Why Your Journey Map Should Be Ugly (& Drawn w/ a Pencil)

But a true customer experience is everything that they experience in their journey with you. And if you truly are building out a business, it's going to stand the test of time. It's all about bringing people back. So it is a journey. It's not a race to the finish line.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And in this episode, we dive into an often misunderstood experience activity, journey mapping. In this talk, we cover a bunch of things like why you shouldn't spend your time and money to design out your journey map. So it looks pretty. Why you should focus on minimum viable product version 1 of your account journey map, and why your journey map should constantly change as your organization learns to optimize these touch points. If you're just starting out or you're right in the middle of mapping your touchpoint or account journey, this is the episode for you. So let's dive right, right in and get to it. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Counter Experience podcast. I'm here as always with my co host, Carrie T. Self. How you doing, Carrie?

I'm doing great. Hello, everybody.

So today we are going to talk about something that's often misunderstood, maybe underutilized by B2B companies, and that is customer journey mapping or account journey mapping. So, Kerry, why is journey mapping important? What does it mean to you? And why should companies utilize a journey map?

Wow, that's a big question.

It is.

Well, let's begin the journey. Let's talk a little bit about it. Well, I think the first thing, it's interesting what you said. I think a lot of companies do maybe don't give it the attention or detail. I almost think they oversimplify the journey too. And maybe we could talk a little bit about that today. But you know, when we're talking about being customer centric or account centric, I think what's vital, what's really, really important is understand everything you are doing is to benefit the customer experience. And in that, there are departments that own different journey points, there are different places where you, you engage with your customer, your account, your client. And I think in that, that's part of that journey, right? That's the most important part of the journey. And I think what a lot of companies do, instead of looking through a window and identifying those journey points from a customer perspective, they immediately make it product centric. They look at themselves internally and then their journey becomes a map for what they're doing or what they're developing inside. And, and it's not really customer centric. And I recently, I think I said this to you. I think we were standing there talking and I said, you know what? Look at your journey map. If each of those journey points, each of those points are not customer centric, if they are not benefiting the customer, get rid of them. They should not be on your customer journey map. You know, it could be part of internal cycles or more of a more dynamic map that you're creating internally to show how you create loops, but at the end of the day, it should not be part of your customer journey map.

Yeah, and I think that's. That's a really good point because I feel like some companies blow this thing out, right? Like, I've. We've worked with Forrester comes to mind, and they had an example of this large bank that literally mapped out every touch point, including internal touch points. And I think that's a really good point. Carrie, is like, start basic, right? Because I think a lot of times companies say, all right, let's build the journey map. And then they realize how many touch points are involved and they get overwhelmed and they kind of quit early or they just get frustrated halfway through and quit. I mean, the point is to keep it simple at first. V1, we always do MVP, right? Minimum viable product launch. What you know is the simple first version. So, like a customer journey map would be touch points that are just on the customer side of things. Don't worry about necessarily the internal touch points. Worry about what, like that touch point is for that customer. And like you said, if it's causing friction, remove it. Like, stop whatever you're doing, whatever you're doing to reach out to that customer, just stop it. Just don't continue doing that because you're harming the overall experience. Right?

Yeah. And the other thing with the touch points, too, what I think is vital is, is really with the touch points. I think what's vital too is you might not have everything figured out with that touch point either. You know, it's a touch point. You know, it needs to be a touch point, but you don't have all the answers. You don't have the processes around it. I think you still need to put that on your journey map. It might even be a broken point. Yeah, it might be causing friction. So, yeah, I think if it's. If it's not benefiting the customer experience, get rid of it. But I think it needs to be there in the sense of that's where you need to start putting some resources and figure it out. Especially if it's a vital Touch point. You know, you look at some companies where, let's say, you know, support. Everyone has a level of support at this point. Right. And I think the mistake a lot of companies make is they focus all of their journey on that one touch point, and there's so many others. But support is usually a big lift. It's a heavy lift. And in itself, there could almost be a journey within the support itself.

Yeah.

So now you start to create little journeys within the journeys. But if you don't have it all figured out, still put it there, still talk to it and show it and, you know, you can start to put the resources towards that.

So let's, let's talk, stay up here at the high level for a little bit and then we'll get into, like, tactical. How do we actually. What are our touch points? Or at least the basic ones that you guys can leverage if you aren't already leveraging them. But how should companies create a journey map? So in your experience, Kerry, do companies need to, like, do this super fancy, designed out, like, pretty little. This is our customer journey map. I've seen some where it looks like a little walk in the park. Do they need to spend a ton of time and resources and making it look pretty or is it. Is it more? Just make sure you have them written down. Like, where do you land on that kind of debate?

