October 9, 2025 • 23 mins
What’s stopping CX leaders from turning mountains of customer data into executive-ready stories that prompt real change?
In this episode, we dig deep into one of the most urgent—and often overlooked—challenges for customer experience (CX) teams: crafting compelling, actionable narratives from all that customer insight. Data is everywhere, but too often the dots just don’t get connected in a way that the C-suite cares about. The difference between a statistic and a strategic priority? It’s all in the storytelling. In my conversation with Ania Rodriguez, CEO of JourneyTrack, we explore the tools, techniques, and mindsets you need to bridge that gap—and the game-changing role that AI-driven storytelling is playing right now in CX strategy.
If you’re a CX practitioner, product leader, or anyone tasked with influencing business outcomes through customer insight, you’ll want to hear directly from Ania. Her twenty-five years in the field, expertise in journey mapping, and insider knowledge on harnessing technology for business storytelling makes this episode essential listening. Whether you’re tired of your insights landing with a thud—or want to lead boardroom conversations that spark action—Ania’s guidance is practical, forward-looking, and instantly applicable.
Here are three questions Ania answers in this episode:
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Why do even seasoned leaders struggle to translate customer data into executive-friendly narratives?
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How does JourneyTrack’s Storytelling AI automate the process of building empathy and urgency for C-suite presentations?
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What are the crucial integrations and data strategies for making journey management systems truly enterprise-ready—and how can you put them to work right away?
Ready to supercharge your customer storytelling and move your executive team from data fatigue to decisive action? Listen now and subscribe so you never miss an episode:
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Spotify You’ll also find us on all your favorite podcast platforms!
Meet Ania Rodriguez
Ania Rodriguez is the CEO and founder of JourneyTrack, a pioneering journey management platform designed for enterprise-scale CX storytelling. With more than 25 years of experience, Ania has led transformational customer experience initiatives for some of the world’s most recognizable brands—including Google, where JourneyTrack first launched. She is also the founder and CEO of Key Lime Interactive, a renowned CX consultancy known for its expertise in journey mapping, research, and strategy.
Ania’s leadership style blends human-centered design with data-driven rigor, and she has a longstanding reputation for coaching executives and teams on turning insights into action. She was among the earliest to bring AI-powered capabilities—like Storytelling AI and Recommendation AI—to journey management, ensuring that organizations can not only aggregate data from diverse sources (like Jira, Qualtrics, Medallia, Snowflake, and more) but can also deliver that information as compelling, actionable presentations tailored to any audience.
Connect with Ania Rodriguez on LinkedIn
Show Notes & References
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“Using Storytelling Playbooks to Supercharge Journey Management” (White Paper): https://bit.ly/47gE1xE
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JourneyTrack platform: https://journeytrack.io/
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LinkedIn: Ania Rodriguez
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"Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath (Velcro theory of memory): https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/
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Integration partners referenced: Jira, Qualtrics, Medallia, Snowflake, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics
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Forrester on Journey Management (industry wave publication): https://www.forreste
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Well, I am so excited to have back on my show Anya
Rodriguez, the CEO of Journey Track. Anya, welcome back to the
show. Pleasure to be here. Mark, thank you so much for having me again. My
pleasure. And today I'm really excited because we're going to talk about
one of the things that CX leaders tend to struggle with
and that is translating insights into executive
(00:23):
ready presentations. That is taking all this information like
there's no shortage of data. That's never been the issue.
The issue is how do I convert that into something that the executive
team sees as valuable? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I
think it's one of the hardest skills that people don't master easily. Yeah.
And I think one of the great things about having a tool
(00:46):
like JourneyTrack, which takes the
customer's journey and gives everybody a chance to view it
with a visual map of what the customer's
going through. That's living, active, breathing, connects the
dots between different touch points in the customer journey and can
actually, if it's set up, can actually have data and numbers built
(01:08):
into it and can be shared across the enterprise. But
while that's terrific and way ahead of where we used to be with
the sticky notes and bringing roll paper to
a meeting and scotch taping it onto a wall, it still
doesn't necessarily capture the attention of the C
suite. Could you help describe why this is big deal
(01:30):
and why it should be something that's top of mind for leaders in
general? So JourneyTrack has been now around for a little over four years.
Right. In the four years right when we started, we started, we launched with 15
enterprises, big companies. Among them was Google as our
core sort of set of customers. And so we've been able to
observe over time sort of some, you know, some, some
(01:52):
opportunity areas, green space areas where people weren't, you know,
the data to its fullest potential. Right. And so in our conversations
over the last year with customers and even with new prospects, people
who are leaving our competitors, part of the challenge had has been,
I think is as this new movement of tools to really at least have
like one central place where all that customer strategy
(02:15):
lives and customer data lives. You
know, there had to be a better way to pull things out and
people would spend a lot of time making sure that
everything's in and using that to start to create presentations.
