifetime value. Those are the things that are important. And so you have to, you
should care. If you want to really ensure that you continue
to be profitable, growing, you have to make sure your retention is there.
Right. And so, so, and that by in hand, we will increase
(11:04):
your profitability. So these are basics to it. But it's
sometimes the companies that are really customer
focused, customer obsessed, whatever word you want to use, they get this
right. Really, really work out where those areas are. Right. And in
doing so, there's quick ROI to it. And
that is much better than trying to,
(11:26):
you know, go out and try to, you know, look at other business opportunities
in certain ways or if you can fix what you have obviously, and, and
get, you know, customers to stay, that's better than retain them.
That's better than exploring other options. Because oftentimes I see a lot of companies and
I'm even talking the big, you know, sort of, they don't do enough of the
work up front to really do that. Right. And so they end up, it's,
(11:48):
it's a, it's a painful predicament when they need to correct
it, but yet they need to correct it. Otherwise there's brand impact to that.
So we're talking about, we just talked about
churn and understanding these
moments of truth which there may be pain points and then you also shared,
you know, kind of amplify those areas that are really important
(12:10):
in a good way. So potentially building
loyalty might be another benefit. Right? And
potentially, you know, an openness to
more, more, more of your offerings. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. I mean loyalty for me is not just discounts or rewards.
Loyalty is, comes from real value from, from them feeling they can
(12:32):
trust you from ease of use, not just the perks. Right. And so for sure,
yeah. So, so the evolution from roll
paper, craft paper, schlepping that around and post it
notes and so forth, tell us about how your organization,
your tool, your solution can help companies do
this in an efficient way. And a Way that isn't just
(12:54):
an event but ongoing how it can
provide actionable data, even
real time data that shifts very far away
from the soft fluffy feel of a arts and crafts project too.
This is really concrete stuff. How does that happen?
Yeah, I think, I think I like the way you started this
(13:17):
with the whole thinking around business process management. For those that went
through that era and did that, that was really key to
sort of leveling the business. Right. Well, I feel like
this, this journey management as a practice and it is to your point, a
new practice if you will. Even though customer journey mapping has been
around the idea of management is sort of near. Right. And so manage
(13:39):
it by. And I think we did, we were going to define it is really
not just saying here's the. And what's happening and what the customer. All the
sort of core journeys. It's really understanding where
the, where those breaks for are what actions and how you as
a business are going to prioritize that to help you understand like how
important this is for the customer. How important is this for the, the business. So
(14:00):
both looking at both those two different ways to look at it, you know, face
a base in doing so you basically have, you know, you're
able to, to really prioritize what's important. Right. And, and you
can, and very much you can decide I'm going to put the lens of the
customer, I'm going to put the lens of the business and in some
intersection there also based on effort and a couple other factors,
(14:21):
you're going to make decisions on what you think are predictive that's going to move
your especially if you have goals to continue increasing revenue and you know,
reduce losses and things like that. What it helps you do is really create
a strategy that you can track and trace it from any data that's
coming in from your business, whether it's qualitative in nature, quantitative nature
and really sort of pipe that into the actions that your, your
(14:43):
teams are doing to fix some of these if you will. If you will
opportunity, you know, opportunities within the business. It'll give you some, a
real measurable view of what that impact is over time. Right. And I think that's
the difference. Right. So in the old days people just assume map and then they,
everybody was just a piece of paper and some of the things got done, other
things didn't happen. Well now there's a way to really see if it's happening or
(15:03):
not. And that's, that's the first check mark. Next thing it's is it really Moving
the needle in any of our measures, whatever measures are important for you as a
business. So that's the next check mark, right? And then the third check mark
here is how can we look at all signals and triangulate that to see if
we're missing other areas? Because what I commonly see is
the, the friction points is when there's two different departments because
(15:25):
they're so siloed, especially in the enterprise, when they have to come
together and they didn't realize that one was doing this and the other one
was doing that. And those, those, even those conversations are
fun to watch because it's some basic things that no
one expects. So are you. I love, I
love that illustration of silos bumping
(15:46):
into each other. And my own experience with journey maps is
I remember I worked in a bank for a long time and
I remember someone in the deposit operations
side was in the same journey mapping session as
the head of the contact center and they were constantly finger
pointing at one another and the journey map
(16:09):
took it all from the customer's vantage point and their
eyes were open and got to see it for the first time and realized there
was a whole bunch of assumptions that were happening about the other side. It's sort
of a typical writing stories about other people. But the journey
map took it out of, you know, your fault, my fault,
and brought it and took a look at it from the customer's lens
(16:31):
and the silos broke down. I remember that gentleman,
his name was Pat and he said this was the most
productive day I've had here in 12 years. So does that story
resonate? CX
professionals know that every touch point matters, but managing
the entire customer journey can be challenging, especially for
(16:53):
enterprises due to disjointed data, difficulty aligning
stakeholders, and struggling to secure executive support.