I think we're both laughing because we're thinking of the same exact journey point, the journey map. I literally see them, you know, they were skipping through the. Through a part. So I know which one you're talking about, but no, I don't think that's vital. Not initially, I don't think. Anyway. I think there's a couple of things that are important here. Number one, does your own organization know their journey? It's always interesting when I'm talking to someone. It's usually my first question out of the gate and it throws them. It's like, wait a minute, you're to help me with my customer experience. Why are you asking me about my journey? Well, your journey is your experience. We're just interchanging names here. But a true customer experience is everything that they experience in their journey with you. And if you truly are building out a business, it's going to stand the test of time. Time. It's all about bringing people back. So it is a journey. It's not a race to the finish line, you know, and so I'm being. I know I'm being overly cliche here with this, but yeah, I think start simple and identify that. Does your own organization, can they identify the journey?

Yeah. And it's interesting. On the. On the account side, like the account journey, it's a little different than, for example, like a customer B2C style journey, where there's. There's different touch points, there's different things. So I kind of want to dive into that. But one more point before we do. I just. I was telling this story to you the other day where I went to a local company in Boston, one of our clients, and they had this really cool way of doing it. They had a room that was dedicated. It wasn't necessarily dedicated. It still functioned as a meeting room, but they had a dedicated two walls to their journey map, where literally they put a paper background with little almost like circle modules in a vertical fashion from almost like the top of the ceiling to the bottom of the sea or the floor. And they basically did that across two gigantic walls and then put Plexiglas over it. So they write what the journey touch point is on each one of those vertical lines of circles, and they would basically say, all right. And they would measure it with their program and say, all right, this needs to be optimized. This is the thing. And they would plan around each vertical touch point across two entire walls. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I just think, like, you can go both ways. I can see it both ways. I don't know if you necessarily need to design it out and make it look pretty, because that's not only serving, that's just serving yourself. Right. You're not really focused on the right things there. But if you do something where it's like a process and you have it on a wall and you are measuring the touch points, and anybody that walks into that room can see all the touch points, it was. It was super impressive. But you could also tell that they. They were doing it the right way. They were approaching it from a optimization standpoint. And it wasn't just to look pretty in a room. It was like they're doing measurement. They're optimizing around different things. They're. They're gaining from their experience program. So I'm kind of in the middle there, where you don't need to make it look super pretty, but maybe you should have some sort of a process behind it.

Well, it's amazing. I mean, just to unpack that example that you just shared, you just said some really key things. Number one, I bet you anyone in that organization would be able to clearly identify what their journey touchpoints are right. There's no doubt about it. Secondly, they understand that a journey touchpoint isn't carved in stone. It is something that constantly needs to be worked at and analyzed and looked over, optimized. And then. And then when you think you got it great, you go back and measure it and look at it again. So there's a lot of really good examples you had there, and then they've made it a working journey. I think that the risk you run into when you make something that's too pretty or too finalized, then you lose the ability to be agile and adjust as things change or as you learn new definitions, feedback. Reason why we're doing this is because it's all about constant learnings and changing and applying that.

Then it was whiteboard markers.

You got it.

Yeah.

So I think there is a time and a place to make it look pretty. But. But have your design team ready to redo that, because we're going to learn something new tomorrow, and we're going to have to address that particular journey point.

All right, so let's dive into the tactical account experience journey points, at least from our perspective. Right. So we plan to get a bunch of customers on this thing and talk to them about their journey points and how they're leveraging their programs, but let's focus on us real quick. And I know that sounds a little weird, but what are we doing internally to kind of map out our account journey and what are the points? So again, Kerry is VP of program and education, so he's the perfect person to talk to about this. So Kerry, lay it on us, man.

So I. This is one of the big aha moments I had, I think now in two different developing a program around journey mapping and around a customer experience. And what I really learned was, which I found some of this might be obvious, some of you were like, going, okay, you're not teaching me anything new here. Other people. It might be the aha moment it was for me. But what I started to discover that each of these touch points, you usually lives within a department, meaning when you look at somebody's relationship with you and their experience with you, these different touch points. And I think this is how organizations shape their organization. Well, you're going to be responsible for this part of the business, which happens to be one of the touch points or one of the journeys. So sometimes just laying out your departments creates that journey right out of the gate. And I think that's something that we did. You know, we look at marketing as kind of that being out front of Everything. They're the ones out there, you know, grabbing prospects and being that first message to bring people in, you know, preaching the gospel that is customer gauge and, you know, getting people excited and identifying. You have a need and we're your solution. And then it flows into sales, you know, and sales isn't a dirty, dark department that everyone makes it out to be. They are solution providers, right? They're saying, look, you have a pain, I have something that might work for that. Let's talk. And so this, right, this becomes another touch point. And then, you know what, we're good for you. It works. And then it flows into implementation. And then you have a team that's going to say, well, let's get you started up. Let's get you on board here. And then it flows into the relationship and product and then on to support if you need us. And then the cycle begins. So, you know, what I just did is I laid out our journey just there, right? Our touch points. Our journey touch points. They're pretty simply, but they live within the different departments.