But then that heavy lift was happening. Just like one of the things
that we did early on was create the workshop feature so you could just kind
(02:37):
of at a click of a button, run them and put them in we wanted
to do the flip on the other side, which is like, hey, you don't have
all this data in here, you've been collecting it. We integrate with
a lot of different systems of records. Your, we have all that data. The biggest
challenge people do is when they get asked, hey, I need you to create a
presentation about, you know, these, this, the end to end experience
on XYZ or you know, whatever it is and so on
(03:00):
in the mortgage process or, you know, I don't know, in healthcare, clinical
trial, you know, in pharma, clinical trial process. And what is that experience
like for a patient, etc. Etc. So oftentimes people then really
struggle there because then it was like piece like trying to pull together that story
was just painful for them. And I just, you know, I coached a bunch.
And we're talking not just like junior people, we're talking about executives who just really
(03:22):
even struggle with that, right? Telling the story to their C suite, their
boardroom, of what the outcomes of the work
that their team had been doing is sort of coming down to and why they
needed to get this additional funding. And so that's how storytelling AI
was born, right? What it does and what it helps people do is
it creates PowerPoint, right? That basically allow. That
(03:45):
basically tells a story. And you define the audience, you say, hey,
I need. This is for Mark. He's a swell guy, you know, he's
smart, he's a numbers guy and he's. But he's charismatic and you
gotta like, you know, tell him stories, whatever it is, you know. And
so you define a little bit of that sort of who that reader is, that
Persona for the reader, who's your stakeholder, if you will.
(04:07):
And then maybe, you know, you, Mark, might like some additional industry
best practices benchmarks, I don't know, some other data, you know,
they could upload new data that's not already in there. They may already have that.
And so that might help them with like, here's the financial reports, here's
this, here's that, like here's our annual report. This is like his
last document to the team, et cetera. So it's written their style,
(04:30):
which is great. Then what the system will do, it'll go through and like it'll
create a PowerPoint that starts with building empathy, right? Saying, you know, here's,
here's the story of who is affected by these, you know, by this specific
blips and mortgage, let's say journey, if you will. And because of
it, we're, we're having whatever 40% drop in completion
of mortgage applications. That amounts to XYZ
(04:52):
revenue for our possibility. And there's some real
pains here. So it starts with that story to tell and then critical points
where maybe there's too much information being asked or something's happening, breaking down,
they know about it, it's documented, there's research to back it up,
competitive assessments, whatever it is you've done as a business and now
you're trying to move that forward. Right? And so, so it goes
(05:14):
through that. It says here's the pains in the journey, here's
like, here's the reasons why this is just goes beyond this
Persona and this is what the impact to the business is like. Here's how much
it does and you know, obviously this is based on what's in your, what you've
put into Journey track. It doesn't lose, it doesn't add new data, it doesn't create
data for you. We've done a lot of testing to our best of our ability.
(05:35):
Of course we, there's always edge cases but like you know, you know,
you know obviously we want to be able to create trust to the folks using
our systems. Right. And so net net it'll do that.
And then I'll say here's the recommendations you already have in play and this is
the prioritization, this is why because it has maybe like a high
customer value and a high business value and they're like effort is low
(05:56):
and so here's some initial low hanging fruit and here's some secondary things
and here's the plan low, you know, short term strategy, long term strategy
and then it ends the story with like hey, this isn't just the story of
just one guy or you know, one set of people. This is like again the
cost of not doing is this, this is what the impact of you not doing
this. So it kind of, you know, obviously every presentation is different but that's the
(06:18):
cadence it kind of goes through and just making sure that it
creates that empathy arc to like you know, act now. Because act now
is there's some, some stuff and it helps them get started. It's
by no means is it supposed to be the final presentation but from there you
can take it and like least have guardrails and a little bit of kind of
like the end marks of where you want to tell the story and then add
(06:39):
pictures and make it more, you know, you put it into your own template. Obviously
most people do. Right now it's just in a generic journey Track kind of
template. But you would obviously Change it to yours and kind of move from there.
You know, I love that. Wow. There is just a lot to unpack on what
you just shared. So so many points of help
there for a leader who's trying to make an impact. Even
(07:01):
all the way to spoon feeding them with the PowerPoint
presentation kind of template built for them.
I want to read from something that you and
your organization had shared in a paper which is
going to be in the Show Notes, called Using Storytelling
Playbooks to Supercharge Journey Management. We'll provide you with
(07:23):
access to that in the Show Notes. But what you said was Journey
Map. Journey Management thrives on data interactions,
metrics, KPIs. But data doesn't inspire
action on its own. Stories do. And you said when
a CX team simply presents 29% of customers
drop off after onboarding. It's a statistic when they pair it with
(07:45):
a narrative. Maya, A new customer signed up with
excitement but felt lost navigating the dashboard and gave up.
After two frustrating attempts, the problem becomes visceral
and the need for change becomes urgent. Yeah,
you know, we find obviously this is, you know, stories have been
telling since the beginning of time. Right. And so,
(08:08):
but it takes an art to tell the story so that
executives kind of understand the impact of no action. Right.
