Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 10 Episode 1 - Customer Journey Management

In this episode of the Customer Experience Superheroes podcast we meet Jochem Van de Veer, CEO of They Do. Host Christopher Brooks speaks with Jochem about the progression from Customer Journey mapping, a recognised practice for identifying customer pain points and new opportunities, to Customer Journey Management, where the emphasis shifts to action to be achieved from mapping.
In conversation they discuss the shortfalls of the way many are coached to developed customer journey maps, and the impact and positive impression on senior management which 'managing' customer journeys can achieve beyond just mapping. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to another episode of Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast. My name is Christopher Brooks and I'll be your host throughout this series, in which we'll meet up with the talented individuals in our sector who are taking customer experience to the next level. We'll hear their ideas, get their insights and be inspired by the work that they're doing. Today's guest, Jockam van der Vier, is a classic case in point. Jockham has taken the very established and conventional practice of customer journey mapping and is progressing it to a customer journey management system. We caught up with Jockham to understand what the difference was and the value this is bringing in the world of customer experience. Welcome to Jocham Van De Vier. Jockham, it's a delight to have you on the CX Superheroes podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Thanks for having me, Christopher. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

What we're going to talk about is quite extraordinary, actually, because I think you've made a pivotal decision based on something really fundamental to customer experience, which I think many people probably recognise, but few have got the confidence or capability to do anything significant about. So I'm really looking forward to talking about customer journey mapping to customer journey management. And we'll come on to that. But first of all, there will be some out there who, you know, in quiet parts of Guatemala or the outbacks of Australia that might not know who you are, believe it or not. So would you mind giving people an appreciation, sort of, you know, of who you are, but more importantly, your journey, you know, where you started from in terms of commerce and how you've arrived at where you are now?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, sure. So I have a background in interaction design or UX design is the modern term for it is. And previously, before we found the idea of managing journeys the way you manage products, we were actually part of the problem that we're going to talk about today. So we were like a CX SWAT team, a consulting firm that went into the Fortune 500 companies. And we helped the teams there to transform their way of working, bringing in design thinking, human-centered design principles, journey mapping as a way of bringing customer experience and business priorities together. And we did that as consultants. So we got projects, right? And we helped those large teams to create alignment between UIX, between marketing, between product, and between other departments in the organization using journeys. And I don't know if that's also your experience, but what we found was that the big reveal moment where the insights were presented, the management team or even the board was there in the in the war room. This was pre-COVID, obviously. It would be like, whoa, these are amazing insights, let's work on them. And then Monday was business as usual, and nothing like real change happened. So that's where the insight came from. Like journeys are a fantastic way to align people, but they don't have a purpose beyond the presentation. So to scale our own consulting firm, we thought, let's acquire software platforms so we can start, you know, making more clients successful with the way we help them to work. And we realized that beyond the mapping tools out there, today everyone does it in whiteboards, there wasn't something that really allowed you to scale this beyond the project. And that's what we started building for ourselves. And then one of our largest customers said, Can we roll this out globally? Like to 36 countries that can start working like this. And that's where the original insight for hey, we need to build a product company, stop consulting and start sharing journey management, as we call it today, with the rest of the world. And now we have Johnson Johnson and NCR in the US, and here the large insurance companies, everyone is now starting to manage journeys across the organization and they're using our products to do so. It's cool.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Brilliant. Well, I I mean, I think I would imagine many listeners are actually kind of really nodding in agreement, kind of with what you say there. The fact that the journey mapping sessions would happen, the senior leadership team, you feel like they've got buy-in, but it's actually a false peak of adoption. They, you know, they they've not adopted it, they've they've not they've probably spent a long time building, designing those maps as well. A lot of effort and energy has gone into it, and it feels like it's the end of the task, whereas actually it's just the starter's pistol on the race, isn't it? When you've got the journey map. So I love this concept that you actually you don't talk about the mapping, you talk about the management of it. Now, that's interesting. So, Joachim, you were consulting, you're advising, you're moving from one organization to the next. You've now become a SaaS organization, so you're there with the customers constantly.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