That's where journey Track comes in. JourneyTrack integrates journey
mapping, management and measurement, allowing you to pinpoint
friction, optimize experiences and demonstrate the ROI
of CX initiatives. So you can align teams,
(17:16):
break down silos, and then you can track improvements in real
time. With JourneyTrack, you get visibility across every channel
and touchpoint. No more guesswork, just clear insights and
measurable results. Join the CX leaders who transform journeys
into improved experiences with impactful business outcomes
like reduced churn and increased customer lifetime
(17:38):
value. Visit JourneyTrack IO today and see
how better journeys lead to better business.
That's exactly what happens day to day. That's why we built in the whole
workshop feature as an important that's we're the only one that has that
differentiator because we know those conversations,
(18:00):
what people think think is happening and what's really happening are
just, just they're eye opening. And it's always, I mean
I literally, I, I kind of smiled when you said this because I literally, this
conversation happened with a bank not like two weeks ago. They literally
had, they thought, just in general, they, they, they
had their cards, they, they thought it was a different phone number on
(18:22):
it. And they realized that one other, one other group was getting those calls
and they were like, no, that's not the number on it. And someone said let's
go get the onboarding part and let's look at what it looks
like. And yeah, those are big. You have a moment where
the president says what just happened? How did we do this? How did we drop
this so badly? No wonder people are having a hard time onboarding. And that's new.
(18:44):
Onboarding is one of the biggest friction points in financial services, as you probably know.
And so that's where you need to make sure you don't mess
it up. As simple as a number. This is the
funny thing, this is the irony of it and going through a process like
this. I want to hear, as soon as I'm done talking, I want to hear
more about that feature that you said nobody else has and how it works.
(19:05):
But you know, this kind of, it's a number. I mean
we had something, the change of address process.
When a customer wants to change their address, they wanted to do a journey map
just for that process. And I'm like, are you sure that's going to be enough
content for a journey mapping workshop? And they said,
oh yeah. Because when a customer wants to change their address, there's at least five
(19:27):
different channels they can go through to do that. And then
there's a whole bunch of regulations around like if it's a spouse, if
it's a joint account, you know, it could be a soon to be ex
spouse and they don't want the address change where the bank statements go.
Right. So there's all sorts of regulations around that. And it became a whole journey
mapping session. Part of the journey mapping management
(19:49):
strategy, but a session. And one of the things that
you mentioned, and I think I heard you mention this the, at the beginning of
the show or early on in the show was when you go through this process,
while it sounds soft, touchy feely, it is. There's really
concrete results and we can reduce churn, but if you
are a leader of UNSC suite listening to this, you
(20:12):
need to know that when you go through this, I can promise you and you
can verify this and validate me on this if it's true, Anya. But
I can promise you that there will be low hanging fruit, there will be quick
wins that do not cost the organization a lot of money to fix
and will build momentum. What's been your experience for sure?