You do still have the executives that are very much like, start with the numbers,
you know, forget the story. And that's okay too because we can, we can work
with that too. But what, you know, those in the room remember as like, hey,
remember this story. And so obviously, you know, our customers
(08:29):
sometimes layer in some, you know, some additional things to tell that.
But yeah, the power of a story is it
really, it really plays to their
memory of the gravity of the situation. Yeah. And I think that, I
mean, when you talk about storytelling and why you.
So you said what they remember. It reminded me of the book Made to Stick
(08:52):
by the Heath brothers where they talk about this Velcro theory of
memory, which is like our memory is full of
hooks and loops and there's lot, the logical side and the emotional
side. And when you tell a story, you connect the two sides of the
brain so that it creates this sticky Velcro
type memory that we have of the experience. So to the
(09:14):
extent that the tool can help
us with the storytelling piece, that's magic.
Yeah, the, you know, the, the, the hook and
sort of that Velcro and the Velcro theory of memory, if you will, that
metaphor, it's so powerful. Right. I just,
you know, I think that when you Think about like the broader
(09:36):
frameworks around that too. And sometimes people use success model, I
don't know if you've heard of that. Which is full, unexpected, concrete, credible,
emotional stories if you will. It's just, it really
shifts, it really shows and I've seen it really play in. I had
a client one time that, that had their team bring
in like an executive training around this and it
(09:58):
shifted the whole like the way that they started to put together
presentations and it was amazing to see. Honestly that's the first time I was exposed
to this. I mean it's been whatever 10 plus years, but it's, it's interesting.
I always find it really inspiring and I always share with clients, hey, you might
want to think about this if you're struggling in this area. So Anya,
let's just say starting out and I
(10:20):
have acquired the journey mapping tool, Journey track tool
and explain to me how I'm going to create end
up with a story at the end. So am I adding in information from
other sources like how does that work? Yeah, so. So the
basis of this new category of tools, right?
It's newer, right. Forrester is going to. Is basically putting together the first
(10:43):
wave on what now is termed journey management. There used to be what, you
know, the typical journey mapping tools oftentimes people during.
Right after Covid started to your point. It was stickies before then Covid happened.
We all went to Mural or figjam or some version of that, right.
To create this digital whiteboard spaces. Confluence has a
one too within jira. The whole point there was to move to something
(11:05):
where people can interact and vote and understand that journey. Well
as these new tools were born according us right around that time
the thinking there and we were the first to sort of do this. We were
the first to put in JIRA integration, right? We thought like hey, people
are. They're going to have actions and results of the work, right.
I have, I own an all consultancy that's pretty large called Key Lime Interactive. And
(11:28):
we had been working with a lot of clients over the last whatever at that
point, you know, 15, whatever, 12 years and whatever it is
and change now it's been 16. But the whole point was like we, we
need a place where not only like we need to be able to structure this
because at. At scale there's no way to scale like the, the
mirror boards and like the figjam. It just, it's constantly going to get outdated
(11:49):
and then we gotta be able to track things, right? We gotta be able to
track, to see things. So at the very, very preliminary thing, it was like, let's
create a structured way to create this so that people can connect it, they can
create micro journeys from it. They can like look at that whole. It's not just
one thing sitting here in one workspace and another one over there and another one
over here. They're now all connected. You can kind of pull it together. Because
(12:09):
oftentimes what we see is that there's a lot of disjointed moment of truce
that happen between phases, between teams that are
interacting. So if people only own parts of the journey, it really
breaks down. That's why we as customers experience a really poor experience.
Right. And that sort of is oftentimes where the breaks
happen. Right. So we wanted some more of that. They can, you know, that styloism
(12:31):
would sort of reduce itself where we can have one place. And we started with
Jira. We said we want to do that, that's part of the core functions.
And that really started to build that. And that literally was like at the beginning
of this whole thing. From there we're like, okay, we want to bring in other
data, voice of customer data, right? We want to be able to start tying
metrics. So those types of data. As we did Qualtrics, we have Medallion, now
(12:53):
we have Forster and we have others coming in too now. And then we
said, okay, well that's great. Now the next level of this is
we want to add in maybe some operational financial data.
Okay, let's do this in Snowflake integration. And that's sort of the next level.
Okay. And by the way, all along this we always had pointers. Even if you
didn't have the data integrated, we had pointers to things like Power,
(13:15):
Bi Tableau, the Figma, you know,
designs and maybe some videos is around YouTube. So we have like
about 15 simple integrations that are like at least give you awareness that
there's data over there that's relevant to this journey. Right. So it's like a
little iframe. It gives you a preview, but it doesn't actually bring in the data.
All of us do the same thing. It's not something that's unique to just us.