How how has that changed the dynamic?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Well, it was a transformative experience for us as a as a team of two co-founders, because we needed to flip the switch from helping people to untangle their mess to helping them use tools to entangle their mess, if you will. So that was a that was a transformative experience in all. And because we understand the organizations that we work with so deeply and understand the fundamental problems, like how to coordinate and align across teams, and with the pandemic, making even islands within the silos even more disconnected, reconnect again. The easy part was to come up with solutions, the hard part was to actually build a product that people love, and that's what we've been doing so far. But the core idea that, like you said, the journey is just the start that resonates with people, but they didn't have the tools, didn't have the skills to change something about it because of all the other things in the business that run. But once you understand that the customer journey is always there, you just now have visualized it, you just now have a place to go to and and see it, that flips the dynamics that hey, we can start improving this and we have all these journeys interconnected. How about you know making a hierarchy out of them and understand how everything in the business is related to that? And that shift, because we are able to help those organizations to set that up in software, comes with a whole new dimension of new problems that you know are infinitely interesting to solve and help skill at the enterprise level.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Does it also mean that you're you're working with uh as um Jeannie Waters, who I'm a big fan of, talks about enlightened leaders? You know, so I'm guessing to say I don't know what journey mapping is, yes, let's do some, is a very different conversation to I'm struggling to see the sustainable value of journey mapping in my organization. So, do you find yourself working with a different C-suite now or different organizations? So they slightly further along their transformation of customer centricity.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, so there's an interesting dynamic we see, and that's also why I think it's relevant today, even more than maybe a few years back, is that customer experience is now the holy grill in the business, right? It's the strategy, whatever form or shape you give it to, or how you interpret what that means for your business and how you want to make it actionable. But CX, customer experience is the strategy, it's the way to differentiate the business, especially in the commoditized markets, but in in in most businesses, and especially in larger organizations, that means that not only marketing, design, product, innovation, RD, however you call these departments or however you're structured, all have a version of what customer experience is, who the customer is, and what priorities we should give all the things that we want to work on. And that makes it very hard to align. And previously, experience was the domain of let's say UX, right? User experience. And they represented the customer, they did the research, they helped the business understand what they needed. But customer experience is much bigger than just the products. So, because customer experience is now part of the core strategy of most companies, that calls for a different approach to bringing in the customer experience and the business priorities. So people naturally tend to use journeys more because it's just a very nice tool to align across all these different teams, but also from the customer to the business. And then they found out it's breaking down because it's just a map. So the difference in I would say maturity almost in those organizations is that the management has decided on customer experience is the strategy, but also realizes that the vertical organization, the functional organization, is not going to serve that purpose best, and they are looking for a different way to organize, and that's where journey management comes in.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Excellent. So let's uh take a couple of steps back here. In terms of the solution you're offering, does the client need to have the inputs and the insights ready, or does the management solution allow them to improve and develop their own capability in that space? Likewise, I can imagine it'd be interesting to hear more about the mapping. But also, then how do you connect it, if you're not advising, to the output piece in terms of helping clients then take forward the findings and putting them through an operating model to make sure they can become a reality? A lot in that question, sorry, but you so I'm just trying to understand just the different components that fit into your management solution.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yeah, sure. Let's unpack them. And and one of the things, and let's start with do you need everything to have all the data and to have all the insights in place to get started? No, because and then maybe that's that's also nice for your listeners. What we what we saw, especially in large organizations for for the last few years, is that people tend to make like these large, big overviews of the customer life cycle, right? That is like what they call the customer journey or the customer journey or the customer lifecycle journey, whatever you want to call it. Problem with that is that it's too broad, especially think about an insurance company where the life cycle spends maybe decades, right? Maybe maybe a lifetime. So, how do you gonna innovate around that if that's such a big time spent? But in smaller organizations or different um products, still the customer lifecycle journey is too abstract. And then people cram in all these details to make it more concrete, to make it more detailed, and then you get like this uh wallpaper that people don't understand and don't like to look at anymore. So the innovation here is to think about the life cycle, which is relevant as a framework where all these little journeys exist. So think about it when you know you're a big bank and you issue credit cards, there's like a ton of journeys you can imagine, from issuing a new card to changing your contact details to you know uh paying your bills, and all those journeys together make up for the experience of having a credit card through the eyes of the bank. So the life cycle journey is now used as a framework to understand how all the other journeys in the organization are related to the customer experience, and what that means is that you don't need all those journeys to be mapped out, you don't need all the data to understand it. You just need to understand what is the customer lifecycle or what is the overarching umbrella that we like to see the customer experience fit in, and then understand hey, where do we have leverage? What are the key journeys that we currently want to optimize, or where do we see room for improvement, or where where do we know the biggest frustration, or the data is showing that there is a lot of issues, and that's where you start. And then because you have a framework in place, these large organizations that we work with tend to have something in place, you can start building it up from the bottom upwards, and I think that is one of the most interesting dynamics we see. At some point, you will have completed it, and there is a journey framework in place, and all the journeys interact or interconnected. But to get started, you can still start on a journey level, but you can make them way more manageable and smaller because you have influence over that part of the experience more than over a lifecycle. So let me just pause there and and see if that that that answers part of the question. Yeah, great.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