So let's give an example of that, right? So we have a post demo survey, which is interesting because I don't think a ton of companies do that. That's one that maybe is a tidbit for some out there where we send a survey after every time a salesperson gives a demo of our product. And it's a simple, you know, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product demo to a friend or colleague? It's kind of like a honestly a bastardized version of Net Promoter. But it gives us a nice touchpoint analysis for how effective are our salespeople at communicating our product worth and our overall solution. And that's honestly our one of our first touch points that we look at to see, you know, are things mapping appropriately from marketing to sales. And then obviously we can use that data from sales to the handoff implementation. So generally the companies that do close with us are very happy with that first demo. So it is an indicator of obviously potential customers, but also the effectiveness of marketing and sales working together. I think is kind of interesting because sometimes they come in with these preconceived notions of what they're getting sold and then sales sells them something different. And that's a good indicator for me as the VP of marketing to, hey, maybe we should adjust how we say this or bring it to market. So that's the first touch point, I think. Would you agree with that, Kerry? That's probably the first one.

Yeah. And I think you said a couple of things too that are really key to that. I mean the survey itself is how do you put sentiment? Everyone's looking at their sales funnel. Everyone's looking at. We had X number of first buyer meetings, they turned into demos, demos turned into sales. We get that aspect. So that metric is down pattern. Everyone's kind of doing that if you're worth your wait. Right. But then you put the customer sentiment in the form of the survey. That lets us know immediately how they felt about it. And then here's the third component. All the other departments are looking at that.

That's right.

So product has eyes on it. Say, you know, the customer success team is looking at that. So it's not just something that lives with marketing. Everyone is looking at that because that is an important part of the journey and we need to keep that promise that's made during that demo.

That's right. And I think another important point to make, Carrie, is as we onboard these accounts and these customers, we are very upfront about what we expect from them. Right. So, and this is a really good point that I'm sure you could riff off. But it's. We're not, we practice what we preach. So we say, you know, if you're gonna do this, we will be surveying you often at various touch points and we expect you to give us your feedback. You're not doing this just to ignore us. You're not doing us just to kind of take the software and run like we want that, like this is literally what we do. We care so much about that two way communication that we hound people until we get it back.

Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because this is one of the first times I've worked for a company that what we do internally is what we are so good at, getting our customers to actually do. And that two way communication, that sentiment, that feedback is vital. It's so valuable to what it is that we do. So I think you're right. From the very beginning, we tell people we're going to ask you and we expect you to tell us. And it is important to us. It's not just a data point that we throw into a basket and we use at the end of the year. It's something that we use for our relationship and for our constant improvement and how we grow.

So speaking of constant improvement, so what's our next touch point, would you say? Implementation?

Well, I mean, after the demo there is a bit of that sales process that's in there too. And I know some people like to call it negotiation. But I think that's worth talking about a little bit because I do think that's where we start to really dive into what are their needs, what are our solutions? How does it match up? We do a survey at that point too. It's another touch point for us.

Yeah. And when, when we close a deal. Yep.

Yeah. You know, and it's. Or we lose the deal.

Or we lose the deal. Thank you.

Right. Let's. Let's call it what it is. You know, we weren't their solution. We weren't who they were gonna join with, but we still want to know kind of why and where was the value elsewhere, so we can learn from that. And, you know, that's a brave thing to say. Look, whether we win or lose, we want that feedback. And oh, and by the way, whether, you know, this or not, everyone sees that too. You know, we've had stories of people being brutally honest in our process, and that lands on the desk of the person they were working with. And it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's something you have to unpack, take a look at. And it's, it's really a way to develop in the moment pretty quick.

Yeah, a lot of companies are surprised by that. Like, if we send that close lost survey, for example, a lot of companies are surprised by that. They don't expect it. And it's kind of interesting. Like, I don't want to say it creates the sense of like, regret that they didn't go with us, but it is kind of like this interesting angle to say, hey, like, we are not just this net promoter company. We care about, like feedback across the entire journey. And I think what usually ends up happening is once that survey goes out, they'll give some feedback, but then we usually do like a third, 30 minute, or sometimes even an hour debrief with these companies of like, let us understand we are in the business of taking information and improving based off that information. So this is very near and dear to our heart. And a lot of these companies are just so very gracious to let us sit in and understand their internal process and why we weren't picked. But also goes the other way. Right. Like, we do the same thing. If we close a deal, we should have a good idea of why we did. But it is interesting how sometimes, you know, companies surprise you that it's. Oh, actually it's just one thing. So it is, it is a very important touch point to call out. So thanks for that. I think it's, you'll find nuggets in there. And I think that's an unexpected thing because not a lot of companies do these types of, you know, surveys, but we've, we've literally found them so invaluable over the years that it would be crazy not to do it on our end. This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C Suite buy. In Customer Gauge's research with mit, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why Customer Gauge is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, uh, yeah, we get a good amount of Free Bear Onelogin, Iron Mountain, H and R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge, yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions, or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well, with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. Customer Gauge's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing if you want to see Customer Gauge in Action. Go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it.