100%. You know, there's some simple things that
(20:34):
happen in these conversations that moves a needle like
by so much sometimes surprisingly so. You know,
if you, if you end up looking this, this sort of just the whole
sort of birth of it, you'll probably see an example that was done with GE
Healthcare and Stanford School. I was actually. They
were a customer of us in those years. Right. And the whole like, you
(20:56):
know, everyone's scared of going into an MRI machine. It's you know,
scary the whole journey that's used in that experience. That
example was around little kid going into the, the
MRI machine and sort of all that anxiety that happens. Right. And quite
frankly the solution was just stickers. Making it look like it's like, you
know, we need the pool in or. Cars or whatever, campfire,
(21:18):
campgrounds, campfire. And then give them a little backpack and do
stuff to like really alleviate quite frankly has some real, you
know, high impact. You know, the kids, you know, the likely them to be, you
know, having to take drugs will sort of minimize, you know, the ability
for them to stay engaged will be in there. It makes it fun. I mean
simple tiny things. And this is a well known example. But I'm just
(21:39):
using this kind of showcase how
simple stickers can change a whole process. Right. And that to
me is sort of the epitome of how, how simple some of these solutions are.
But at the end of the story it's, it's those tiny things. Just like everything
in life, there's those tiny things that just do sometimes miracles. And it's when
you pull together and you really just start, you know, thinking about what is
(22:01):
potential simple solutions to this. You'd be surprised how, how
much teams can come up with like low risk, low cost
fixes that really just make, you know, huge differences. Let me double
click on what you said earlier about the unique tool feature
that your program or your tool offers. Yeah, yeah.
So we, we, you know, traditionally this work, you know, to your point is done
(22:24):
with a bunch of sticky notes and you probably everybody in this call has probably
at one point been in some workshop of sorts. When, when we were doing that
work with my first company. That's, that's a huge engagement That's a lot of time
and money and strategic money that this is huge to get all these executives,
60 executives in the room to run these workshops over X number of
days. And at the end of the story, you know, they need, they need a
(22:45):
way to synthesize. All right, so as we built this, we're like, listen, there's different
ways that you can bring in what's happen. You can bring in,
you know, all the data you have qualitative, quantitative, and use what's called journey
AI. That's one way. But the way that customers typically do this is
because there's data everywhere and data nowhere at the same time.
They, they run workshops and, and during COVID
(23:07):
you know, many companies then had to move to like the digital whiteboard kind of
solutions because there was no way to do that. The challenge you have with that
is it's still the same problem. You get done with that workshop and what do
you have to show for it now? Somebody has to translate everything that happened to
go to the next. So having an experience and live that and really just
wanted to capture was really happening and not, you know, we
(23:29):
created a feature right at the beginning which was like, run your workshop just like
you would right within the tool and literally at the click of the button. And
it creates that baseline journey, which is based on what everyone talked about it. And
there's. What's neat about it is there's voting capability. So you can, as a team,
you can, you can do the typical, like, you know, in the past you used
to put like, you know, similar themed.
Yeah, it's on one side and the other. And you
(23:52):
create what the topic, you know, theme was that that's called affinity mapping, if you
want to work out a little bit. But that is, you know, what a lot
of the consultants do. Right. To basically get that baseline journey. Because the reality
is, is, you know, even in the largest companies that you think that they
really get data, they. It's just there's so many different interpretations of
what's happening. Right. So that baseline journey of what everybody think is happening is so
(24:14):
important to capture it, because then you can validate it. Is this really what's happening?
And we have this feature, we built the whole jobs to be done framework, which
for those that don't know what that is, is like how. How important
is. Is this whatever point of the experience to your customer
and how satisfied they are. And so what we did during the workshop, part of
it we have like what we call a presumptive, like what we think the team
(24:35):
thinks how important do they think it's their customers and how, how, how
satisfied do they think? Right. And it's always interesting to see that, you know,
vis a vis, when we, when we, when we, when we track it, because we
give them both, as time passes, what the team thought versus what
is really happening. Because when you do this work, you really want to
focus on things that have, like, that have high dissatisfaction. Like
(24:57):
people are not satisfied but are super important. Right. So there's a little bit of
a triangle. They call this an opportunity triangle. Oftentimes
we'll see that you know what you know, and it works. If this is to
your point of what things are, people get, get really off. People
think this is not important. And for customers it's something very important. And the
things that they feel is, in that the customers feel like it's that
(25:19):
not important. You know, someone internally thinks it's super important. And granted
there's, there's going to be times you're going to have to make a decision for
a business because maybe there's something that you are seeing. Obviously your customers are only
seeing so they're like they're reacting to whatever you're building. So we find that sometimes
you're going to have to say, well, this is important for the business because this
is a strategic, you know, sort of step into this direction we're going to go.
