Journey mapping, management, and orchestration. They’re all just different names for the same thing, right? Well not quite. Even though they are all aimed at creating a more valuable customer experience, they all play unique roles.
Today we’re exploring customer journey management with Eytan Hattem, CEO and Co-Founder of Cemantica. We’ll delve into how understanding and managing customer journeys can transform business strategies and customer experiences.
About Eytan Hattem
Customer experience has always been at the heart of Eytan’s career and his passions; from his proven track record in international Customer Engagement projects through to his work as a business consultant supporting clients in their digital transformation journey.
As a CCXP certified professional, Eytan consults global businesses across multiple sectors to help them understand and transform their customer journeys through best practices and innovative technologies.
A true evangelist and thought leader, Eytan speaks and writes regularly within CX industry media with authority and passion plus mentors fellow CX professionals to spread the power of customer experience!
Resources
Cemantica website: https://www.cemantica.com
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today, we’re exploring customer journey management with Aidan Haddam, CEO and co-founder of Cemantica. We’ll delve into how understanding and managing customer journeys can transform business strategies and customer experiences. Aidan, welcome to the show. Hi, Greg. Great to be here. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don’t we get started, though, with, you know, give us a little background on you and your role at Semantica and a little bit about what Semantica does.
Eytan Hattem: So I’m managing the company. I started, I did my CCXP certification six years ago, but before that I was also doing consulting in customer experience and mainly in customer engagement implementations. And this is where I got to know customer experience from looking at things from customer perspective. The company that created with two other co-founders in 2018 was aimed at transforming all the knowledge we had into a platform, into a technology, which is a journey management platform, and which allows the customers to document their customer experience strategy, map their journeys, and then manage all the outcomes of the journeys from opportunities, solutions, the execution, the measurement, and the refinement of the whole cycle. I think that the main differentiation was at that time, and still is probably today, is the fact that you manage the journey as a continuous improvement cycle and not as a one-off exercise.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so I want to get to that first, actually, is just this, like I touched on in the intro, just the difference. And it’s not that one is better than the other. They all have roles to play. But could you Dive a little deeper on the customer journey management, what exactly it is, as well as how it’s different from you’ve got journey mapping on one side and maybe journey orchestration on the other. I’m not even sure, but if you could talk us through that a little bit more, that would be great.
Eytan Hattem: Yeah, I actually like the question because this is something I’m asked pretty frequently. In the mind of people, this is like a linear process. They think that there’s journey mapping and then journey management is an evolution of that and journey orchestration is an evolution of journey management. And the fact is, it’s not linear. Each one of them has a role to play. So when you look at journey mapping, this is the practice of mapping a customer journey to having a persona, mapping this journey of the persona, identifying the experience frictions, and maybe having as an outcome, a list of opportunities for customer experience improvement. Then if you look at journey management, journey management is about managing this as a continuous improvement cycle. Meaning that you don’t stop just, I have a list of opportunities, but you’re supposed to continue to solution ideation, transforming these opportunities. prioritizing them and transforming them into solution canvases. And then the solution canvas is transprioritized and transformed into project based on a cost benefit analysis matrix. You’re executing the projects, you’re measuring the outcome after a certain while. and then you’re refining the cycle again. This is journey management. It means there’s a continuous cycle here where you have journey teams, sort of journey committees that are responsible to manage the journey over time. Why do they need to manage it over time and not just to do it as a one-off? It’s because customer needs and expectations are changing over time and also the organization is changing. So if both ends are changing, the journey isn’t static, it’s a dynamic journey. And since this is a dynamic journey, it’s something that has to be done over time and continuously and not as a one-off. Then there’s the third piece of journey orchestration. This is also not an evolution of journey management. This is something that plugs into the journey management practice and is helping you bring the personalization based on data in the touch points, either to the individual that is currently trying to buy something on the website, or as a group looking on persona segmentation, what are the improvement or the statistics or the insights that we can conclude from the behavior of certain persona segments. And based on these conclusions, we are supposed then to act through the journey management cycle, we’re supposed to identify the orchestration engine is helping us to identify these insights feeding the journey. And then from the journey, you’re supposed to manage the improvement cycle. So journey mapping is a technique, is a tool to manage, to map these journeys and to identify the experience frictions. This is the technique. Journey management is about transforming that into a continuous improvement cycle. And the journey orchestration is the engine that feeds you with insights, statistics, data, findings, customer routes, optimization scenarios, everything you need in order to take customer-centric decisions that are data-driven.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so this is, thanks for that explanation. Cause I think it does, it does make everything more clear. And yet I think there’s, there’s a lot of people that are in a lot of teams that are maybe tasked with one of those things, maybe two of those things, but not really tying them all together. What do you think is, you know, you touched on the, on the value of, of this because things are continually changing and it’s a dynamic situation, both internally and externally. But, you know, why are more organizations prone to look at this as, you know, maybe they mapped a journey and so now we’re done or, you know, what’s, what’s, what’s kind of getting in the way of a more dynamic view of this, of these things?