Yeah. And then I think from there, once we've kind of, you know, closed that sale and formed that relationship, then, yeah, implementation kicks in. It's where they take over as a handoff. Again, doesn't sound new to anybody, but I think what we talk about constantly is if marketing sales is out front making the promise and forming the relationship, implementation has to transition them into that and keep that promise. So understanding why they bought us, why we're being called to the table, to what we're here to solve, but also we take on the task of really starting to give them hard feedback also in that particular touch point. You know, sometimes some companies come in and think they've got their program all laid out and they've got everything they need, and it's a really huge aha moment. So you find yourself working in one area, and what you're discovering is there's gaps in other places that we need to help fill in. Also, I think expectations are different too, with what we do, Ian. I think if we went back 10 or 20 years, the way business was done, we would sell something to somebody and that's who we would work with. And I think one of the unique things about now when we're looking at the account experience, there's usually one person, a sponsor or someone at executive level who's out making the buying decision, negotiating, and says, I know my company needs this. I need a solution that can pull data together and get sentiment from customer and client and help strengthen and protect our accounts. Right. You know, how do we eliminate churn and grow sales? And he understands that or she understands that, and that's who we spend most of our time with up until this transitional point. Then what happens is implementation takes over in that touchpoint and we find ourselves working with a very different audience.

That's right.

You know, usually this sponsor, this executive from the C suite, usually hands it off to a director or management level who's going to own the program. So it introduces us really for the first time. Some companies are better. Some companies introduce that person ahead of time, but usually this is the first time that these two new audiences are meeting. So it's almost strange because you kind of have sales and the executive sponsor in the room or in the meeting, but then you have implementation in the program champion now in the meeting. So it's almost like this family reunion of people who haven't met each other yet. You meet Each other and. And this new group takes over the journey.

Yep.

It doesn't mean sales doesn't check in. It doesn't mean the executive sponsor doesn't jump on cadence calls and see how things are going. But it's almost like it's a handoff. It literally is to entire new group. So we find ourselves. Well, okay, I think I might know what you're about to ask. We really find ourselves almost going back to the sales process and redemoing, reintroducing, re showing. These are your pain points. I'm sure you know them, but this is what we do and this is how we solve them and this is the benefit to you. So it almost feels like a mini sales process in a way. We're redemoing, we're reeducating for a whole new audience.

And I want to make this very clear is that this is kind of like the fork in the road right between a standard CX program and an account experience program. There's a bunch of different forks, but this is a major one. So in this, if I could pinpoint something where things fall off the rails, whether it be in an implementation over an over an overall account engagement, it's right at this point where. All right, so you sold your executive sponsor, you sold your. Your champion, right? The person that originally was championing the idea of bringing on your product. And then you go to implement and there's this entirely new group of people that have no idea. And you say some of the companies know, bringing these people in, I would say it's probably about 10 to 15%. It's a very small amount. So sales and CSM and the implementation team are tasked with essentially re educating or educating for the first time a gigantic group of people why this was bought, why it's important to them, why it's not a threat to their job, which is generally a very interesting conversation. So again, account experience allows you to literally map that out and survey these individual touch points. So not only your champion, your sponsor, but get the sentiment of these new groups of people that come in and you can identify from these journey touch points like, you know, Fred and accounting is, you know, not bought into the solution, doesn't see the value, but Samantha in marketing totally gets it. So like, it gives you a map to understand, all right, if we're going to be successful at this company, we have to get everybody on board with what we do and why we're valuable. And account experience allows you to take that full view of the account and not to keep pushing that. But I think it's so important, man. Like, you can't just rely on those one or two touch points. That's how you lose accounts. Because then, you know, if one of those two people leave the account, then you're stuck with the other people that don't know who you are, don't see the value in your product. And I guess you can probably figure out what the next step is. Kerry.

