7 Steps of Customer Journey Management

Hello everyone, it's me again, Alain, and today I'll be focusing on a short presentation called the 7 Steps to Successful Customer Journey Management. Now I got asked to put this presentation together mainly to give a little bit of structure to the idea of customer journey mapping, which seems to come up a lot in conversation, and And as I was putting it together, I actually realized that when we talk about customer journey mapping, we actually mean much more than what the textbooks say. So to avoid miscommunication, I actually changed the idea of journey mapping to customer journey management because that's essentially what we're talking about as Futurlab. Not just making a drawing, making a map of what the customer reality looks like, but actually affecting that customer reality at every step in the journey and at every touchpoint in a way that the business can duplicate. So in other words, we're looking at a much bigger picture than most design agencies or even consultancies do. So to get that picture a little bit into a structure, I've tried to put it into 7 steps. It's a perpetual work in progress, so there's probably ways you can improve upon this, and if you find them, please shoot. But what I'd like to do in the next 15-20 minutes is take you through each of those 7 steps and just give you a bit of a flavor of what the activities are that take place at every step of this customer journey management model. So if we get started, basically what we'll be looking at is 7 areas starting with Clearly defining an objective, generating customer insights and market insights, designing a first customer journey map, operationalizing this journey, implementing changes in the business, conducting select deep dives into the business, and reinventing the experience. What I'll be doing is I'll be going through each of these 7 And basically give you some background to each of them. So to start, I would like to begin with the topic of clearly defining the objective of a customer journey management approach. Now, this may sound very, you know, sound a little bit basic, but actually when you think about it, there are multiple approaches to customer journey management. I mean, You can do it as a company-wide effort, you can do it with a few people in a room, you can do it spending a lot of money, you can do it on the back of an envelope. You can actually take a whole bunch of different approaches to managing a customer journey. You can try a total company approach, or you can just start in one store or touchpoint. So to pick the right approach to customer journey management, You actually need to understand what it is you want to achieve with your journey management efforts before you actually start, you know, embarking on making all sorts of war rooms with wall charts and putting Post-it notes on walls, etc. And when you look at the objectives you could possibly have, I've written down a few on this page which I've encountered in the past. A first one is aligning the business, essentially saying that, well, you know, we want to do a customer journey management effort because our business is too silo-oriented, our people are too far away from the customer, and nobody really talks about the customer in their daily work. So what you can use customer journey management for is essentially to say, let's create a journey map where the customer is the center of attention for every department of the business. Because while if you put 5 people around the table from different departments and they have to agree on a common approach, there is always a risk that one of them says, I'm right, and if one says, I'm right, then the other one's wrong, etc. So by putting the customer at the center of that conversation and actually saying, guys, we're working on a customer journey management approach, None of the people around the table are necessarily right, because it's the customer who will decide what is right at every touchpoint, at every step in his relationship. So in other words, Customer Journey Management can become a tool to align all the people who are around the table from the various parts of the business around the customer objectives. So that's the first motivation. Second motivation can be to find and fix weaknesses. in the system somewhere. You have an interface for the customer, you have a website, you have a retail environment which has got issues. Now, customer journey management can be used to actually say, let's find what these issues are, clearly define them, and fix them. Fix the weaknesses. It's like a repair process. Now, the approaches you would take, for instance, compared to aligning the business is that in the first approach you'd be much more generic, you'd be much more, you know, high-level, whereas if you're finding and fixing weaknesses, you're probably really going to go into detail. So in other words, these approaches immediately change based on the objective you take. If you want to differentiate the business, that's another objective for customer journey management. In other words, you know, everybody in the industry does the same thing for the customers, but we want to have an exceptional exceptional experience. Okay, so then you can use customer journey management to design and implement that exceptional experience. You can use it for resource allocation. In other words, if you want to know like, okay, there are 20 areas where we can put our money, which are the ones that have highest impact on the customer and on the business? So what is it that actually drives our resource allocation apart from our own opinion? What really matters for the customer? That's another way of dealing with it. Envisioning the future. I mean, what is the customer experience going to look like in 5 years, in 10 years, or even further? Managing the value drivers, which is another way, another reason for customer journey management. In other words, you want to make sure that you offer the right value to the customer at the right moment