Eytan Hattem: I think there are two reasons. The first one is, first of all, it’s a question of maturity and the ability to tie customer experience to the business goals. I think many organizations are not doing the work of translating the customer experience measures and efforts that are invested in that space into business outcomes. So in many cases, that stays like an NPS score. We’ve improved the NPS, but people aren’t really able to tie and explain that the fact that we have improved the NPS score has resulted with these business outcomes. So I think, first of all, there’s a gap here that makes people stay in the journey mapping space because it’s a shorter exercise. You do it one time. maybe there is more familiarity with it. And the other practices, the journey management and journey orchestration, I think they’re a bit more recent, you know, as a terminology and as a space. So there is less familiarity with what they can bring to the table. So probably these two things are a question of maturity, the lack of connection between customer experience and business outcomes that people don’t understand the value of having journey management and journey orchestration in. And thirdly, there’s of course the question of effort, putting that in place. requires from the organization, people, resources, knowledge, capabilities. And in many cases, they’re just lacking the skills to do it. So connecting all of it together requires the customer experience practice, you know, in place. And this is something which is an effort and requires some investment.
Greg Kihlstrom: From the customer standpoint, customers don’t necessarily care how it’s done, but they care that it’s done. Right. So it’s like how what is the customer expectation here? I mean, they they probably want an organization or a brand to map the journey out so they understand them. But, you know, what what what are customers really looking for is the outcome here?
Eytan Hattem: Yeah, I like this question as well because in many practices that I see today, like people say we’re doing journey management and they’re stopping at a list of opportunities or with a solution canvas. If you didn’t execute anything, nothing happened to the customer. So there’s no impact. The fact that you and me are brainstorming in a room and we are super happy with the solution we found to a problem, but we never put it in place Nothing happened. It’s worth nothing. So I think customers expect to be listened, but to also to act upon the insights that you derive from what they told you. It doesn’t mean that you need to do everything a customer told you, because you’re not supposed to stick to an individual feedback. You’re supposed to look at it from a persona perspective as a group. of feedbacks that you’re receiving. And then you need to act upon it and you need to give visibility to customers on what you’re planning to do with the comment they gave you. So if I’m looking at it from customer perspective, definitely they want to be listened, they doubt that you do something with what they say, But they are and they’re surprised when you act upon their feedback. This is something that surprises customers today. They like don’t expect someone will really come back to them. But when someone does come back, it makes a difference. I had many cases that I have seen. with a bad experience of the customer, the fact that the feedback was instantly handled or someone senior came back to the customer and solved the solution or gave a compensation, you know, did an action to fix it, this is definitely doing a very positive impact on the customer. And this is what they’re expecting, you know, listen to me and solve my problems.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And you touched a little bit on the measurement piece there, but I want to talk a little bit more about that as well. So, you know, certainly CX practices will measure things, you know, whether it’s NPS, CSAT, things like that. Organizations at a high level may be looking at customer lifetime value if they’re a little more mature on some of those ways. But, you know, how do you balance some of those short term things, those opportunities that you mentioned of, you know, if you’re if you’re monitoring and measuring individual steps of the journey, you have opportunities to do things. How do you kind of balance that with the bigger picture measurements?
