Are you interested in Journey Management? Managing journeys is all about managing priorities and taking impactful actions to improve customer experiences and business outcomes. How do you know what actions to take?
Create a journey-oriented measurement strategy that drives action and shows results.
Actions must be based on the directional guidance set by high-level business goals, an in-depth understanding of the current-state customer experience, in-flight initiatives and existing capabilities, past successes and failures, and an understanding of the changes needed to move from the current state to the desired state.
Before you can start managing priorities based on journey-oriented insights, you need to develop a strategy for collecting and organizing the insights and data that will illuminate the right paths for action. A journey atlas structure can help your team get a full picture of current-state customer experiences from multiple levels of granularity; read more about how to set up a journey atlas for your organization here!
After you have developed a journey atlas, it’s time to start linking research insights and live data to show the health of each journey, from the framework level to the moment level. But it’s important to be judicious about which data, insights, and metrics you link. More data may not make the picture clearer; in fact, it may cloud the picture and create confusion. It’s key to only link data and insights that will help you take action on your priorities, which should come from high-level business goals and strategy.
You can then use the journey atlas to create layers of granularity for what you’re tracking and create relationships between what you’re tracking at different levels to show how they add up. For example, if you’re tracking wait times at a specific moment in a journey, how does that add up to customer satisfaction in that stage? And how does that contribute to a higher-level customer retention strategy? When you understand how the specific metrics you’re collecting relate to objectives and key results and how those objectives relate to high-level business goals, you can see clearly what changes need to be made at a tactical level to impact broad directional strategic aims.
Selecting the Right Metrics
Once you are clear on directional goals, the next step is to look at your top-level journey framework, which might be based on a customer lifecycle, as well as the stages of a high-level customer journey, sometimes called a “macro journey,” and determine, for each directional business goal, what success looks like from the standpoint of the customer, the business, and the employees who deliver that part of the journey.
If you have done service design work or developed a North Star vision, you should have a clear picture of the desired future state of the overall experience. However, you may still need to dive further into how you will measure success as your product and service offerings progress in the direction of the ideal vision. A jobs-to-be-done framework can be useful for developing a deeper understanding of what is valued most (and measurable) by each actor in each stage of the experience.
When choosing what to track, consider these dimensions. It is important to balance…
- Quantitative data that shows generalizable trends, with qualitative data that explains why those trends are happening
- Attitudinal metrics, such as customer satisfaction with behavioral metrics, such as conversion rate
- Leading indicators predict what is likely to happen in the future, while lagging indicators show what has already transpired
- Customer and employee experience metrics with operational and business metrics
- Metrics that show the success of touchpoints and channels, with metrics that show the success of moments, regardless of channel, or are inclusive of omnichannel customer behavior
Each metric you choose to track should be traceable to an element of high-level business strategy, whether that’s becoming more customer-centric, streamlining operations, diversifying revenue streams, being recognized as a great place to work, or anything else. Finally, each metric should relate to something impactful that is important to see change or essential to keep constant.
To help you get started selecting the right metrics for your journey atlas, I have built an inspirational menu of metrics you may consider tracking at different levels through different phases of a journey. This is not a comprehensive list or a recommended solution, but a starting point for your own conversations and decision-making around what is most important for your journeys.
Reasons to prioritize certain constructs to measure over others will vary greatly by the situation and should be carefully curated to fit your organization’s high-level goals. For each measurement construct listed here, it will be important to dig deeper into qualitative and attitudinal insights, as most metrics listed here are highly quantitative and behavioral. This is where design research should overlay every element of your measurement strategy. The behavioral and quantitative metrics will show you what needs to change, and the attitudinal and qualitative insights associated with them will guide you in design criteria: how things need to change and what specific actions to take.
Setting SMART Goals and KPIs
If you are using Key Performance Indicators (KPI), a commonly cited best practice is to ensure they are “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These are good criteria to keep in mind when setting any style of goal, even if your organization doesn’t formally talk about KPIs. Another common KPI best practice is to regularly re-evaluate and adjust them to ensure they maintain relevance to customer expectations, market dynamics, and business or product strategy. This is a best practice regardless of the framework your organization uses for goal setting and tracking success.
Once you have developed your streamlined set of key metrics to track by journey phase (a best practice is to track 2-3 key metrics per phase), you need to determine what success looks like for each construct you are measuring.
How do you know when your data indicates success?
To set goals, start from the data you have about the past and current performance of that metric. Use this to predict a curve if all conditions remain the same. Then, consider the potential impacts of internal and external influences outside of your control that will likely affect this metric. Next, consider how you expect to impact the outcomes that you are measuring with the actions you are planning through things like design changes. If this metric tracks something strategically important to improve, and your team has actions planned to make tangible changes, incorporate how much you expect or desire to see those actions impact what you are measuring.
Compare these expected results to available industry benchmarks to provide a reality check. It may or may not be applicable to incorporate this information into your projections, but the information can be a guide. These factors combined can help you determine what an ambitious yet achievable goal will be. If there are no planned actions to impact a metric, it may not be reasonable to expect a higher success rate. With this in mind, ensure everything you’re measuring is important to the organization’s strategy and something you are trying to either change through actions or is essential to keep constant and monitor for strategic purposes.
Ensuring actionability
Once you have determined what you will measure and what success looks like for each measurement, it’s time to think through how actions are expected to impact results and how potential results will help you guide and manage future actions. This is the true art of journey management.
To do this effectively and efficiently, it is key to be able to track and view the results of your measurements in a timely and easily understandable manner. This is possible with a tool like Excel or Miro, but a journey management tool such as TheyDo helps you not only see the data and results but also understand the impacts on the customer experience and journey operations in real time.
Beyond having the right tool for the job, using a living journey atlas and measurement strategy to take action will require the partnership and buy-in of stakeholders who manage diverse areas of the organization. Managing journeys is cross-functional by nature. If you can effectively partner with stakeholders who manage services, products, features, and operations to discuss the results of your measurements and recommended areas of focus and actions, you can engage in the kind of trade-off conversations necessary for taking responsible actions within the activity system of the organization. Journey management is a team sport; building your team of partners and stakeholders is possibly the most important enabler of this practice.
Your journey atlas can be a key tool for engaging with essential stakeholders. It allows you to show successes, failures, gaps, and unmet needs illuminated by your key data and insights in the context of high-level business strategy, for which they are also accountable, demonstrating the value of this practice in contributing to their goals.
Bottom Line
When you effectively use a journey atlas to track key metrics that align with high-level business strategy, you create enormous value for the organization by highlighting the most impactful areas for improvement in customer experiences and business outcomes. To make this new knowledge powerfully actionable, use your journey atlas to define the tactics that will support strategy with a cross-functional group of partners who are accountable for the same high-level strategic success. Use the journey atlas as the tool that keeps everybody rowing in the same direction.
Sources
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