I mean, yeah, that covers the input. And I'm guessing, you know, there is interconnectivity with other solutions in an organization that you know you compatible with SAP and and the like to make sure that you can Salesforce, you you you can get these feeds in if you need to. You don't you don't you don't have to use your system and you know ditch every other data source from what you're saying? Is you take what you can get, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

And and and the beauty is that you take the customer, you start to walk in their shoes and make journeys out of those little stories and how they solve their goals or how they hire a product to do a job for them, right? If you if you use that terminology, but really understanding what the customer is doing step by step, and how your business that's the that those are like the typical lanes or layers in your journey that you add, where's the data coming from? What are we doing in marketing? So, what landing pages do we have? What communication do we send out at what step in what journey? And then digging in deeper. Okay, so which systems get triggered as soon as the customer inputs data or starts interacting with our digital product? And then at the back end or the backstage, if you will, if you make a service blueprint for some of your listeners who know what that is, what is actually not visible to the customer that we do as a business to make sure that this journey can be serviced and that we actually help the customer deliver their goals. So you can go very deep in a specific journey, but if you make them in the same way across your organization, then you can start layering on the data from the source you already have. You can bring in the backlog from, let's say, the product teams and the agile team. Say, what do we have planned and how does that map on the priorities that we actually see are happening? And you can have all these interesting insights and reprioritization sessions with the business in line with the customer experience. And I haven't seen anything out there that does that.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

No, no, I mean, I must confess, I mean, I've run several uh lectures in customer journey management mapping, and when it comes to what should we use for this, we get as deep as visualization tools until you came along, you know, it's just visualization stuff. So so to actually have that there is there are a couple which are perhaps more reliant on purely transactional data, data that's going through my system, but that's not the journey the customer's going through, to your point, is it? I think what you're doing is you're bringing a capability which we've wanted for some time and will kind of help to really keep senior leaders committed to the importance of understanding the journeys their customers are going through. Rather than it being a s I remember once, Jockam, going to a telecoms company and going in a room with all these beautiful maps. I mean, they were beautiful, laid out around the walls with data points and everything on them, and going, wow. And I was there with a professor actually at the time, and he was like, This is incredible. And the lady we were talking to said it would be if it wasn't for the fact they're four years old. They cost so much to build that nobody dare change them. You just think, What is the point of this? You know, what is the point of this? But that's where we kind of come from, isn't it? You people rocking up, doing a training session, this is how your journey map disappearing, and everyone going, Wow, never seen this before, and doing some service blueprinting on the back of it, but actually not doing the thing we have to do, which is close the loop and go back and re-prioritize. So it seems as if dynamism is what you've brought to journey mapping and gives you the credibility to call it journey mapping to journey management. I want to come back to how the experience for employees of journey mapping has changed and to see what your your view is on that. But I'm keen to understand you found all this insight and kind of it's coming out and it's being optimised within the organization. How does that piece get managed? Because it's still the same teams, it's still the same functions, being given the responsibility of taking the findings and making it happen. You've moved from advisory into system support. What is the confidence level you have that this actually will now make a difference and change will happen?