in your relationship, but inversely that you also capture the value back from your customers. So in other words, customer journey management can be used for that. It can be used to establish an operational framework for the business. In other words, what does a customer expect at every step of the relationship, and what does this mean in terms of processes, KPIs, people behaviors, all these things? It can be used to develop a digital framework where you basically say, what is the journey that the customer goes on? What is the data we're looking for? How does it really— how will the data be captured? How will the data be used? What will we do with the systems in the company to support the experience, etc.? And many, many, many more objectives. That's what the question mark's about. Because in this step 1, what you do is actually just say, what is it that we want to achieve? You don't go into the process yet of achieving that. You just basically describe what it is that you want to achieve. And from a Futurelab perspective, commercially, this actually means that we start with a conversation which goes beyond customer journey mapping or management or design or whatever it is, and we actually take the conversation to the business objective of whoever's sitting on the other side of the table. If somebody says to us, I want to do a customer journey map, Our question is not how should it look, it is why. What do you want to achieve with that? Because depending on what they want to achieve, the exact approach we take will vary, and the customer will have a different experience with us than with a competitor who comes in with a standardized one-size-fits-all approach. Which gets me step number 2. Once the objective has clearly been defined, many other agencies or consultancies immediately rush into meeting rooms with clients where they hang all sorts of Post-it notes and start doing all sorts of activities. At FutureLab, we take a very deliberate step to say that every journey management effort needs to be rooted in customer insights. Customer insights which are both absolute— in other words, absolute is what customers are thinking, what they are feeling, what they're looking at— but also in the context of the market and the competition. So the second step is all about collecting the information we need to be able to go into the process of journey management, and this information typically comes in 3 forms. First are customer insights. This is a picture of what is on the customer's mind. What are their needs? What are their desires? What are their hopes, their fears? How do they consume products? What products compete with each other? I mean, mobile phones for a while used to compete with Mars bars, because if you're a teenager and you've got €5 left, are you going to pay it on your prepaid subscription for your mobile phone, or are you going to use it to buy a Mars bar? So So what is all that thinking that's going on in the customer mind, and how does it relate to the experience and to the journeys we are trying to manage? So that's one group of insights we want to collect, not in a general market research sense— that can be part of it— but also really what's on the mind of the customer. Secondly, it's competitive insights. No company operates in isolation, and competitors are continuously moving and changing the perceptions of customers and the way the business is organized. So what is the competition up to today but also tomorrow? What's the mindset? Where are they going? Because any customer journey will not just be influenced by what we do but also by what our competitors do. Today, for instance, a company like Tesla is reinventing the whole automotive industry because they repair cars from a distance. Suddenly consumers are learning, ah, I may not always need to go to the garage to get my car repaired. So any other manufacturer suddenly is put with a question which they didn't have an answer to. So essentially competitive insights are sort of a second group of pieces of information we can generate and basically compile at this stage. And finally, there's market insights, which is where's the world going? What are the trends? Where's technology taking us? Where is demographics taking us? How's the economy going to evolve? All these elements again are key insight to use in further customer journey management, because essentially if the world changes, customers will change, and the business will need to change. Now those 3 insight categories typically are collected through a whole host of materials. There is voice of the customer or NPS research. There's desk research in which, as Futurelab, we go into companies and really try and raid their cupboards because typically they have massive amounts of market research data lying around which nobody ever looks at, but which is a goldmine in information. We can have customer panels, we can have customer conversations, conversations with channel partners. In other words, if you're in a retail business or if you're in a business with repairmen, these people can tell you massively interesting things. Cross-industry expert panels— having people from multiple industries look at a challenge and understand. Like, for instance, have hotel people look at the way computers should be sold, and suddenly you get completely new insights of what works and what doesn't. Observation research, mystery shopping, deep insight techniques. In other words, every trick in the book and anything which hasn't been yet invented, we try and apply to generate insights and really understand what's on the customer's mind, where's the competition going, and how do the macro trends in the market influence what we're trying to achieve. Once we've got all this information together, and you have to imagine this as a cupboard, a digital cupboard full of information and insights, which gets summarized into a couple of very clear points of view, then we can get started on the real journey mapping. Now the most important thing when designing a first version