Eytan Hattem: For me, everything is connected. The reason why I’m in the business of customer experience is to produce business value. This practice is a business practice. Everything as an outcome of this practice is not supposed to be smiley faces. It’s supposed to be business value. The way to get to the business outcome is to drive this customer experience program in the company and have a journey management practice where you will continuously improve the experience of your customers. Then looking at it from an ROI perspective, the business value, I think the balance is exactly in the middle. It’s supposed to be when I’m doing prioritization of opportunities and solutions and projects, I’m always putting the cursor in the middle. Of course, from an aggregation perspective, I’m not taking on every individual project and saying it has to be 50-50. I’m just saying that the initiative as a whole They need to be 50% for the benefit of the customer and 50% for the benefit of the business. If you get to this balance, you’re in the right place.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that before an organization really takes the journey management kind of mindset and approach? do you think there’s a tendency to perhaps chase the wrong numbers? I mean, you know, is simply getting, you know, you mentioned the smiley face immediately makes me think of like the, those things in the airport bathrooms or something like, are you satisfied or whatever? It’s like, you know, are people, It’s, it’s easy to chase an NPS score. And, you know, there, I know there’s been research and, and I’m not going to denigrate it too much, but like, you know, there are people chasing the wrong things. In other words, at the expense of, of great customer experience.
Eytan Hattem: I think it became an industry to chase NPS numbers and CSAT numbers. And I think this is wrong to do it. Not because I don’t think NPS or CSAT have value. I do think they have value. I just don’t think that this is the aim. That’s not the end goal. You’re not supposed to chase your NPS score. What you’re supposed to chase, really, are you meeting your customer expectations? This is the only question I want to answer. Then the outcome would be that I will improve my NPS score if I’m doing a good job, you know? So the NPS is a good indicator for me to tell me what is happening with my health, you know? Am I healthy? With CSAT, if I’m having good scores, then probably I’m doing things in the right direction. If I’m having negative score, bad scores, then I know something is wrong with my operation and I need to get in and deep dive. But again, the NPS and the CSAT and CES and all of these for me are supporting information for me, but I am always looking. What is the customer ambition? What are the needs and what are the expectations? What are the frustrations? Then I’m asking myself, through journey mapping exercise and the journey management cycle, am I answering these needs? Am I solving the problems? Am I addressing the issues? Am I meeting expectations? If I am doing this, the rest will be an outcome and I will be happy with what I’m doing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And I think even the creators of NPS and CSAT and all that would, would mirror that, you know, it’s like, it’s cause again, I think it, I think people naturally want to conserve energy and you know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t make them lazy. It doesn’t make them, it’s just people when they’re given a goal to achieve, they want to achieve it. Right. And so if they’re given this goal of like, achieve a higher NPS score, okay, let’s let’s do it, you know, and when they do, to your point, it’s, yes, it’s, it can become just kind of a score versus the the nuance of, let’s actually create better individual experiences and better points along the way. And kind of to that, to that end, want to talk a little bit about, you know, what, what that actually looks like, you know, because, again, I think a lot of, you A lot of people may be coming from organizations where, to the earlier points in our conversation, you know, they did a journey mapping exercise or they talked a lot about the customer journey and feel like, okay, box checked, you know, we did CX, you know, what does it actually look like to manage a journey and be, you know, who, what are the roles involved? And, you know, what, from an operational standpoint, you know, who do you need and doing what?