And that's okay. But where it gets interesting is where they totally
(25:42):
miss it because they just thought it wasn't important or they thought it was super
important and it's not important at all to customers. And those are fun points of
those conversations, those productive days where you're like, wow, this is so
interesting days. So, yeah, I mean, what you're
describing reminds me of like the analogy of me out
in my front yard trying to plant a
(26:04):
tree and using a spade, shovel and a traditional
shovel and digging away. And if you haven't dug in a while,
the older you get, the harder it is. But then someone comes along with one
of these bobcats with the front loader on it
and can literally dig the hole in a matter of seconds.
And so planting the tree becomes a fun event when you know you've got that
(26:25):
looking in front of you. And I think that's a difference between the way
we used to do it and now what you've got with your
tool being able to not have to recreate the whole baseline
of the journey map, but you can do it with a click as an example.
And the other thing, for those listening now Back to the strategic side of it
is I remember having Jason Barrow from NPS Prison from
(26:48):
Bain on the show early on and he talked about the ability
to have to know which levers to pull, know which
levers to push and how far to pull or push them. And
this is what your tool can help really in many ways
automate. Right? Yeah, it does. It's exactly
right. And just understanding what if I, if I pull this one. What
(27:10):
historically has happened and what do we do in this case? Like what should we
think about when we're doing these changes? Is that proactive sort of
using data to basically, you know, help you decide and
really pull it. It was very different in the days that, you know, when
we were just doing. Even for those companies are still using whiteboards, you really
can't action on that. You can't do anything. That's the difference between just
(27:33):
doing a simple journey map. And you know, I find it, find it
interesting because I don't, you know, I find one of the things that
I think that I've seen more as I've you know,
been working with a lot more of just both US based and
internationally based companies. Right. It's
really like how important is really
(27:54):
identifying where those areas are for a
customer to really pull in. And, and honestly what I've,
I've noticed is in, you know, there's what I've seen
anyways in the US from a maturity perspective in this practice,
there's still a thinking at some levels that this is a one in, you know,
one kind of year kind of thing. Right. And it's, it's that the practice of
(28:16):
continuously doing this work and really having a tool that lets you
continuously look at this, okay, we're making these strategic changes. It's not this
one and done kind of annual event that we do and
then just kind of set it and forget it. It's really that proactive like let's
see what happens if we do do this shift. Now we've seen these, these outcomes
of based on these actions we took, what is that going to take us to
(28:38):
the next level? I mean a lot of part of getting decisions made,
which is a big part of what I try to help CX professionals with is
getting executive buy in is making it simple and easy for
them to understand what the problem is that we're trying to
solve. And what you're describing there really does
not just for the C suite but for other levels as well provide
(29:00):
those sort of insights that then you can take action on. And it's not Just
a gut feel or putting your finger in the air, but
you've got some solid data that's
triangulated, as you said, that you can then act on with
a certain level of confidence. For sure. We talked about several
different strategies. There's one more that I'd like to kind of end on,
(29:23):
and that is if you don't have a journey mapping
strategy, if you're listening to this and you haven't in
your organization, but haven't done it, but you really like to bring it in,
what are some. What's the steps that they should be thinking about
going through to fully integrate journey
mapping, journey management into their organization?
(29:45):
Yeah, I like to. I guess the
first point of this is understanding. You know, what I've seen most
successfully work is that, you know, there's small groups. It's almost like a small.
And I've seen it, I've seen it happen where there's like 15 people around the
globe. If it's a huge Fortune 500, and that's big because it's a different brands
maybe playing into this, but really sort of pull together almost a small
(30:07):
team depending on the size of the company. What is that? You know, that turns
into that for you, but it's really starting. It starts with just
dipping your foot and just even doing the basic. To me, that's
workshopping has become sort of super important because they all. Some of this
early customers, they will, they'll do is run a lot of workshops because they want
to at least get a baseline of what, what is happening, what they think is
(30:27):
happening. Right. And so that is a simple way and we've
made it so simple for anyone to do that. I think that's why it's been.