customer journey map is to realize that it needs to be simple. If you look at the number of permutations involved in multiplying all the number of touchpoints a business has with the number of steps in a customer journey, with the number of customer types that can be involved, with the number of, I don't know, different scenarios for business which exist, etc., etc., you very quickly come to a, let's say, a matrix of thousands of elements, touchpoint moments, to be managed. Now that permutation is too big for any business to manage for the first time. Yes, it may be very accurate, but nobody will understand it, nobody will care, and nobody will know what to do about it. So when doing journey mapping, it's really easy to get lost in the detail of every touchpoint, which is why it's important to start simple and focus on the big picture first. Yes, there are a few exceptions which I'll get to later, but generally simplicity is the key. And simplicity means designing a customer journey which has a number of components. The way it looks, you know, that's up to the creative moment. Yes, we can have some templates, but generally the way it looks is not that important as long as the right elements are included. Element number 1 is the outside-in journey steps. In other words, the steps the customer sees in the customer journey from his or her own perspective. This is a perspective that is different from the perspective of the company. For instance, when we were doing work in a telco business, there were people who basically— or the business basically did not consider leaving the business as a customer as a step in the customer journey. It was like, yeah, customer's gone, end of story. Now, from a customer perspective, if you've ever tried to leave a telecom operator, everybody, every one of us knows that it's a very real step. It's actually a step that can take very long, be very frustrating, and, you know, have a lot of headache. So essentially, the steps in in the journey need to be defined from that customer perspective. So if you're a telco, you have to have a step in there, customer leaves us. If you're an automotive company, typically the step between I have bought my car and I receive my car is forgotten. There's a waiting period, which for many brands can be 3 months, 4 months, 7 months, 10 months before delivery of the car is taken. Period, which is typically not recognized by the brand, but at the same time from a customer perspective is a very emotional, interesting, what's going on with my car period. So the first element to make sure that's included in a first journey map is the steps in the journey as the customer sees them. Associated to that is the second element, which is the customer mindset. at every one of these steps. So in other words, if a customer takes a step in a customer— in a journey, what's on their mind? If a customer walks into a computer store, what is he or she thinking? If a customer walks into a car dealership, what is he or she thinking? If a purchasing director calls in a vendor, calls in FutureLab, what's on his or her mind rationally? What are they looking for? But also emotionally, what is on their mind? What are the emotional risks they're taking? What decisions do they need to make? Do they care? Don't they care? You know, what's their state of mind? Related to that are then elements number 3 and 4, which are the customer expectations. In other words, at every step of this journey, what does the customer expect? And expect means I pay money in order that you do X, whatever X looks like. A customer expectation may be something like, when I get— when I receive a letter describing the account balance I have in my life insurance policy, I want to understand that letter. Yeah. So it can be very basic things, but it's a clearly defined expectation from the customer which he or she expects the company to fulfill for the money they pay. If the company does not fulfill that expectation in the eyes of the customer, the company has failed. Not necessarily a reason to leave the company, but it's just so it's clear, this is the criteria for success from a customer perspective. Associated to that are also the choice drivers. Choice drivers define whether a customer customer moves on in the relationship? What is the driver that makes a customer say, I continue with the relationship, I continue with the customer journey, or I'm out of here, I step out, I forget about it? By having these choice drivers very clearly defined as well, companies can see, okay, there are 10 expectations, but out of those 10 expectations, 3 are real choice drivers. We get it right, customer moves to the next step. We get it wrong, we lose the business. So basically, that actually gives a very clear picture of what the company should achieve to meet the customer expectations. Final element in this first journey map are then the advocacy drivers. This is a description of activities which basically make customers go beyond satisfaction, where companies exceed customer expectations, but not in a frivolous way like just doing crazy stuff, but in a way that actually drives advocacy. In other words, in a way that makes customers talk well or talk about the business to their friends, to their family members, etc. These are the elements that go into this first touchpoint map. Now this is a very high-level map, typically somewhere between 12 and 15 steps, that's it. It fits on an A3, you can hang it on a wall, sometimes you can make it very colorful, but essentially the idea is that it's the kind of map which if you sit down with somebody and you take 5 minutes to explain it, it is so intuitive that people immediately go, I get it. Yeah. I understand what you're trying to say, I understand what's on the customer's mind, and I understand what the customer expects at a minimum, what makes him stay with us or go, and what actually drives him to advocacy. That picture is the 3rd step. Now, as FutureLab, we have a slightly different way than other agencies or consultancies to