Well, you know, there's so many things. Wow. We can really, really go off on a couple different tangents here on a couple of things. And I know it's all about journey today, and I want to keep it to that, but you've identified a couple of key things that are important to a customer. Journey map, or let's call it an account journey map if we want. But first off, you talked about the different audiences, right? You still got to stay in touch with that executive sponsor. So key, so vital. So you got to keep that survey, that communication and that, that data. You got the program owner who's out front, who's the champion, who's the one that, let's be honest, is really passionate, pushing this thing uphill, yelling and screaming that they need resources and not getting them. You know, who is really that person? I know I was that person. Right. So I get that person, without a doubt. And then there's that audience that you just talked about. And I hate to call it the end user of the front line, but that's who they are. It's the face of your business. Who is out there engaging with those customers? How do we get them bought in? How do we get them to understand? So now you've already talked about these three audiences. So when you start looking at your journey maps, you need to understand who is included in those different customer journeys, destinations or places on that map. Very, very key. And then the other thing that you talked about too, which I think is vital, is metrics. What metrics are you tying to these different journey points? NPS is great. Response grade is wonderful. Are we hearing back from them? And I think again, I think we could talk a whole nother session just on metrics. You know how passionate I am about that.

Yeah, I think we should.

But really tying the right metrics to each one of these points, what's good for one journey point is not going to work necessarily for another one.

That's right.

You know, a relationship, one's nice. It's a nice umbrella that goes over it all. But at the end of the day, each of these journey points has its Own metric and its own audience.

And it's, it's such a, like a, it applies that, that concept applies to a bunch of different things in the experience world where it depends, it changes. Like, I can't tell you, man, how many times I've talked to these different prospects that every single company treats experience differently. So some have a dedicated team, some have one department that owns it, some the CEO owns it. I mean, it really spans the entire length of an organization. Nobody's the same. But to your point, I feel like this is the standard rule in experience is that like, even touch points, they shouldn't be the same. You should treat everyone differently. That's why this is such a hard job, guys. I mean, hats off to everybody that's listening to this thing and is doing that program champion role or the front line or the executive sponsor. I mean, this is hard work. I think that's why a lot of these fail is because it's hard. And no company has the silver bullet or the blueprint for this yet. We're trying to provide some insights into it, but I think it's hard and I don't know how else to say that, but a journey map is a great way to kind of map out a framework of like, all right, this is version one. We know what, we could boil the ocean, we'd probably burn out in about a month and a half. But point one, let's do a journey map. Let's map out at least the major touch points that we think will do, you know, have a major impact on the experience for our customers or our accounts. And I think that's what we're really talking about today, guys, is it's not that walk through the park where you show 150 journey points. It's like, figure out what the major ones are that can really move the dial or move the needle and focus on those. So we've talked about a couple already. I think we're up to three, right? So we had post demo and then close one, or closed law survey and then the implementation survey. So what's the next one, Carrie?

So I think that everyone has a little different name for this, but it's, you know, how do you manage that relationship? Who's in charge of the customer experience, the account experience? For us, it falls under the customer success team. Their role is really to establish the ongoing relationship. How do we keep them happy? How do we solve whatever it pains them, how do we get them comfortable with our product or our solution? And then ultimately, how do we help grow that account. I'd be lying here if I told you that. We all know our mission here, right? Sales. We're not a nonprofit organization, you know, we're here to make money, and that's a vital key of that. How can we continue to grow, make money, see us strengthen our relationship in that. Right. Become more sticky, but also benefit the count the customer at the same time. And it's got to be mutually beneficial. We can't just be cashing in. You know, we talk about bad profit on and off all the time, and we just can't trick them into adding new users and going, aha, I'm gonna tag you for that. You know, it's gonna be, wait a minute. It seems like more of your employee base wants to use it more often, and that's a good thing to have. Let's open up some more users for you, or let's add this feature, you know, And I think that's where that customer success team becomes vital. They're almost like the center of that spiderweb that touches all the different departments. And, you know, they become that conduit for product, for support, maybe going back to sales if we need to reshape or relook at that relationship and that original contract.

Yep. You want to talk about a hard job, man. Customer success manager, they are doing a ton, a ton of different things. So hats off again to everybody that's in CSM roles. I think they do a lot, but you're right. They own the relationship. It's up to them to manage the support feedback, to manage even sometimes the product feedback or field it at least. But they own the overall relationship. They operate QBRs. They're communicating strategic vision and plans with the champions and the executive sponsors of these accounts. That is no small feat for anybody. But these CSMs specifically are doing it all. So it's a vital point of that relationship with those accounts. And that's really, I think, the longest relationship, too. I mean, sure, there's some salespeople that stick around and have those great relationships with the champions, but ultimately, it's up to the customer success manager to maintain their relationship over, you know, multiple years. So that's a really interesting touch point. And how do you give an example of how we measure that at Customer Gauge? Right. So you could do it a bunch of different ways, and we'll get into the transactional stuff later, but let's focus on that relationship. How do we actually measure that relationship here?