SPEAKER_01 16:43

So it is also related to the change we now see in organizations. And I think the biggest new discipline or the fastest growing discipline that we see, and we also serve quite deliberately, is the service designer in the organization. So these people naturally need when designing the end-to-end service, need input from product, from marketing, from sales, from operations, from even finance and accounting. Like, how do we together make this part of our service ecosystem a reality? And they naturally look holistically at an organization and at the customer experience. So this discipline is growing, people are creating more roles in the organization, and they are, in most cases, they either sit under products, so in the design organization, the experience design organization, or they sit in marketing. And because they are looking at the end-to-end experience, they are talking to all these different teams that also want to connect around the customer experience, but also lack the structures to do so because they're organized vertically. So we serve the service design professionals in the organization and their management who needs the insights to make the decisions and help the business navigate the strategic priorities. And that trend has been accelerating. So when we see a service design team adopt journey management, that organization starts changing. And it is a no-brainer to be customer-centric today. I mean, any leader you ask, yeah, of course, we are customer-centric, but making it practical beyond the project, you know, you can do a fancy service design project or you can do a fancy design thinking trajectory or design sprint or whatever, you know, bring the customer front and center in the core of the solution. That's all fine, but it doesn't scale. To do something sustainable, you need a critical mass in your organization of people to be able to oversee this. And typically we see that the service design group in the organization, sometimes it's the experience design organization that thinks like service designers that can bring this to the front in the organization, and they get asked to do so. So we help them to scale their practice tremendously by offering tools to do so.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Great. So you're interacting with the research and the insight teams, the VOC teams, you're interacting with the senior leaders, the service design teams, and the customer experience team. So this is this is great, it connects it all up, doesn't it? So I think as I say, you've got the authority to talk about mapping to management. Let's go back to that room that we've all been in with the post-its and the whiteboards. Has that experience changed, or was that kind of okay? It was just the uh the other pieces that needed to be improved.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Yeah, so the the idea of bringing in a customer journey and understanding how the whole business you know works together to make that journey happen or not happen, and we want to make it happen, is a wonderful thing. And I still think that's relevant, especially in organizations where not everyone is already buying into the idea of journeys are an effective way to connect the dots and align internally. People still need to do that. And the real war rooms have now transferred to the digital war rooms almost, where things in in MIRA and mural happen, which is the first step, and it's still necessary. We're also not going to replace that whole whiteboard collaboration, vision, idea, ideation with teams. That's that's part of collaboration, bringing things together, working live with your customers in in one place. But as soon as you want to have some structure around it, it is important to do this with a standardized approach that scales beyond that little warroom, even though you can fit 50 to 100 people in such a place easily, to do this at a more sustainable level. And maybe one other way to think about it, and that was also a big aha moment for me, is that when you look at the parallels with, for instance, product management, you've had agile being the way of thinking and being, and then you have the the agile planning tools like the gyro or DevOps that help the engineering teams to coordinate and work towards goals. Whether you have you know QBRs or product increments and you work in Sprint, or however you set it up, do a scaled agile framework in your organization. The truth about product management is there's always reality. You can go to the digital product, the website, the app, you can tinker with it, you can experience it, you can look at it, you can try it. And then there's you know the build environment where new features are created, and there's the workflow around what gets first and what gets last. So in product management, you have reality and you have the workflow. But in customer experience management, we're talking about experience, it's it's human emotion, it's about the customer. By definition, that's not tangible. So, journey management, you have to recreate reality, understanding the journeys, that's that's your version of reality, how they're all connected. That's like your journey framework, and that is the new reality. And then you have the workflow on top of it to go from inside to implementation. So, if you think about that, journey management is a little bit more difficult to do because you need to recreate reality and you need to have the workflow in one.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