come to that map because the traditional approach for this type of exercise is that you put people in a room where the customer in a room with lots of Post-it notes, flip charts, and colorful little hats and whatever to actually design that journey together. Now that process is actually quite labor-intensive and has the downside from a content perspective that it relies on the immediate knowledge of the people in the room. And it relies on group thinking, on what is right and what is wrong, etc. And actually, it assumes that everybody in the room will have read and understood all the customer insight information which has been gathered before. Now, that's why we take a very different approach. And what we actually do is we take all the insight information we gathered in step 2, and based on that, we actually formulate A first thesis. So we actually, as Futurlab, we go away and we basically come back with a ready-made first journey map. We just put it on the table, it's pre-designed, it doesn't look like super luxurious drawings, but it's clear. And we actually say, okay, here are your 10, 12, 15 steps. This is what customers expect at every step. This is the customer mindset. This is, you know, basically come with the whole picture. That picture we present in a workshop to the client with the key business stakeholders we try to convince, and they can then shoot at it, they can then improve it, and we change where we need to change. But we also, because we have the knowledge of all the customer insights, we fight back if the business basically says they want to change something because they don't like customer reality. We're sort of the customer advocate. in that front. But essentially, by doing it that way, we make sure that everybody has the opportunity to buy into the journey map that was designed, which is important. So it's not a map that got designed by some consultants out there, but actually, yes, we designed it, but they co-created it, so it's actually their map. Secondly, we make sure that the map that gets produced is rooted in customer insights, so there's no workshop group-thinking blah blah going on. This is based on hard data and reality. Thirdly, we make sure that the map that gets presented also gets a dose of reality thinking in there, because yes, you can design a beautiful map from a customer's perspective, but if it's totally unrelated to the way the business operates, you know, it's kind of hard to sell it afterwards. So we get that dose of reality. And finally, what it does is that it creates a level of speed which is typically impossible in doing it the other way. Now, the other way being working with lots of Post-it notes, going away, improving, doing it again and again and again, which we understand why other agencies and consultancies do it because it maximizes billable hours, but actually it's maximizing billable hours at the expense of the client. Client because basically we just keep the client busy for hours and hours while we could do the work for them 3 times quicker. So, and this is major feedback we get from clients as well, by walking in with a thesis, the client may not necessarily agree with the thesis, but he realizes that we've just saved sometimes weeks or months of work. Final step then is that we validate this final thesis with the customer. Because there will be some group thinking going on in those workshops. As Futurlab, we will have gotten it wrong. I mean, we're human, we understand, we try and we do our best and we understand things, but we will make mistakes. So basically the final step is to go out to the customer and say, listen, this is the customer journey we came with, this is the thing we think is on your mind, what you expect, what, you know, really would delight you, etc. Is this correct? And the customers actually will come back with, yeah, that's fine. No, that's totally different for me. And again, that's not to slavishly follow just whatever the customer says, but basically by taking that input on board as well, we can validate— we can come with a validated customer journey map which reflects the customer's reality and it reflects the point of view of the key stakeholders in the business. Which essentially is then the place you can start from for further work. And this further work takes the shape of operationalizing the journey. Now, to operationalize a customer journey basically means turning it into a language that the business can work with. Earlier on, I used the example that one customer expectation might be I want to make sure that I understand the letter that goes out to describe my account balance in my life insurance policy. Now, if you work in IT, you actually have a direct role to play in that letter, but frankly, you can't really do anything with that statement. If you work in legal, probably you have a role to play. If you work in finance, you'll have a role to play. But basically, looking at the statement by its own, I want to make sure that I understand the letter, it's kind of hard for people to really act. And essentially, so that the business can act, the customer journey which got designed needs to be translated into operational standards. And these standards need to be at a level that is significant enough that they are customer noticeable. In other words, it needs any improvement or any action taken by the business needs to be noticeable by the customer to exist. In other words, if I come up with a— let's say I'm now speaking into a microphone and I come up with a better way of organizing microphones, but there is no way that either you listening to this listening to this presentation or me speaking actually notice it, then frankly whatever technical innovation went on into that microphone is completely irrelevant. So essentially the standards which come out have to be customer noticeable, and secondly, it should also allow anybody working on microphones in this particular case to know whether they're doing the right thing. whether they are in their job in IT, in finance, in