(13:37):
That's the way, like we can handle simple integrations. But the more complex two
way integrations became a jira, became the VOC stuff. So we're
pulling data. You tell us what cadence you want us to pull that data. Maybe
it's hourly, maybe it's daily, maybe whatever it is when you open it up and
then, and then Snowflake came in and now analytics is coming in. So like, you
know, Adobe analytics and Google Analytics really is sort of the initial
(13:58):
prompt of that so that we can bring in some of that data as well.
And then obviously along the way, we were also early to bring in
some AI assistance. Like from the beginning we had the recommendation AI.
So that was an early version of things. But now as times progress, this is
how we get along. Right. We continue to build out. So storytelling AI
was that as people just had data and data and data in there, they
(14:20):
were having a hard time like pulling together. And we hear
oftentimes, oh, you know, you hear a lot of people say, oh, they got to
learn how to read the financials for them to be able to tell
the ROI story. And some people just don't get that. And
honestly, even if they did, they just wouldn't be able to articulate it because it's
not the way they think. And so we wanted to give them a way to
get to that ROI story without having to do that. Right. Oftentimes
(14:44):
this is the kind of stuff that my consultancy would do. It's amazing what this
tool now can do and what AI can assist with. Right. And so we wanted
to do that and create a lot more value because if otherwise it just sits
as a repository and that's not what we, we are intending. Right. And as we
move from like AI assisted to agentic, where we're going to have even more
scalability. Right. That's sort of the bigger next play. We want to make
(15:04):
sure that it makes it easy for people to not have to do
to not to updates. It becomes a lot more autonomous.
So really it takes a look at the whole ecosystem.
Yeah. Of the customer. And it's looking at data from all these
different sources that begin to tell the story of, of the
customer's lives. So you're not just looking at either
(15:26):
this is where customers are falling off, or this is the percentage of
customers that are falling off after onboarding, but
that this is the story of their lives. This is what we know about
them. Here's a quote from Erica, who
is typical of someone going through this particular friction point.
And this is the risk to the organization. This is the
(15:49):
risk in terms of churn. This is the risk in terms of no revenue
at risk. Exactly. There's.
Exactly. So you're translating everyday
life and the life of the customer into business
outcomes that the C Suite really cares about, Right? Exactly.
Every industry is losing customers. They're trying to figure out how to not lose
(16:12):
customers. And in this economy they want to figure out that's even more
important than ever. Right. So how to retain things. But even getting them to start
from an early on that experience is important, right? Because some
sometimes like you know, SaaS companies, for example, if they don't, if they don't deliver
a great experience in the first, I think it was like 90 days, like
people tend to leave like 60% as I think is the stat. So
(16:34):
there's a lot of opportunity there and that's, that's painful to go through getting a
customer and then like losing them, you know, in the first 90 days because you've
had really poor onboarding or usage is bad or whatever it is. And we work
with some SaaS companies, companies, pretty large ones that have really big problems like
that. Well, so if somebody, what's next? If
somebody was interested in and
(16:55):
having this tool and being able to tell the story of their
customers lives to their executive team and get the leverage,
the PowerPoint that it, that it generates for you, what would
be the next step? Yeah, I mean I think for us it's, you know, if
you go to our website you can request a little more of a demo, right.
So for us there's an easy way to set up a time. There's a free
(17:16):
basic one, it does not include storytelling in it. So it's, you'll have to
kind of connect with us to see that in action, if you will. We
do have links to like little videos of how it works and so if you're
interested in just looking at it that way and that's enough. But if you want
to try it, we have, you know, different trial and pilot programs that we
can have you be part of and of course we'll welcome you as a customer
(17:37):
to if that's what you want to move forward. If you find. We have customers
that never even go through pilots or trials because of it's going to take
them just as long to do that and then to just get going. And so
teams are like, yep, we set up their demo to be exactly their data in
there. And then they, and they're like, yep, that looks exactly like what we would
have done. Okay, that looks good, let's move forward. And that happens at the big,
big, big ones. But not always, but it's sometimes there and it's interesting and
(18:01):
it's worked fine for us with, you know, with our retention
year over year. But people get in there and they see this. I will tell
you this, this specific feature is really a game and I
hate to use game Changer, because it's such a, like overused word, but like it
is. I really feel I've been,
I've been doing this work for nearly 25 years, I think now.