Well, it's funny you said it's one of the longest it Happens to be also the most dynamic. It happens to be the deepest when it comes to metrics and audiences. Right. Because we're asking a customer success manager to really be all that for all these different levels. They have to be able to switch gears and be the executive confidant and consultant. They have to be the partner to the champion and understand the woes. But they also have to be kind of that cheerleader for the front line. So there's that itself. How do we measure it? Well, there's some of the obvious metrics, of course, you know, nps, response rate, do we have an engaged audience? What drivers, what feedback are they giving us when they do give us our feedback? So that helps us, kind of shapes us strategically. Is it product, is it support? So that kind of helps us, guide us in that realm. The other thing we look at is just our cadence of our engagement, how we contact our customer. This is one of the things I think a lot of companies take for granted, or we trust it's happening. Oh, no. I speak to them at least once a month. You do? Let's see that. What do you consist of to speak to? So starting to look at how many emails are going out. You know, are we keeping them in touch with updates on the product? Are we. Are we talking to them about new learnings? Are we challenging them on their own program? Hey, so that I think that leads into a third area of metrics, like their usage of our solution, our product. You know, how many users do you have and how frequently are you using it? What's your success rate with us? We don't want you just to cash a check every year of what we've sold you. We know to make you successful and the way you're going to see value in us. Our return on investment is how you use the product and what that return is. And I think that's the fourth category. What is that return on investment. For us, I think those are like the four pillars or buckets that come to mind quickly of when you start to measure this particular touch point, this relationship in the journey. I think that's really important. Then we can talk about retention. Do they renew with us or not? Renewals are so important, right? That proves that we have value referrals that could be its own topic in itself and break that apart. But are they bringing us customers? Guys, let's boil this down to one simple thing. A net promoter. There's a reason why we use the word promotion promoter, right? What a promoter is, they will literally promote us and suggest us to their friends and colleagues. It's in the damn question. So measuring that as the ultimate. They say they're a promoter. Are they really a promoter? How many referrals can you tie to a current account or customer? That's huge, right? Can you activate your promoters to become referrals for you? I know I'm going way off tangent here, but. But I love it.

I love it.

But it's a very. I think it's a very dynamic measurement system that you have to have in place in order to be able to step back and say, is this a healthy relationship? Am I doing well here? And then there's this last one, I think, Ian, you and I have really looked at. We have as an organization, but it's the absence of signal in any of those categories where we see white space, where I use the white space, because we use an activity timeline that literally maps out these different touch points and the depth of or the variance of or the success of these different touch points and metrics, we can step back at a very high level and see these pockets of what we call empty space. And to us in our industry, in account experience, if you have a lot of empty space on this timeline, activity timeline, you're in trouble.

Yep.

That's a sign that they don't need you. They're not using you, or they're not talking to you.

Yeah. And I think just to follow up on that topic, so what Kerry's talking about is this, this product we have is account vitals, and it maps out. They're not direct. Well, sometimes it's a mix of indirect and direct. So, like, for example, indirect touch points would be website visits or support tickets. That's actually a direct touch point. But website visits, what else? Carrie, Give me, give me email opens things like that with things that are baked into the overall engagement from a brand level but aren't directly like us, reaching out for a survey on a relationship. And what Kerry's talking about is the absence of signal. And I think a lot of the times companies assume that if a company is, for example, sending you a bunch of support tickets, that's a bad thing. I don't think it is. We don't think it is. We know that if you were sending a bunch of support tickets, the rest of that timeline, just based off of experience and using our own product, that all of those other categories for those direct and indirect touch points will be filled up. That's an engaged account. They want to try to fix things. They need help there. They want help here. When you stop getting support tickets when you stop getting those website visits, the logins, the interactions with chat in the actual app itself. I mean, that's a, that's an absence of signal and that's a scary place to be. We could tell you all the accounts that have turned in the last, honestly three years have had pretty serious absence of signal. And we've known about it ahead of time because we know and we can see the trend in the data where there's just like emptiness, like, wow, that, that doesn't look good. And we start enacting, you know, our win back or save kind of tactics. But it's pretty obvious, man, if they stop engaging with you, that's a bad sign.

Yeah. And I think you summed it up perfectly if you, if I could pick one, one metric to boil them all up to. To me, it's the silence. It's, it's. It's the absence of signal that is the real tell all that. If you really want to predict Churn, if you really want to know it's coming, that's. That's the big one.

So, yeah, that's what it's all about, right? I mean, that's literally why you're running this program at the end of the day is either you want to get more money out of your accounts or you want to retain them and make them buy into your brand at a deeper level. And that's why we do this, Carrie. Right?