legal doing the right things. Now this means that basically 4 types of standards need to be defined. The first group is what I would call minimum customer experience standards. Yeah, this is the Olympic minimum, this is the minimum to play, this is based on the customer expectations we discussed In the previous point. Now minimum does not mean easy. Minimum standards may be well above whatever the company is delivering today, but essentially the minimum standard is what the customer would expect. In other words, if the customer says, "I would like to understand that letter of my annual statement for my life insurance," that's the standard. Yeah, it's either achieved or it isn't. Now some places they we call this brilliant basics. You can you can play with the language. But essentially it is, what is the minimum the business needs to achieve from an experience perspective? And it's in a very black— formulated in a very black and white way. I either understand the letter or I don't. Second set of standards are advocacy standards. That is about exceeding the expectation to a point that customers actually want to tell their friends and family about it. That is a description, again, of how customers would like to be treated beyond those minimum expectations. Typically, those go very much into unmet needs, things that customers have missed in the past but essentially don't even know how to formulate. In other words, if I go into McDonald's every time, I don't even think about the fact that I might want to have a glass of wine with my burger. Why? Because they never ordered it. However, if you really dig into it, I might appreciate it. Not that I go to McDonald's, it's a bad example, but anyway, you get my point. It's that advocacy standards are descriptions, operational descriptions of how to go beyond customer expectations. Third standards to be defined are employee behaviors. Employee behaviors are the things that employees do When the manual runs out. In other words, there is always an operational manual which either relates to customers or not, but there is a moment that employees need to improvise. Yeah, customers do something different, the process doesn't work the way you anticipate it, then it comes down to the way the employee behaves. Those behaviors need to be written down. So in other words, For instance, at Ritz-Carlton is always a beautiful example. At Ritz-Carlton, the rule is you anticipate the customer's needs. So in other words, if a customer has a need, you need to be quicker than the customer in providing the answer to that need. So because if the customer needs to ask, you haven't done your job. Now that's a behavior which basically means that everybody knows they have to be on the lookout for customer opportunities. Another rule is that no matter what your job is, You will always make sure that a Ritz-Carlton hotel is clean. So in other words, if you see a coffee cup lying around somewhere, if you see some dust on the floor, if you see a cigarette butt, you pick it up no matter what your job is, no matter what you're doing. Those are behaviors which are clearly codified and every employee in the business can react to. That's a third type of standards. And finally, there's the data system standards. Standards. Data system standards are basically standards which describes the data and system information which needs to be available at every touchpoint to deliver the experience that the customer deserves. In other words, the minimum standards, the advocacy standards, and the employee behaviors— what is the data that's required if you want to basically make sure that employees always greet customers by their names, they need to have a system in place which basically makes sure that they can very quickly look up the customer name if they can't think of it. That's basically the 4th type of standards. Now those 4 standard types we again approach in exactly the same way as in the mapping the journey. So in other words, rather than again going around and making all sorts of complex workshops and all that sort of thing, We basically formulate a thesis for each of these standards based on customer insights, in which we may go around the business and talk more to customers. But essentially, we formulate the thesis, then we go around and align with various business stakeholders on these standards. This can be individual conversations or group workshops. Based on that, we again go back to the customer, and very often this can be done in parallel with the previous process, we sit down and we actually validate and say, okay, customer, these were the steps, this was on your mind, this is what we would like to offer to you, these are the minimum standards, this is the advocacy standards, this is the employee behaviors, what do you think of that? And finally, that then allows us to do an exercise where we can prioritize the key standards and focus areas, because by now we are looking at hundreds of permutations already. We've got a number of steps in the journey, we've got minimum standards, advocacy standards, employee behaviors. Let's say we've got 15 steps, at least 4, 5, 6 pieces of information. It's getting a lot, and that means that as a business, if you want to hit everything, you're not going to hit anything because it's just too much. So what's needed at this final step is that when you see at all the standards that have to be met, you again start saying, what are the most important ones? Typically driven by the customer voice, but it can also be driven by brand decisions, company decisions, or whatever. For example, in ING, we basically said, let's focus on 6 standards for every country. That's it. And we only do minimum standards. We don't touch advocacy standards. Employee behaviors will come somewhere down the road. We just want to focus that those 6 areas at the various moments in the customer journey, they run smoothly, and then we'll see further. That makes the whole program then suddenly from an operational perspective also much more manageable