(18:22):
And I have seen and I've managed teams of
100 plus easily. Right. So my other team is 70. I used to
manage at IBM. I've seen a lot of things and I just. This is
interesting because this shifts the dynamics. It's amazing,
guys. It's so, I'm so like, still, like, honestly, it's, it's
moving fast. That's the thing. What's interesting, as a technologist and engineer at
(18:44):
heart and sort of, you know, went to school for engineering, I
never would imagine that we would be moving this quickly right now. The things you
can do quickly. It's so life like, it's, it's, it's so phenomenal
moving quickly. But at the same time, we've got to make those connections emotionally
to leadership. And what a tool, what a great assist
for leaders who are trying to make that impact. Yeah, yeah. I think
(19:07):
always there's always got to be. For no matter how much we move with
technology, we're always going to have to connect that story. We're always going to have
to be the ones that really pulls together the
real strategic sort of impact conversation. We might get
assisted and get some ideas going and things like that. But I think
what we as humans are capable of is amazing. And I think that
(19:29):
we, we are a lot more knowledgeable of all these other things that, that, you
know, I think for now anyways, make us such great, you
know, people to, to really just tell the story. Excellent. Anya, thank you so
much. Again, this information will be available in the show notes. If you
haven't seen a demo of the tool, I've seen it. Incredibly
impressive. And with the ability to do storytelling, boy, it could just make
(19:51):
your life so much easier. If you're trying to make that impression on, on the
executive team, I'm going to add, we got to land the plane now. But I
want to ask you the same question I ask all my guests on the show
to end the show, which is what delights you as a customer. I'm a
small, but like, I'm, I'm all about small little things that you do.
I don't need big. I don't need big things. That's the nice thing. My
(20:13):
husband got me this little thing that I sit on. It sits on my
desk, which is like this little, little heart thing. And I just look at it
every day and that's sweet. It's not like, you know, I don't need this, like,
expensive jewelry. So I'm all about the little things. I'm a very little things
person. You make those little touch points and make me feel special and that's all
you need. Excellent. How sweet and romantic of your husband.
(20:34):
Yeah, he's good at that. That's why I knew he was a keeper. I
worked 20 something years ago now at this point, but, yeah,
excellent. Well, Anya, thanks so much for being a guest on the show. Thank you,
Mark, for having me. Have a lovely day, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
Well, I am so excited to have back on my show Anya
Rodriguez, the CEO of Journey Track. Anya, welcome back to the
show. Pleasure to be here. Mark, thank you so much for having me again. My
pleasure. And today I'm really excited because we're going to talk about
one of the things that CX leaders tend to struggle with
and that is translating insights into executive
(00:23):
ready presentations. That is taking all this information like
there's no shortage of data. That's never been the issue.
The issue is how do I convert that into something that the executive
team sees as valuable? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I
think it's one of the hardest skills that people don't master easily. Yeah.
And I think one of the great things about having a tool
(00:46):
like JourneyTrack, which takes the
customer's journey and gives everybody a chance to view it
with a visual map of what the customer's
going through. That's living, active, breathing, connects the
dots between different touch points in the customer journey and can
actually, if it's set up, can actually have data and numbers built
(01:08):
into it and can be shared across the enterprise. But
while that's terrific and way ahead of where we used to be with
the sticky notes and bringing roll paper to
a meeting and scotch taping it onto a wall, it still
doesn't necessarily capture the attention of the C
suite. Could you help describe why this is big deal
(01:30):
and why it should be something that's top of mind for leaders in
general? So JourneyTrack has been now around for a little over four years.
Right. In the four years right when we started, we started, we launched with 15
enterprises, big companies. Among them was Google as our
core sort of set of customers. And so we've been able to
observe over time sort of some, you know, some, some
(01:52):
opportunity areas, green space areas where people weren't, you know,
the data to its fullest potential. Right. And so in our conversations
over the last year with customers and even with new prospects, people
who are leaving our competitors, part of the challenge had has been,
I think is as this new movement of tools to really at least have
like one central place where all that customer strategy
(02:15):
lives and customer data lives. You
know, there had to be a better way to pull things out and
people would spend a lot of time making sure that
everything's in and using that to start to create presentations.
But then that heavy lift was happening. Just like one of the things
that we did early on was create the workshop feature so you could just kind
(02:37):
of at a click of a button, run them and put them in we wanted
to do the flip on the other side, which is like, hey, you don't have
all this data in here, you've been collecting it. We integrate with
a lot of different systems of records. Your, we have all that data. The biggest
challenge people do is when they get asked, hey, I need you to create a
presentation about, you know, these, this, the end to end experience
on XYZ or you know, whatever it is and so on
(03:00):
in the mortgage process or, you know, I don't know, in healthcare, clinical
trial, you know, in pharma, clinical trial process. And what is that experience
like for a patient, etc. Etc. So oftentimes people then really
struggle there because then it was like piece like trying to pull together that story
was just painful for them. And I just, you know, I coached a bunch.
And we're talking not just like junior people, we're talking about executives who just really
(03:22):
even struggle with that, right? Telling the story to their C suite, their
boardroom, of what the outcomes of the work
that their team had been doing is sort of coming down to and why they
needed to get this additional funding. And so that's how storytelling AI
was born, right? What it does and what it helps people do is
it creates PowerPoint, right? That basically allow. That
(03:45):
basically tells a story. And you define the audience, you say, hey,
I need. This is for Mark. He's a swell guy, you know, he's
smart, he's a numbers guy and he's. But he's charismatic and you
gotta like, you know, tell him stories, whatever it is, you know. And
so you define a little bit of that sort of who that reader is, that
Persona for the reader, who's your stakeholder, if you will.