That is the goal. Yeah. And I know we're not at the end yet. I know there's a couple other touch points, but I think what's important here to say is a couple of things. I think, number one, Ian, you said this. It's hard. The reason why it's hard is, and I would boil it down to one thing, is fear. I think there is a natural fear in this. I think actually when we were talking about what we were going to talk about on our podcast today, we were talking about the journey points and how different departments own that. And one of the things I said to you, Ian, was when that fear kicks in, when business gets tough or something like Covid comes along, right? And it shakes us at our core and it changes our business dynamic. We all go into fear mode. What do we do? You've all heard the word. We create our silo. We all kind of retract, we protect ourselves, we put. We ford, we fortify our, you know, we fortify our forts, and we get protected and we get ready, right? And what we do is we pull away from our other departments, and we forget the journey. The only person that ends up really suffering in this is the customer, because we lose the flow and the vision of that entire journey as an organization. And I think that fear is what really starts to break down the customer experience and your success. And I think the more you can keep this journey and be able to visualize that and share those metrics across all those different platforms and make that something that everyone's looking at, I think you start to break down the fear and you understand, where does customer experience, where does account experience live? Who should own it? Everyone does. Everyone, every department has to have an investment in this. Otherwise, I don't think you've got a full journey mapped out. I think there was any department or person in your organization that doesn't live somewhere on that journey map. You've missed it. You got to go back and figure out where they fit.

Yeah, I think you summed it up great when you say, you know, fear is the big issue, and knowledge and understanding is the kind of the antidote for fear, to be honest, across multiple different things. I mean, that's how you fix that problem. So getting it to the right departments, and like you said, if they're not, every department's not involved. You've missed something because I am 100% on board with that statement. I used to run a program, as I mentioned previously, a large bank. And it was clear after kind of diving into it, I'm sure, Kerry, you have this exact same experience that every department plays a role. Some are bigger than others, but every department plays a role. I've not found an exception to that role yet. I just haven't. Yeah, that's. That's a really good takeaway for anybody listening to this. If you're, you know, on your little island in one department, managing all the data, feeding up a PowerPoint to a CEO, that's not the way to do it anymore. That is not going to work. It's going to crash and burn because you got to get the data to the right people. You have to get the data to sales, marketing, CSM products, finance. I mean, everybody has to be involved or else, you know, people aren't going to know what you're doing and they're going to start questioning the money that's getting poured into the program. That's a bad place to be. It's a bad spot to be.

Yeah, and I think you have to. You have to be. I don't want to use the word creative, but maybe that is the right word. You'll be very creative and make sure everyone understands how, how they're part of a touch point. I think sometimes people hear a touch point. They think, well, I never talk to the customer. I'm back all the way back there in the room working on, no one ever sees me or talks to me. But they need to understand that they also have a touch point. It might not be through a phone call or an email. It could be through a button on a platform that you click on. It could be in an invoice you receive once a year. You still have a touch point with that relationship.

Definitely.

And I do think the transition, I think, I like to, I like that you use the analogy of the fork in the road. I feel a blog coming on. But that fork in the road of what's the difference between CX and ax, I think is you have to understand it's much more dynamic. It's much more dynamic from a, from a metrics perspective, from a people perspective, from a process perspective.

And that's what our research with MIT basically showed. And that's why we went on this big mission around this account experience concept is because our data showed that these companies that just focus on that, you know, one departmental view and they don't spread it across the organ, they don't get everybody activated and involved. These programs fail at an alarming rate. I think it's like over 70% fail. When you're not measuring the right things, when you're not getting the right people involved and you're not, you know, maintaining buy in at your C level, bad things happen. And it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of one. So that's, that's a really interesting point. We've got about five minutes left, Carrie. So what are the other. Let's just like rattle off the final kind of touch points, you know, no big deal.

Well, there's support. Well, yeah, I know, right? The easy ones, right. But let's be honest, there's support, you know, and I think you, you did a good job of talking about like support doesn't have to be negative support. Is it, you know, tickets, support tickets are not a bad thing. It shows that people are using it and they're challenging you to help them, educate them. And if you can overcome the fear of them asking or putting a ticket in, you've done a good job. Right. Hey, I think we have a spirit at customer gauge of we want to get better, we want your feedback, we want to learn. I think that's why I got Hooked, you know, as before, I was a gagee, I was a customer. And what got me hooked was you found ways to say, give us feedback, we'll work on that. We might not, we might not give it exactly the way you want, but we're listening and we're working on it. Which leads to another touch point, is the product itself. You know, identify the team behind who's hands on, on the product and working on it. And, and, and that has to be another of. Definitely one of, one of the biggest. So I say be customer centric. The beauty of our product team is they're not product centric. They keep in mind the customer experience when it comes to the product, how they use it, what they, what the benefits are of using it. Then I would say, and it was interesting because you said people fail and it kind of leads into that last touch point. What happens when someone doesn't stay with us? What happens when someone makes the hard decision or easy decision, depending to move on or not to utilize us as a solution anymore? And is that a touch point? Is, is our losing of a relationship and then moving on a touch point at customer gauge?