We have customers, all they do is run workshops. That's all they do. They don't
even like they run baselines and they just. Because quite
frankly, depending on your size of your business. But we see
that customers in the year one, especially at an enterprise, which
(30:49):
is our typical customer, they're going to create anywhere from like, you know,
60 to like 90 journeys in their first year. And
so sometimes they want to go, you know, sort of breath. I tend to want
them to go like narrow and just really get an ROI case going
for their business. But sometimes that
there's so much excitement that happens, I'm like, wow. We can at least, you know,
(31:11):
create a baseline and at least then we can connect data to it and see
what's happening. There's different ways to do this, but I tend, I'm of the school
of thought that you start small and then you build from it. Right. And so
if I was, if I was just starting, I would create a, you know, create
a, create a small, you know, working group
that's going to do this and then really just, just identify, you
(31:31):
know, sort of the, the top. In our tool, we have templates for
you to start. Right. So that, that's another way to get going. Right. Or quite
frankly, it's bringing in data. Right. So like pull in
a couple of customer interviews that's been done through your teams, through your
sales, through research, whatever you want. And then like create that baseline and
start validating that and understanding is this really what's happening, what's not
(31:54):
happening? Right. And so there's like, yeah, those three ways either start
from a template, you start from a workshop, or you start from your data
and then you continue to build on that.
Yeah, great, great first steps. Great way to get started.
It's been a fascinating conversation. I know we're going to have more of them
this year with you. So grateful for that. But before we
(32:16):
sign off, one final question, which I asked all my guests
now, which is what delights you as a
customer? Yeah, I just said I like, I like to start small. I like little
things. So to me, those little personal touches, like those little, you
know, you don't have to do a lot for me, you just give me the
smallest things and I'm happy. Right. For me, I don't need a lot. I don't.
I'm not one of those people that I get feels like they need to like,
(32:39):
be showing. So it's those little personal touches you call
me through, you know, my birthday. It's silly, right? You call me my birthday or
you if I get there. Like the other days I went, it was my birthday
here in February. So that's why it's sort of really happy birthday. Yeah. And we
went to dinner and it had my name printed on the menu. I'm like, I
know that a lot of people do that, but I always find it so, like
(32:59):
such a daring kind of thing. It's like, oh, they printed something for me. It's
silly. It's those personal touches. And I,
yeah, I, I really pull to those kinds of
differentiation experiences. Well. And I
don't think it's a little thing. I think it's a really important thing to make
it personal. And I'm sure that is a solution that would come out. A lot
(33:21):
of journey mapping sessions is to make, to amplify this
particular point. You know, it could be on the plus side
where it's something they love and they want more of, or it could be on
the negative side when they feel like a number and they feel like they're being
ignored. And you could do something to make that special. So what a great, what
a great tip. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for being
(33:42):
on the show and for being a sponsor, a new sponsor of
our show. If somebody wanted to, first of all, if
somebody wanted to get a hold of you will be the best way. And then
do you offer either a demo or a consult that they could
have to get, get more information? Yeah, for sure. You
know, I can be reached either via LinkedIn or even just
(34:04):
writing to salesurneytrackIO even though I don't do
day to day sales, I get those emails. So we know who's in. But if
you. Yeah, for sure. On the website on JourneyTrack IO, you can sign up
for a demo, I'm happy to show you. For customers that need
to kind of play with it, there's a 30 day free version that you can
get on, which is really great if you're just trying to dip your toes and
(34:25):
understand what this is for. And then I'm happy to have one of someone on
my team walk you through a more extensive demo. And
we also have a couple of partnerships with a couple of folks who do different
trainings and so if you're just new and trying to get in,
happy to help you and get that going. Excellent. Anya,
thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you, Mark for having me. It's
(34:46):
always fun talking to you. I
hope you enjoyed this episode of the Delighted Customers podcast. It
would mean so much if you would take a moment to subscribe. You can go
to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to
podcasts. Click on the plus sign or follow button and that will ensure
that you don't miss an episode and it helps get the word out to
(35:08):
others. While you're there, I'd love it if you leave a five star
review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday.
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