(04:07):
And then maybe, you know, you, Mark, might like some additional industry
best practices benchmarks, I don't know, some other data, you know,
they could upload new data that's not already in there. They may already have that.
And so that might help them with like, here's the financial reports, here's
this, here's that, like here's our annual report. This is like his
last document to the team, et cetera. So it's written their style,
(04:30):
which is great. Then what the system will do, it'll go through and like it'll
create a PowerPoint that starts with building empathy, right? Saying, you know, here's,
here's the story of who is affected by these, you know, by this specific
blips and mortgage, let's say journey, if you will. And because of
it, we're, we're having whatever 40% drop in completion
of mortgage applications. That amounts to XYZ
(04:52):
revenue for our possibility. And there's some real
pains here. So it starts with that story to tell and then critical points
where maybe there's too much information being asked or something's happening, breaking down,
they know about it, it's documented, there's research to back it up,
competitive assessments, whatever it is you've done as a business and now
you're trying to move that forward. Right? And so, so it goes
(05:14):
through that. It says here's the pains in the journey, here's
like, here's the reasons why this is just goes beyond this
Persona and this is what the impact to the business is like. Here's how much
it does and you know, obviously this is based on what's in your, what you've
put into Journey track. It doesn't lose, it doesn't add new data, it doesn't create
data for you. We've done a lot of testing to our best of our ability.
(05:35):
Of course we, there's always edge cases but like you know, you know,
you know obviously we want to be able to create trust to the folks using
our systems. Right. And so net net it'll do that.
And then I'll say here's the recommendations you already have in play and this is
the prioritization, this is why because it has maybe like a high
customer value and a high business value and they're like effort is low
(05:56):
and so here's some initial low hanging fruit and here's some secondary things
and here's the plan low, you know, short term strategy, long term strategy
and then it ends the story with like hey, this isn't just the story of
just one guy or you know, one set of people. This is like again the
cost of not doing is this, this is what the impact of you not doing
this. So it kind of, you know, obviously every presentation is different but that's the
(06:18):
cadence it kind of goes through and just making sure that it
creates that empathy arc to like you know, act now. Because act now
is there's some, some stuff and it helps them get started. It's
by no means is it supposed to be the final presentation but from there you
can take it and like least have guardrails and a little bit of kind of
like the end marks of where you want to tell the story and then add
(06:39):
pictures and make it more, you know, you put it into your own template. Obviously
most people do. Right now it's just in a generic journey Track kind of
template. But you would obviously Change it to yours and kind of move from there.
You know, I love that. Wow. There is just a lot to unpack on what
you just shared. So so many points of help
there for a leader who's trying to make an impact. Even
(07:01):
all the way to spoon feeding them with the PowerPoint
presentation kind of template built for them.
I want to read from something that you and
your organization had shared in a paper which is
going to be in the Show Notes, called Using Storytelling
Playbooks to Supercharge Journey Management. We'll provide you with
(07:23):
access to that in the Show Notes. But what you said was Journey
Map. Journey Management thrives on data interactions,
metrics, KPIs. But data doesn't inspire
action on its own. Stories do. And you said when
a CX team simply presents 29% of customers
drop off after onboarding. It's a statistic when they pair it with
(07:45):
a narrative. Maya, A new customer signed up with
excitement but felt lost navigating the dashboard and gave up.
After two frustrating attempts, the problem becomes visceral
and the need for change becomes urgent. Yeah,
you know, we find obviously this is, you know, stories have been
telling since the beginning of time. Right. And so,
(08:08):
but it takes an art to tell the story so that
executives kind of understand the impact of no action. Right.
You do still have the executives that are very much like, start with the numbers,
you know, forget the story. And that's okay too because we can, we can work
with that too. But what, you know, those in the room remember as like, hey,
remember this story. And so obviously, you know, our customers
(08:29):
sometimes layer in some, you know, some additional things to tell that.
But yeah, the power of a story is it
really, it really plays to their
memory of the gravity of the situation. Yeah. And I think that, I
mean, when you talk about storytelling and why you.
So you said what they remember. It reminded me of the book Made to Stick
(08:52):
by the Heath brothers where they talk about this Velcro theory of
memory, which is like our memory is full of
hooks and loops and there's lot, the logical side and the emotional
side. And when you tell a story, you connect the two sides of the
brain so that it creates this sticky Velcro
type memory that we have of the experience. So to the
(09:14):
extent that the tool can help
us with the storytelling piece, that's magic.
Yeah, the, you know, the, the, the hook and
sort of that Velcro and the Velcro theory of memory, if you will, that
metaphor, it's so powerful. Right. I just,
you know, I think that when you Think about like the broader
(09:36):
frameworks around that too. And sometimes people use success model, I
don't know if you've heard of that. Which is full, unexpected, concrete, credible,
emotional stories if you will. It's just, it really
shifts, it really shows and I've seen it really play in. I had
a client one time that, that had their team bring
in like an executive training around this and it
(09:58):
shifted the whole like the way that they started to put together
presentations and it was amazing to see. Honestly that's the first time I was exposed
to this. I mean it's been whatever 10 plus years, but it's, it's interesting.