by the people, because essentially what you do is you take the abstract customer journey and customer mindset, you turn it into minimum standards which can be related to clear KPIs, processes, behaviors, and actions, and you actually say, you know what, you don't need to do all of them, just focus on these 6, and that's something people can work with because they can get their teeth into it, they can project manage it, and they can actually go like tick the box, I did it, it's done. Which then gets us to the 5th element, which is actually then moving to action. Because everything we've done to date is just describing what the business should be doing. The business isn't doing anything yet. Now, this is where it's crucial to clearly scope and prioritize again the changes that need to happen. In other words, we've described a picture of what the business should be doing— minimum standards, advocacy standards, behaviors, etc. Now, that picture by definition is going to be different from the picture of what the business is doing today. And essentially what we need to do is close that gap. And when looking at the actions to close that gap, there are actually 4 areas again which need to be looked at. And it's 4 types of gaps, I would say. The first type of gap is customer performance. Going back to understanding the letter that basically has my annual statement of my— of the money I have in my life insurance, there is a customer performance measure, which is the percentage of customers that correctly understand that letter, which can be measured. It can be measured by asking customers, did you understand? And then secondly, following up with, so what exactly did you understand? So you eliminate the risk that customers think they understood, but they don't. Now that gives you, for instance, you have 27% customer performance on that minimum standard. Basically, that means if your target, because it's a minimum standard, the target is 100%. So if your target is 100%, that means you've got a good 73% to go. That's one type of gap analysis. Second type of gap analysis is operational readiness. Operational readiness actually means how capable is the organization of actually sending out letters that people can understand. I mean, if there is a standardized process internally and there are computer systems which only allow the company to send out one type of letter, which has to look a certain way, and there's all sorts of legal restrictions, and the company doesn't know how to deal with those restrictions and all those elements, that means that the company actually isn't operationally ready to meet the standard. Yeah. Which is a second layer, because customer performance can be poor or good because the company really is well organized, or it can be just lucky. Yeah. So this is where operational readiness comes in. So it's actually a gap analysis to say, okay, to hit these minimum standards, to hit these advocacy standards, we have to have the following operational processes in place. Have we got them? Have we got them not? That is the second type of gap analysis going on. Third type of gap analysis is the readiness of the people. We have talked about behavioral guidelines, we have talked about the way that people act when the manual runs out. Now, people readiness is about the fact that— or the question whether people actually want to be behaving in such a way. Yeah, because if they don't want to, then you're kind of dead. Secondly, it's also about making sure that the people have the skills to behave in a certain way. Yes, I want to be, you know, proactive and predict the customer's needs and anticipate his needs, But I've actually never learned how to do that. I mean, it kind of sounds daunting. I mean, frankly, if I speak for myself, if somebody told me you have to anticipate customer needs in a hotel environment, I wouldn't know where to start. I'd love to do it, but I would not know how to start or where to start. So there must be tricks, there must be techniques. So that's a skill thing. And finally, there's the ability thing. So in other words, if I If I want to, if I know how to, the business also has to allow me to do it. Imagine again going back to that hotel. If I have to anticipate customer needs and that requires talking to customers, and okay, I want to do that, I've actually had the training, but every time I want to have a conversation with the customer, my boss kind of calls me, yeah, yeah, but that has to be done and that has to be done and that has to be done, and I never really get around to having these conversations. conversations, well, essentially that is going to make it impossible for me to deliver. So in other words, people readiness is about, are the people willing, are the people skilled, and are the people able to do what is asked from them from a behavioral perspective? And finally, there's resource availability, because designing the perfect customer journey and implementing it and managing it and Whichever way you look at it costs money, so you have to make sure also that the business has the money and the resources and the people and the time available to actually deliver against those standards. So in other words, when it comes to operationalizing and implementing the improvements and the changements which need to happen from a customer journey perspective, There is these 4 areas to be looked at, and typically as Futurlab, we look at them in those 4 steps. 