A hundred percent.

Yeah. I think a lot of companies are so terrified of saying goodbye. I think there's a fear in it. We do it in hr, we do it with accounts, we do it with. With even our own vendors that we use. Sometimes saying goodbye becomes this really awkward, uncomfortable. We almost want to shove it in a basket, put it under the bed and pretend it doesn't exist. But the reality is, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ian, but we probably learn more from our goodbyes and our accounts that do churn than probably anywhere else in that journey sometimes.

You know, that's an interesting thought. I never thought of it that way, but they're usually pretty illuminating, especially because some of the things that they turn on. Well, I'm torn because I've been on a lot of those calls and some of the things people churn for are things that we thought we do really well and we don't, or they just didn't know they had access to or something like, like something weird like that.

So even that, that, that proves to us we had a breakdown in communication education. Right? It was, it's almost just like, well, I knew about it and he knew about it. I didn't, you know about it.

You know, I think I might be with you, Carrie. I mean, those are. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, I think those are super interesting calls and pieces of feedback and touch points, because you do get kind of those, like, preconceived notions of what you do well, what you're communicating well, it just gets completely shattered in those meetings. And that does more for repositioning the org around, you know, clearer communication and, honestly, product adjustments if needed. Yeah, that's a good point.

But I also think there's. There's a key component in there is. You got to be brave enough to ask for the feedback. You got to be brave enough to do something with it. I think I'm gonna go back to my analogy of a couple, and I use it all the time because there's not a big difference in account experience, and, let's say marriage experience. Right. But the reality is, is when a relationship is over and you get that, you know, that moment, there's that gut feeling when someone walks to you and says, it's done, we're done. You're like, whoa, what are you talking about? I don't know, Shot, everything's fine. Well, in your eyes, it is. But this, this, and this, and usually this, this, this, and this are things that you thought that bothered you, that upset you. You didn't like that, and you're thinking, like, why don't you say something sooner? And that's why I think, Ian, one of the things that we do is we try to break through that sooner. So it's not a breakup, a bad breakup. We try to get people talking and listening earlier and looking at the metrics and understanding that. But sometimes even ourselves, we've missed it a few times or we didn't pick up on a few of those signals. And I think one of the things we've been brave enough to really not only adopt, but almost amplify that final touch point and say, give us the feedback we really do want to know. And we've had stories of some of those champions moving on to other companies and searching us out because they did such a good job or coming back to us down the road and going, hey, we made a bad mistake breaking up with you. We want back in. But there's been a lot of learnings, and I can just think of a lot of them that we've taken away from that final touch point.

Yeah, I think the theme at Customer Gauge is we're not perfect. We know we're not perfect. We could do a lot of things better, and we want to do a lot of things better. But you know what? We'll damn well learn along the way and optimize around your feedback. I think that's above all else, what we really strive to do. As soon as the company stops listening to your feedback, I think that's, that's the red flag. And then generally things go downhill from there. And you know, that's, that's a theme across anything like that where, you know, if you buy AirPods from Apple and they don't listen to your feedback, I mean, you know what, what do they care? They're so big at that point where. But you're, I feel like just your experience is tied to how well the company listens. And that's been my experience in both B2C and B2B. So we really do pride ourselves on just trying to listen and trying to improve. And we're not just talking about this just to be self serving guys. Like we want you to take these learnings and apply them to your business. It's, we're talking about it from our lens because that's what we know. And we do have other amazing clients we're gonna bring on this thing and have them talk about it from their lens. But this is what we learned along the way. And it's been a journey. As Kerry mentioned in the first two minutes of the podcast, it's a constant journey. We're not off that journey yet. We're not even close. So we know we have a list of 100 things we want to do, but it's a journey, it's an evolution. And I think the message that I think maybe we leave you with is just start the journey. If you don't have that, start it just one foot and step in front of the other type of thing. Like just start it. Do an MVP version 1 and build it out from there. Anything else you want to? Yeah, yeah.

And I'm going to pick up one more thing. Get, get as many people and departments involved as you can. Get their perspective and don't be afraid. I know one of the number one things we run into when we're talking about the journey and we ask them, can you show us or where are you? Well, we're working on it. It's all. They're always working on it. That is the answer. You're going to forever work on it. But show me what you have right now. Just put it out there. Right. Don't be afraid to show where you're at right now. And even if it's a doodle on a napkin that you did the night before, it's one of the biggest things I tell people. Don't be afraid to show us because we can add to that, we can help kind of expose that and show you ours. I've seen 10 versions of ours just in the last year alone. Why? We learned something new. We plugged something different in there. So don't be afraid. Get more people involved for sure would be my big takeaway.

Love it. Terry, thank you for joining me again. Another episode of the Kind of Experience podcast.

RA.