place where in product management that's that's separate so that's maybe a nice analogy that that I can bring that makes it easy to understand why it's hard but also rewarding if you if you can do this sure and I can imagine if I've you know I remember once working with an organization who had done had a consultancy in they'd basically done service blueprints they hadn't done any mapping really and when we had to go back and say right we need to go and get the customers for space it was hard it's really hard to get people back in the room with your solution because it's going from insight through to implementation surely there must be a greater commitment as well from individuals who can see the value they're not just inputting and then getting some snacks from their colleagues and then meeting them for lunch it's it's actually I'm contributing to something I can see that's going to have a delivery do you find the level of engagement is is is higher yeah by definition it's higher what we see is that there's a there's a small core team that is thinking about the end-to-end experience setting it up but then magic happens okay so on the C-suite or on the management level what do you need you need to understand okay so in general how's customer experience doing where are the biggest in opportunities for us today what's going really well okay double click on that let's zoom in on stage in the customer life cycle where we know there's a lot going on that we want to improve what are the journeys that run there what are the product teams doing there what is marketing doing there what are the opportunities on that level and then what is the data that we have to support just decisions.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

So where can we make confident decisions about which opportunity to address that is what the management level is looking at. So they start top down drilling down into whatever their you know focus is but the other way around you see that the product teams for instance they already have a roadmap they have a planning and they want to build things that people like that people want to use and that makes their lives better. So they are naturally inclined to work with what is usually separate in the organization is the discovery teams the design teams that are talking to the customers making priorities on what their pains are right and those worlds were separate. There was a handoff obviously maybe through design files or wireframes but what you want to do is understand hey we have a whole solution roadmap how does it actually map onto what the customer is really telling us and what data do we have and by bringing that in to your journeys you create a current state of the customer experience whether you talk about one journey a selection of journeys or a whole stage of the life cycle expressed through journeys that is the place where you can see the whole and together work on the actual customer experience improvement delivered journey teams get informed the data changes the journey changes maybe a new opportunity rises but there is no such a thing as a version of a customer journey the customer journey is always there experience of people is always there right it's just subjective you want to capture as much detail as possible so that you can make decisions but it's all about managing the current state and looking ahead in the future how to make it better so this comes onto something I we find is really important is having the right mindset.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

I mean you used a lovely expression earlier which is as a customer you hire a product to do the job for them.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Yeah that's what you do and I've heard people in working in B2B they've kind of said oh we're a manufacturer our distributors they already get a cut for selling our stuff what more do they want but does it require when people are embarking upon using your capability they have the right mindset to be open you know to be curious to kind of understanding more to to truly recognize the customer's experience so that they can build their organization the solutions around it or do you still find people who are kind of like you know well we've done enough we put a QA on the website there's a chatbot there what more do we have to do do these people not understand it's quite you know do you come across that or do you find actually the types of people you're working with they get it and they're starting in the right place so people we serve today they actively look for solutions around their problems we don't have a sales team that goes into an organization says you must do journey centric organization because it's important and here's five reasons why I so want to buy our solution that's not how we approach the market we say no there's so many people who believe that customer experience is the most important thing to focus on as a business and I agree I mean no customers no business in the first place right it's just ridiculous that we just forgot to talk to our customers and try to understand them for for maybe decades but that's that's the fundamental nature of a large organization I guess so can't can't do much about that but the people in most of these organizations already understand that that this is the most important thing to focus on. So they start looking for solutions and then come across one one of the solutions in their option pool which is us. But what we don't see are people who disagree with focusing on experience in the first place. And I believe there are a lot of those organizations out there. And we were even when we were consulting we were helping the leaders of those organizations to transform their organization the people that were typically saying oh we don't care we put a QA like you said on the website and that's it. But I don't think that is that is part of today's ecosystem anymore. I mean customer centricity really is a no-brainer it has been for a while but the notion of only focusing on us as a business is just not of 22 2022 anymore I don't think what about I mean you mentioned earlier working across 36 countries I mean obviously one of the things we find is context really does impact the expectation of the customer experience and and culture has a has a big part to play on that.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