Eytan Hattem: So I would say the first step, first of all, before you start mapping journeys and managing the journeys, first of all, define your customer experience strategy. define your brand values, define the customer ambition and define your brand promise. This is my starting point because the journeys are supposed to reflect your brand values and they are supposed to reflect your brand promise. That’s the question you will be asking yourself in your journey. Am I keeping the promise that I gave to my customers? So if you are a McDonald’s, then one of your promises would be fast food, right? So if you’ll be waiting in the queue for 30 minutes, you will be disappointed. So that’s why for me, it isn’t just about starting to map the journeys, it’s first of all to define the strategy and the brand promise. Then the second step would be to establish your journey management practice. And here you will nominate a journey owner and you will nominate journey committees, which are the people, a cross-functional team that will work with the journey owner in optimizing, mapping the current state of the journey, mapping the future state of the journey, the desired one, then doing gaps between them, gaps and then building an experience roadmap and managing this whole journey. Next to this, to the journey committee, we will have the customer experience committee because journeys reside in a bigger thing. So there’s supposed to be a customer experience program in the organization and journeys are part of it, the journey management practice. So inside the journey management practice, you have the journey manager and the journey committees, and they will be working on something we call the journey Atlas. So the Journey Atlas would be a map of all the journeys you have in your organizations, or let’s say the main ones. You will be prioritizing these journeys based on some criteria you will be putting in place. Like for example, do you want to work on VIP customer journeys? Do you want to map the mainstream journeys? Do you want to map journeys where you have issues? These are examples. And then you will start mapping them with a journey framework. And the journey framework is the levels of the journeys that you’re mapping. You will start with a level zero journey, would be your master journey. And then you will zoom into the different stages of the high level journey in order to create sub journeys, okay? Level one and level two journeys. So think of it as a tree of customer journeys that are forming your journey atlas. And this is your universe. And inside, the teams that are the mapping teams are responsible to take one or more journeys based on their competencies and knowledge, and to start doing this continuous improvement cycle of mapping current state journeys and future state journeys. So you need cross-functional teams, you need a journey manager, which will be an owner of one or more journeys, You need a CX team or CX committee that will give the bigger perspective with handling also the cultural aspects, the strategy and the other things around journeys, because it’s not just journeys. And then you will start deep diving, extracting experience friction, ideating solutions, executing project measuring and refining.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s, it’s a lot there. You know, it’s, it’s, which, which is, which makes sense. Because I mean, if, you know, if, if the customer experience is important, which we, I would say we both agree here and most listening out there will, will certainly agree as well. It takes, it takes, you know, different people looking at different aspects. When you’re working with organizations, obviously every organization is structured a little bit differently, but one of the trends or things that I try to keep an eye on is Are there more customer experience teams and departments popping up? Or, you know, sometimes there’s talk of moving CX into a marketing function. You know, are you seeing any trends one way or the other? Or does it just kind of depend on the organization?
Eytan Hattem: This is also a good question. Actually, I thought a lot about it. And when I’m looking, I’m working many organizations and I see actually everything, everything at the same time. So I do see customer experience team popping. I do see customer extreme being absorbed in marketing or customer success or in strategy or in operations or in other places. digital, and I see places where CX is thriving, and I see places where CX is disappearing also, where they’re closing the customer experience program and organizations don’t understand didn’t see the value that it brings because and mainly that’s the main point in most cases where it happens it happens because the customer experience program did not bring or prove business value this is the main reason why that will be stopped so as a trend I see a sort of, maybe it’s not the right word, it’s sort of a mess, let’s say. It’s a mess in the sense that there isn’t anything guiding this for the moment. We are in exploration. The CX function, let’s also say the truth, it’s relatively new. It’s a new role, a new practice versus HR, finance, sales, marketing, customer service, which are here forever. If you go today to a company and you say, hey, create me a company, what would you do? You would create the finance, HR, sales, marketing, customer success, right? You won’t necessarily say, I have to have a customer experience team because if not, my organization won’t work. This is not true, but you will not hear an organization saying, oh, I don’t need sales. I don’t need to do marketing. I don’t need to do finance. That doesn’t exist. Customer experience didn’t embed itself yet as a core critical function that has a place around the table. We are missing chief customer officers in the landscape. And I think that this is also a question of maturity. We need to wait until the practice finds its right spot in the organization. And also another thing I want to say, because I think it’s very important and is impacting this mess, is customer experience is a transverse role. It’s not a silo. Look at the organization. All of them are siloed, right? Everything is siloed. People work in a silo. Customer experience is working for the greater good. And working for the greater good is a problem in a company because it doesn’t belong to any silo. And working as a transverse function is something that’s very challenging. This is the reason why it’s hard to prove value.