I always find it really inspiring and I always share with clients, hey, you might
want to think about this if you're struggling in this area. So Anya,
let's just say starting out and I
(10:20):
have acquired the journey mapping tool, Journey track tool
and explain to me how I'm going to create end
up with a story at the end. So am I adding in information from
other sources like how does that work? Yeah, so. So the
basis of this new category of tools, right?
It's newer, right. Forrester is going to. Is basically putting together the first
(10:43):
wave on what now is termed journey management. There used to be what, you
know, the typical journey mapping tools oftentimes people during.
Right after Covid started to your point. It was stickies before then Covid happened.
We all went to Mural or figjam or some version of that, right.
To create this digital whiteboard spaces. Confluence has a
one too within jira. The whole point there was to move to something
(11:05):
where people can interact and vote and understand that journey. Well
as these new tools were born according us right around that time
the thinking there and we were the first to sort of do this. We were
the first to put in JIRA integration, right? We thought like hey, people
are. They're going to have actions and results of the work, right.
I have, I own an all consultancy that's pretty large called Key Lime Interactive. And
(11:28):
we had been working with a lot of clients over the last whatever at that
point, you know, 15, whatever, 12 years and whatever it is
and change now it's been 16. But the whole point was like we, we
need a place where not only like we need to be able to structure this
because at. At scale there's no way to scale like the, the
mirror boards and like the figjam. It just, it's constantly going to get outdated
(11:49):
and then we gotta be able to track things, right? We gotta be able to
track, to see things. So at the very, very preliminary thing, it was like, let's
create a structured way to create this so that people can connect it, they can
create micro journeys from it. They can like look at that whole. It's not just
one thing sitting here in one workspace and another one over there and another one
over here. They're now all connected. You can kind of pull it together. Because
(12:09):
oftentimes what we see is that there's a lot of disjointed moment of truce
that happen between phases, between teams that are
interacting. So if people only own parts of the journey, it really
breaks down. That's why we as customers experience a really poor experience.
Right. And that sort of is oftentimes where the breaks
happen. Right. So we wanted some more of that. They can, you know, that styloism
(12:31):
would sort of reduce itself where we can have one place. And we started with
Jira. We said we want to do that, that's part of the core functions.
And that really started to build that. And that literally was like at the beginning
of this whole thing. From there we're like, okay, we want to bring in other
data, voice of customer data, right? We want to be able to start tying
metrics. So those types of data. As we did Qualtrics, we have Medallion, now
(12:53):
we have Forster and we have others coming in too now. And then we
said, okay, well that's great. Now the next level of this is
we want to add in maybe some operational financial data.
Okay, let's do this in Snowflake integration. And that's sort of the next level.
Okay. And by the way, all along this we always had pointers. Even if you
didn't have the data integrated, we had pointers to things like Power,
(13:15):
Bi Tableau, the Figma, you know,
designs and maybe some videos is around YouTube. So we have like
about 15 simple integrations that are like at least give you awareness that
there's data over there that's relevant to this journey. Right. So it's like a
little iframe. It gives you a preview, but it doesn't actually bring in the data.
All of us do the same thing. It's not something that's unique to just us.
(13:37):
That's the way, like we can handle simple integrations. But the more complex two
way integrations became a jira, became the VOC stuff. So we're
pulling data. You tell us what cadence you want us to pull that data. Maybe
it's hourly, maybe it's daily, maybe whatever it is when you open it up and
then, and then Snowflake came in and now analytics is coming in. So like, you
know, Adobe analytics and Google Analytics really is sort of the initial
(13:58):
prompt of that so that we can bring in some of that data as well.
And then obviously along the way, we were also early to bring in
some AI assistance. Like from the beginning we had the recommendation AI.
So that was an early version of things. But now as times progress, this is
how we get along. Right. We continue to build out. So storytelling AI
was that as people just had data and data and data in there, they
(14:20):
were having a hard time like pulling together. And we hear
oftentimes, oh, you know, you hear a lot of people say, oh, they got to
learn how to read the financials for them to be able to tell
the ROI story. And some people just don't get that. And
honestly, even if they did, they just wouldn't be able to articulate it because it's
not the way they think. And so we wanted to give them a way to
get to that ROI story without having to do that. Right. Oftentimes
(14:44):
this is the kind of stuff that my consultancy would do. It's amazing what this
tool now can do and what AI can assist with. Right. And so we wanted
to do that and create a lot more value because if otherwise it just sits
as a repository and that's not what we, we are intending. Right. And as we
move from like AI assisted to agentic, where we're going to have even more
scalability. Right. That's sort of the bigger next play. We want to make
(15:04):
sure that it makes it easy for people to not have to do
to not to updates. It becomes a lot more autonomous.
So really it takes a look at the whole ecosystem.
