Dr. Chip Bell, ranked by Global Gurus as one of the top three keynote speakers on customer service in the world in 2020, is widely credited with changing the landscape in his industry over 40 years earlier. His contribution, shared with frequent co-author Ron Zemke, is now known as customer journey mapping.
While consulting with a large telephone company in the 1980s, Bell and Zemke decided to focus on what customers experienced when their telephones didn’t work. To do so, they interviewed customers, held focus groups, did ride-alongs with telephone repair workers and sit-alongs at call centers. In the end, they decided to graph what they had learned as if the customers were telling them their stories.
The main takeaway: when Bell and Zemke observed what customers expected to happen in each separate touch point, they realized the customers were actually teaching them how to make their experiences better. As a result, Bell and Zemke developed a concept called the “cycle of service mapping,” which has since become customer journey mapping.
Today, the modern customer journey map is an important way to track, predict and improve both customer experience and customer success. A 2018 report from CXPA revealed that 90 percent of those using customer journey mapping have seen a positive impact, with improvements in customer satisfaction and a reduction in churn. To learn more about the importance of customer journey mapping to customer success professionals, we sat down with Joseph Durias of monday.com.
Joseph Durias is a mid-market customer success manager at monday.com, a work operating system that promotes a culture of transparency and empowerment. He recognizes that customer journey mapping has not only been deeply intertwined in monday.com’s evolution, but an integral part of their success.
What’s one way customer journey mapping helps you deliver a better customer experience?
Our company and org’s evolution are actually both deeply rooted in customer journey mapping. Our product offerings began as purely self-serve and our founders used journey mapping to ensure that our in-product messaging and flow created an intuitive experience within a widely applicable and flexible tool.
As we’ve evolved our customer success org, we’ve become much better at lifecycle segmentation and created deeper specialization among our teams. Journey mapping helped us pinpoint two key stages that had the biggest impact in our clients’ long-term success — technical implementation and early end-user adoption. We also identified that each stage required different employee competencies that led to success.
In the spring of 2020, we split customer onboarding from ongoing success management. This resulted in two significantly more effective and specialized teams. This also had residual benefits in simplifying the hiring process and widening our candidate pool!
What other teams or team members do you collaborate with to support customers throughout their success journey?
When we say CSMs collaborate across the board, we really mean it. We work closely with customer experience, product, R&D, marketing and most closely with sales.
As a high-growth company, both teams are moving at full speed, operate with lean headcount, and sometimes share overlapping responsibilities. Customer journey mapping helps us avoid the tension of conflicting priorities, but more importantly, allows us to leverage each team’s core strengths by defining the scope of ownership and key success factors at each phase.
For example, our AM partners know that CS owns implementation, but also that buy-in is just as important as a perfectly engineered workflow during customer adoption. Here, AMs leverage executive relationships and set the stage for CSMs to usher key stakeholders through change management. CS then pays it forward by coordinating 6-to-9 month reviews during adoption and leveraging data, contextual insights and stakeholder relationships to drive toward a strong renewal and new commercial opportunities.
Journey mapping helped us pinpoint two key stages that had the biggest impact in our clients’ long-term success.”
How do you tailor the customer journey map to meet the unique needs of different segments or types of customers?
At monday.com, we’ve had the blessing of being so flexible that our platform can fit into any industry and function; however, this also challenges monday.com CSMs to also be extremely well-rounded in order to be strong consulting partners.
To balance effectiveness with efficiency, we maintain the same top level phases in the customer journey and instead modify our consulting based on best practices and benchmarking for each customer’s application of our platform.
For example, creative teams typically require frequent collaboration and communication in monday.com as content progresses between design, copy, digital marketing and each team’s unique tech stack. With creative teams, we’ll likely conduct creative business reviews focused on integrations-utilization and potentially each function’s engagement metrics. But with a team of project managers, we might focus our discussion on metrics related to data visualization, reporting and time-saving automations. In both cases, we’d thoughtfully customize benchmarking data to make sure we’re guiding our partners to make the best-informed decisions.