But let's talk about something a lot more practical language. How do you work through that? Because I guess across okay maybe in some international organisations they typically have English as kind of the baseline that everyone has to work on. But you still find if you want to get to some of those individuals got some really good insights you have to still work in local languages and and and bring that forward and obviously working with you know customers they're gonna speak in local language not going to speak in English just because it suits business world how how how have you have you adapted to incorporate many languages but to still get to back that central perspective yeah so the first thing the the the the global oriented companies that we work with do is they create a shared language and in 99.9% of the cases it is English.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

That's just at least in the West and in the US and in in Europe the the language for business but they do understand that localized versions of the customer experience are as important as seeing the bigger picture on a global scale and this is not something that we have fixed today. This is this is a continuous exploration of the problem like let's say you have 36 countries okay so you have a customer life cycle because your product might be similar in all these regions you offer the same services in these regions but how people use them want to buy them and integrate them into their lives is depending on the context. So what we see is that you need to create version of customer experience of a language of customer experience in the organization everyone understands and can fit their work in. So marketing understands what their impact is on certain aspects of let's say the life cycle product does that and the research team do that. That's the easy part. But then understanding what the key journeys are in the life cycle and understanding what the localized version of a journey here where I am in the Netherlands is versus a Peruvian insurance buyer where a global insurance company serves both markets that's where the magic happens and you need to understand the differences but also to what extent you can compare and create best practices between the markets. And I think that's the interesting dynamic and that is one of the problems that we are focused on like how do you build those bridges and how can you use journeys to create narratives in your organization to say this works in the US this doesn't work in Southern America but it also works in EU. Why is that so let's figure it out and then what would work in the US versus the European Union and what are the differences there and if you can use that as a common language through journeys I've seen teams do this very effectively to compare the status quo and then make localized versions of them their experience using the same products.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

I think it's great because it moves us on from that international comparison which will be these are the reasons our customers buy our products and you'll have a ranking of the behavioral drivers and they may vary by a percentage degree from country to country when you actually see the journeys and you see how the products being employed that's when you start to really see the differences and you've mentioned a couple of countries that even something as simple as geography can have a bearing on on these things. So you've come a long way in your time but it feels as if this is just the start in terms of areas you can go into it must be exciting but also challenging to stick to your scope I mean there's other aspects of the customer experience management that need attention like you've applied yourself to it.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Where do you think customer experience is going what are going to be the areas that people really need to put their attention into and are there any that you're got an eye on at the moment for uh to see how they do it next yeah so I can answer this in in many directions but let me take a stab at two directions that at least I see is that for let's start with business like how to apply this way of working in your organization that the rise of the journey centric organization is clearly a trend. We move away from being product focused from you know only vertical focused to looking at the end-to-end experience and understanding how our teams relate and I think we'll see a little bit of a more detailed or better version of the matrix organization where you have either a functional organization or matrix organization that will change to towards a journey organization. I think that trend yeah it's maybe where where agile was like 15 years ago journey management is is today. So that's that's slowly gaining momentum and we'll see that more and more organizations adopt the journey centric business model. In terms of customer experience one of the things I have a hard time wrapping my head around is like the journey orchestration tools that believe that you can solve everything through AI and personalization. I believe that's that's some aspect of it where you know a personalized content flow is better than a generic one. And you can probably based on some behavior and some other data influence that and make it even more personal. But it seems that the whole world is forgetting about the part in the middle where we have the data and then we have the personalized journey. But then in the middle there's the business who thinks about the long-term strategy and tries really to understand the people and in the business people work. It's human beings and we try to influence customer experience for other human beings we call our customers. So because there's a human aspect involved I believe you want to give the agency and the authority to make decisions to the creative teams in the organization. And I'm not talking about the designers only I'm really talking about everyone focusing on making the customer experience zinc for whatever that might be. So that's another thing I see and together with more control as a consumer over your data as a trend I believe that when we have more sophisticated devices to gauge our experience better than even our phone or just tracking our heartbeats let's say five to 10 years down the road there will be even more data around experience you can capture. But there will be also more tools for the consumer to own that data and say hey company I like here's some of my data you can use to make decisions. So those are interesting fields that we are looking into how can we use technology to basically make a meaningful connection between the customer experience and the business priorities and if that's through the lens of customer experience today yes we use journeys I believe customer journeys will remain the the easiest way to align across teams because it is visually in in nature but we will be more sophisticated in getting the data in, understanding the opportunities and then helping teams to make decisions.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