Yeah. Of the customer. And it's looking at data from all these
different sources that begin to tell the story of, of the
customer's lives. So you're not just looking at either
(15:26):
this is where customers are falling off, or this is the percentage of
customers that are falling off after onboarding, but
that this is the story of their lives. This is what we know about
them. Here's a quote from Erica, who
is typical of someone going through this particular friction point.
And this is the risk to the organization. This is the
(15:49):
risk in terms of churn. This is the risk in terms of no revenue
at risk. Exactly. There's.
Exactly. So you're translating everyday
life and the life of the customer into business
outcomes that the C Suite really cares about, Right? Exactly.
Every industry is losing customers. They're trying to figure out how to not lose
(16:12):
customers. And in this economy they want to figure out that's even more
important than ever. Right. So how to retain things. But even getting them to start
from an early on that experience is important, right? Because some
sometimes like you know, SaaS companies, for example, if they don't, if they don't deliver
a great experience in the first, I think it was like 90 days, like
people tend to leave like 60% as I think is the stat. So
(16:34):
there's a lot of opportunity there and that's, that's painful to go through getting a
customer and then like losing them, you know, in the first 90 days because you've
had really poor onboarding or usage is bad or whatever it is. And we work
with some SaaS companies, companies, pretty large ones that have really big problems like
that. Well, so if somebody, what's next? If
somebody was interested in and
(16:55):
having this tool and being able to tell the story of their
customers lives to their executive team and get the leverage,
the PowerPoint that it, that it generates for you, what would
be the next step? Yeah, I mean I think for us it's, you know, if
you go to our website you can request a little more of a demo, right.
So for us there's an easy way to set up a time. There's a free
(17:16):
basic one, it does not include storytelling in it. So it's, you'll have to
kind of connect with us to see that in action, if you will. We
do have links to like little videos of how it works and so if you're
interested in just looking at it that way and that's enough. But if you want
to try it, we have, you know, different trial and pilot programs that we
can have you be part of and of course we'll welcome you as a customer
(17:37):
to if that's what you want to move forward. If you find. We have customers
that never even go through pilots or trials because of it's going to take
them just as long to do that and then to just get going. And so
teams are like, yep, we set up their demo to be exactly their data in
there. And then they, and they're like, yep, that looks exactly like what we would
have done. Okay, that looks good, let's move forward. And that happens at the big,
big, big ones. But not always, but it's sometimes there and it's interesting and
(18:01):
it's worked fine for us with, you know, with our retention
year over year. But people get in there and they see this. I will tell
you this, this specific feature is really a game and I
hate to use game Changer, because it's such a, like overused word, but like it
is. I really feel I've been,
I've been doing this work for nearly 25 years, I think now.
(18:22):
And I have seen and I've managed teams of
100 plus easily. Right. So my other team is 70. I used to
manage at IBM. I've seen a lot of things and I just. This is
interesting because this shifts the dynamics. It's amazing,
guys. It's so, I'm so like, still, like, honestly, it's, it's
moving fast. That's the thing. What's interesting, as a technologist and engineer at
(18:44):
heart and sort of, you know, went to school for engineering, I
never would imagine that we would be moving this quickly right now. The things you
can do quickly. It's so life like, it's, it's, it's so phenomenal
moving quickly. But at the same time, we've got to make those connections emotionally
to leadership. And what a tool, what a great assist
for leaders who are trying to make that impact. Yeah, yeah. I think
(19:07):
always there's always got to be. For no matter how much we move with
technology, we're always going to have to connect that story. We're always going to have
to be the ones that really pulls together the
real strategic sort of impact conversation. We might get
assisted and get some ideas going and things like that. But I think
what we as humans are capable of is amazing. And I think that
(19:29):
we, we are a lot more knowledgeable of all these other things that, that, you
know, I think for now anyways, make us such great, you
know, people to, to really just tell the story. Excellent. Anya, thank you so
much. Again, this information will be available in the show notes. If you
haven't seen a demo of the tool, I've seen it. Incredibly
impressive. And with the ability to do storytelling, boy, it could just make
(19:51):
your life so much easier. If you're trying to make that impression on, on the
executive team, I'm going to add, we got to land the plane now. But I
want to ask you the same question I ask all my guests on the show
to end the show, which is what delights you as a customer. I'm a
small, but like, I'm, I'm all about small little things that you do.
I don't need big. I don't need big things. That's the nice thing. My
(20:13):
husband got me this little thing that I sit on. It sits on my
desk, which is like this little, little heart thing. And I just look at it
every day and that's sweet. It's not like, you know, I don't need this, like,
expensive jewelry. So I'm all about the little things. I'm a very little things
person. You make those little touch points and make me feel special and that's all
you need. Excellent. How sweet and romantic of your husband.
(20:34):
Yeah, he's good at that. That's why I knew he was a keeper. I
worked 20 something years ago now at this point, but, yeah,
excellent. Well, Anya, thanks so much for being a guest on the show. Thank you,
Mark, for having me. Have a lovely day, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
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