4 steps meaning a gap analysis. What does reality look to— look like today? What will it look like tomorrow? Customer perspective, operational readiness perspective, people perspective, resource availability perspective. Secondly, looking at all that information, Ask ourselves again, have we got the right priorities? Can we actually execute this? And this is a very important step because the best strategy is not the strategy that looks best on paper. It is not the strategy that will make everything look beautiful. It is the strategy that actually gets implemented. So in other words, the question is, when you look at everything that needs to be done, Can the business actually pull this off, or do we need to reprioritize? Do we need to rescope? Do we have to become more modest in our ambitions or go and ask somebody for extra money? That conversation needs to take place. Then implement those changes. That's the third step. Just do it. And finally, after 6 months, after a year, after the program's executed, go back, validate the impact, and keep going. improving. So this is how then this operationalized customer journey from, you know, we design it in step 3, we operationalize it in step 4, in step 5 this is how we implement the changes and the improvements. Which gets us to the second last step, which is where most design agencies actually operate when they say we do touchpoint Or we do journey mapping. This is deep diving. In other words, when you have your big customer journey, you know, you're managing the big picture. However, there will be moments that you'll need to fix whatever is happening on the website. You know, the ordering process for a telephone and a telephone subscription with a telco on the website. There's something that doesn't work, there's something that breaks down. Or I am a telco operator and I have issues with the billing of people who have traveled abroad on holidays and ran a bigger bill than foreseen. Yeah, so it's a very detailed exercise. Now you will have to have those conversations, and they will start coming up very quickly once you start mapping your bigger-level journeys and you start collecting your customer insights. Now the process there is slightly different than in everything I've been describing, because in everything I've been describing, the process has always been from big picture to more detailed, but not really super detailed. If you do a deep dive to improve a touchpoint, To improve a swim lane, and just to be clear, a swim lane is the route that a customer takes across all the various channels of a business. So for instance, I start online, I go into a store, I go back online, I check my mobile, I talk to somebody in the call center, etc. So that's basically called the swim lane. So if you want to improve that process, those steps that a customer takes, Or if you want to really focus on a specific persona, because the journeys so far we've made are very generic, but now you want to zoom in on a certain segment or zoom in on a certain personality. If you want to do deep dives in any of these 3 areas, essentially you want to go detailed, detailed to the extreme level, down to the last screen, down to the last button. Down to the last individual behavior that gets involved. Here, basically, the process is essentially quite— it's straightforward, but you have to get it right. First, you select the priority focus area you want to work on. In other words, I want to work on billing for people who have been traveling abroad with their phone and ran up a very high bill and come back and cannot pay that bill. That's a very precise issue which you want to address. Then you go into fact-finding and interviews. I mean, typically people go into process maps at that stage, and we don't. We actually first go and find what is going on with the customer, what is going on with the business, what is, you know, what are the real customer stories that come out. And we actually put these stories almost as artifacts on a wall where we actually describe everything that's going on in that process, whether it's a touchpoint, a swimlane, or persona, or whatever. We actually describe everything that's going on around the element we want to improve on a wall or on a PowerPoint, can be done as well. And based on that, We start working with the people in the business because now we pull out the Post-it notes. Now we go very detailed. We start working with the people in the business to develop a thesis about what's wrong, what should be fixed, and how will we fix it. So this is very operational that we go. And at the end of that exercise, that thesis basically comes out with a very clear action plan for the business. Which we can go with, validate on the one hand with the customer. Is this the way we would like, you would like to be dealt with by us? And also validate it with the business because, you know, no matter how many people you put in a room, there's always going to be somebody who's forgotten. So is it legally possible? Is it technically possible? Is it computationally possible? Is it financially possible? Whatever it is. So validate it and improve it. Basically turn it into an action for the business. But that allows that the deep dive essentially just goes into those areas which are important. Important because customers say so, because there's lots of complaints, because it's a big volume area, whatever it is. But you only focus down in the detail where it really matters. Once you do that, you're very action-oriented. However, beyond that detail, beyond those key moments where you really want to fix something, You just stay at the higher level because at the higher level everybody stays with you. In the detail, you need specialists in the room. Which gets me to the final step, and this is taking a little longer than the 20 minutes I mentioned earlier, which is the reinvention of the experience. Now, this actually is something I've been thinking about lately. I mean, lately, I mean the last 2 months more and more, and it comes from the realization that even the best journey map, even the best journey management process, will be focused on today's reality. It will not take into account the future. It will not take into account new technology, etc., which means that essentially it is a activity. Because if you organize life the way it is today, that's good, that helps you be professional and operationally efficient and all these things, but at the same time you're also locking yourself in to the ways the business works today. That was okay 50 years ago when things didn't change that massively anymore, but today