Right. I see three key things in there and I think you've expressed a lot of people will be kind of nodding in agreement in those terms is is this idea that in the middle the business will need to review what it's uh recognizing from its customers and they need to just rethink its own strategy as well or choose to recognise we can't fulfill that particular requirement let's not stretch ourselves to do it if it's not what we're we're about. So moving away from just fixing functional issues into that space. As you say it's the expectation of customers will grow. I think in the UK I said we have a UK customer satisfaction index that runs and year on year it goes down and that doesn't mean we're getting worse it just means the expectations are going up. This is possible one of the challenges of trying to chase a metric like that. But the third and I think this is a really interesting one I worked on a proposition many years ago called the price of me that we didn't have the technology to support it at the time but it was this idea of I choose to share this much information with you because and the more I trust you and the more I believe you serve my data well the more you'll see of of me and this idea that customers will take more empowerment and the capability and the tools will allow you to do that I think is yeah it is one that customer experience has to look out for. It doesn't have a God given right to well it feels it does at the moment to have access to that information. And I think if I'm simply getting it in spraying it on a journey map and saying there we go the chances are customers have stopped giving it which is why customer journey management allows it to be end to end. I start to see the value of helping provide the information and what the organisations do with it. So I think Jockham it's it's of an age I think 15 years ago people would have probably gone I don't see the value in what you're doing don't have the capability to support it 15 years time and actually you know you'll be on to something else because this would be a standard practice that we all kind of can't realize how we were living without beforehand. So it's been it's been fascinating to talk to you. Now Jockam I'm sure there'll be people itching to to get in touch with you so what's the best way to connect with you individually and and how do they get you know hold of they do if they perhaps want to see a demo or get some more information?

SPEAKER_01 37:02

So I'm pretty approachable on LinkedIn so you can just type in my name and I'll probably pop up. So Joachim van der Veer on LinkedIn send me a DM if you're interested in chatting about this and if you want to get started go to dadu.io make an account it's it's free and you'll have full access to three journeys to explore a little bit and if you've done that and you are serious then definitely send me a DM because then I'll help you set up shop personally I'd love to hear from you because I believe that the journey are journey centric organizations or the the leaders in those organizations or service designers in those organizations are listening to this today. Yeah and want to get started we have so much material for you to to get tracking with it and to get started. So I love to share that. So please let me know and I'll be off hand helping hand.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Well Jock thank you on behalf of the CX community for kind of you know raising the standards and and turning you know customer led thinking into customer led action which is so important. So thank you for joining us on the podcast and wish you and the organisation well in the future thanks for having me Christopher has been phenomenal