Greg Kihlstrom: I completely agree. I refer to it and a few other things I would put in there as well as sort of like horizontal functions. I, I just use that term, but totally agree. Well, you know, given, given that, and I also agree that it is a little bit of a mess all over the place, depending on where you look. I, I keep trying to find a trend as far as the way things are shifting, but it, it does seem like there, there isn’t a clear one at this point. You know, where, where do you see then, the the field of journey management, evolving over the next, you know, months or years, you know, what, what should organizations be keeping an eye out for whether that’s, you know, technologies, methodologies, roles, things like that?
Eytan Hattem: I think the main trends we will see is the deeper and deeper AI involvement in customer experience management and in journey management in particular. So we will be using artificial intelligence and machine learning and algorithms to manage the journey, to identify recurring issues, to ideate solution. to identify areas of opportunities, to create journeys, to create persona segments. There will be many things that AI will be doing, working like a co-pilot next to CX teams. This is one thing. The second thing, I think that journey management will become the leading practice, so journey mapping will be absorbed into it. And there will be closer and closer ties between journey management and journey orchestration until a certain point in time where probably these two things are going to merge. Like Journey Insights merge into the journey orchestration platform or the big VOC platforms, big VOC players, but all the big Journey Insights players out there. they merge and probably the next step would be merging journey management and journey orchestration. Because at the end, customers, they need one solution, you know, I need one solution. So would be much better and easier if everything would be working as a one core customer experience business application, which is my let’s say my vision to the future. is that customer experience will become an app, like you have your PCRM finance system and an HR system, you will have a CX system, that will be your source for your health of your customers, for the actions you need to do, for your scores, for everything that’s relating to your customers, you will be going there. Up until then, it will probably be an ensemble of systems and capabilities, where you’ll be doing brainstorming in whiteboards, mapping in journey mapping tools or journey management platforms, orchestrating and collecting data and insights in journey orchestration platforms, and this type of thing. But at some point, there will be consolidation.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely seems like consolidation is in the in the cards, so to speak. Well, Aiden, thanks so much for joining. One last question before we wrap up here for those organizations that are, you know, maybe doing they’re doing journey mapping, they’re doing some orchestration, but they’re not tying it all together with journey management. You know, what would your advice be to a brand that’s kind of just exploring the concept of customer journey management?
Eytan Hattem: I think that, first of all, get the practice, get the knowledge of how best practice journey management should be implemented in an organization. So I would start, first of all, researching, gaining the knowledge, looking at examples, so I know what I’m doing. And then I would look into one, two, three journeys where I would try to implement this approach, tying my journey map to the VOC data sources. So to surface, to transform my maps from static maps into dynamics map, which are data infused. and using a journey management platform, testing it out in a POC on one to three journeys and one to three departments, just getting some teams in, seeing the value tying the business goals into my journeys that I’ve mapped, so putting the business KPIs there. and really running the full cycle. So defining what I’ve said with the brand values and the brand promise, mapping, taking one journey map, adding to this map, the business KPIs and linking into the map, the VOC data, the journey orchestration engine to surface data, the sentiment feedback and all of that. And then based on that, doing the exercise of prioritization with opportunities, solution, projects as a funnel, taking six months waiting to measure the outcomes. And if I see positive outcomes in this cycle and I see it’s working well for me, I would start establishing it as a practice, creating persona templates and journey templates, creating guidelines for mapping journeys, explaining and educating the organization on the culture of customer experience, and really starting to expand that as a practice that everyone shares and everyone contributes to.