we live in a world that industries are transforming themselves at the speed of light. New technologies are coming in, societal trends are changing, and essentially people are changing, customers are changing on an almost monthly basis. So the reinventing the experience step is actually taking a step back from the customer journey mapping and customer journey management work that's been done and actually say, okay, now let's take a 5-year or 10-year horizon and And see what happens to the industry and how we will respond to that. See what happens to customers and how we will respond to that. Now, if you say that's a long timeline and that's not really practical, I typically challenge that, and I have been challenging people on that in the past few months more and more, in the sense that companies are making investments today and accountancy departments are very often using the amortization schedules schedules of 5 years, 7 years, even 10 years or more, depending on the type of investment that is made. However, if you look at the speed of technological change, and the speed of even societal change today, 5, 7 years is a massive timeframe. If you would have told anybody 5 years ago that— again, going to automotive— suddenly there would be a car brand which would not require a garage to repair your car, which would just update it online, people would have said you were nuts. Today, there's a company called Tesla which is doing it. And things like that are happening in any industry, every industry. 3D printing is going to transform supply chains everywhere within 3 to 5 years. If you're building a factory which is basically assuming a world where the 3D printing does not exist, and you amortize that factory over 15 years, which would not be unreasonable, then basically in 3 to 5 years you are sitting with an outdated factory on your books, which doesn't really reflect reality. So that's why this forward-looking exercise is important, and the key elements in there are 3, Again, 3 key components. The first one is an industry vision document. Industry vision document is a document in which you describe what the future of the industry will look like. Not in an airy-fairy way, really looking at the next 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, 10 years, whatever the horizon is. Just a description. Once that description is done, it can become, or basically can be the basis for what is called a Book of Future Opportunities. A Book of Future Opportunities takes this industry vision document, takes the existing competitive position, takes the customer insights which have been collected, and just redescribes them as how the future could look. Now this is not something to rush out and then immediately implement, but it would work more like a concept Concept car in the automotive industry. Every brand occasionally makes this really super cool car which they never put into production, but essentially they do make it to see where the future of cars is going to be. How is it going to be like, you know, what it's going to be like in 5 years when cars automatically come to your door and pick you up and drive you without even touching the wheel and all that sort of thing. They don't really produce those cars straight away, but they are looking at them to see what's going on. So the Book of Future Opportunity kind of describes what are customer experiences, what are customer journeys that could exist 5 years from now, 10 years from now, so that basically it becomes an inspiration to the business, and parts of that customer— future customer experience and journey can be translated into the third element, which is a roadmap, a step-by-step approach which describes how the business is going to get there. For instance, we've been talking— I talked about 3D printing earlier. Yes, we are still going to build that factory, but we're going to make sure that the machinery stands on wheels so we can wheel them out whenever it comes around and we can put 3D printers in place or whatever it is. But essentially that there's a roadmap that companies can actually work against. And this is a little bit where customer journey management and Profit Scanning starts overlapping in a way. I mean, there's some connection between it, but essentially it has a number of steps starting with Trend Analysis. This is where we don't act as a trend agency, but we just collect all the information from any trend agency and any future watcher and whatever and turn that into an analysis which basically says, we think This is what your industry vision future will look like. We turn that into a thesis which we bring into visioning workshops where we sit around the table with key executives in the business and actually say, this is what's going on, this is how your future will look like. Let's improve it, let's develop that, let's develop that concept car, let's develop that concept vision together. Then there's the reality checks. In other words, in how far, you know, okay, we've come up with this beautiful picture, in how far can the business handle the transition to that? What is the roadmap we deal with? How are we going to make sure that we will actually be able to deliver against that vision? And also, how will we make sure that in case the vision was wrong, that we can adapt, you know, that there's a reality check process also even on the thinking. And finally, that gets us into a continuous innovation cycle where, for instance, you make a plan like this every 3 years. Every year you get around the table to update it and to see how you're doing. And every year you push the boundary a little bit further. So it's like a recurring cycle where the experience continuously gets reinvented. At a concept level and gradually in reality so it's noticeable by the customer. Right, my voice is almost gone, but I hope this was a useful presentation. And as usual, if you have any questions, remarks, or ways to do it better next time, don't hold back. And I look forward to seeing you whenever I see you. Bye-bye.