 Hi, this is Keri Bodin and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc van Tijn. Welcome to your two-weekly burst of service design inspiration, where you'll get to learn what some of the world's best service designers are currently doing. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments, and the challenges that are up ahead. With the Service Design Show, we'll help you to become a better service designer so you can make a bigger impact on the world around us. We bring you a new episode every two weeks, so if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to click that subscribe button. My guest in this episode is Keri Bodin. Keri is the co-author of a book called Outside In, the power of putting customers at the center of your business. And Keri runs our own consulting firm called Keri Bodin & Company. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like do we even need to create maps? The journey as a key principle for customer experience and finally, organizing around the journey. If you want to fast-forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. So, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Keri. Thank you. Keri, I'm really curious. A lot of people probably already know you, do they know the story when you came in touch with service design? Have you shared the story ever? When was the first time you actually got in touch with service design? Yeah, actually, I was getting my master's degree at Carnegie Mellon and Shelly Evanson was a visiting professor there and she was teaching a service design class, so that was my first introduction to it. And then one of our guest professors was also Mark Redig and he showed me the very first journey map that I ever saw. Really? And I think it was actually one that Shelly had created. But yeah, so that was my introduction back 2002 to 2004-ish. Shelly has been mentioned a lot on the show as a sort of starting ground for a lot of service designers. Related to people. For sure, yeah. Keri, so the format of the show is really easy. You gave me three topics that are on top of your mind right now and I gave you some question starters and we'll combine these two and co-create the topics we'll be talking about for the next 30 minutes, right? Sounds great. Are you ready? I'm ready to go. So let me pick the first topic and it's a really short one but I guess you can make anything you want out of it. It's called create maps. What is a question starter that goes along with this one? So my question starter is what if and it's actually what if we didn't create maps? Which kind of maps are we talking about? Specifically journey maps. So when I think about the field of service design and people ask me sometimes to define what service design is and it's such a loosey-goosey term that has so many definitions and it's hard to just say, well it's hard not to say, it's just the design of services. The way that I like to define service design is that it's the design or definition of journeys and then the underlying ecosystems that are required to support and deliver on those journeys. So the journey is really a key part of the discipline of service design for you? It is, yeah, because you can be a product designer or a web designer or whatever it is and you can work on a particular thing or a particular touch point and to me the thing that really makes a service is that it's this connection of various touch points over time and that's exactly what the journey is, right? Exactly, yeah. So it's interesting that for me this definition or my definition of service design around the journey and then the ecosystem it really has an analogous connection to two artifacts that have become very widely known throughout the service design world and then beyond which is the journey map and then the service blueprint. And the interesting thing to me is that the artifacts themselves have really eclipsed the underlying idea of what it is that we're trying to represent or that we're trying to design. And so, yeah, so my question is what if we actually didn't create these maps? What if we thought about the journey but kind of let go of creating these very precious artifacts? I saw Damien Crenaham from Proto Partners and Sidney was on your show and he was mentioning how we were talking about these artifacts have become these bright shiny objects for a lot of organizations and they feel really great about themselves if they just create a map. But that's really missing the point. The artifacts came out of philosophy about the way that we need to be thinking about designing for people. And so for me it's about letting go of that. This has been a topic in a lot of episodes of the shiny map. The first episode with Mark Stiglone was I think the customer journey shouldn't be a deliverable with some added words in there. But if we let go of the artifact isn't, that's a San Francisco train in the background, right? It is, yeah. So if we let go of the map don't we lose something that's really useful in actually explaining what we do and showing what we do? Or is there something that's even better? Sure, so I do think maps can be valuable for exactly that reason. I look at them as visual storytelling tools which for me just thinking about who we are as humans that have evolved over time we have evolved to be visual and we can recognize and understand visual information much more easily, much more quickly than we can along text that we actually have to like sift through and digest. And we are also natural born storytellers. This is how we've passed down our human culture for thousands and thousands of years. And so for me the journey map itself as an artifact is a really great visual storytelling tool and it can be very powerful if you think about it that way. But I don't think a lot of people are embarking on the creation of a journey map thinking about a specific story they're trying to tell and thinking about how to best visualize it in order to really punch people in the gut with the conflict and all of that. The parts of a story that we're all familiar with from watching movies or reading books or whatever it is. So I do think that they can be valuable from that perspective but there's also just so much additional work that goes before the storytelling part of it. So I was actually talking with someone from a regional bank earlier this week and doing research on journey maps right now and she told me when we got on the phone she was like I think you're going to be really disappointed because we actually haven't created any maps themselves. And I said oh you know tell me what you're doing and she had attended a workshop just like a three hour intro to journey mapping workshop that I had done a couple of years ago at the CX conference and just putting sticky notes up on the wall and learning the true just kind of basic actions and what you have to go through and she took that home back to her organization and that's what she's been doing they put up a big sheet of paper on the wall they get people from multiple parts of the organization front line folks, people from their branches people from operations and they get them together and they talk about the journey and what's going wrong from the customer perspective and from my perspective that's what's important right I mean it gives them a framework to talk about things that they didn't have before and she was telling me how you know there was just a lot of finger pointing beforehand you know people in the branch saying well this is what ops is doing wrong and ops saying this is what people in the branch are doing wrong but when they come together and they're like okay we're going to look at this from the perspective of the customer's experience that kind of end to end journey that finger pointing goes away and they all just kind of self organize around this common goal so I love that and they've had you know they've been able to identify a bunch of initiatives that don't cost a lot of money that are making significant improvements to the customer experience but they haven't created any maps at all it's just been sticky notes you know on the wall of a conference room and getting people together from across the organization to talk and identify issues so it's like the time we invest in creating customer journey maps that look really good maybe it will be smarter to actually treat maps as prototypes so making them sketchy, rough and actually throwing them away after a session, something like that not getting attached yeah I like that we actually just released a PowerPoint journey map template on our website and part of the reason why we wanted to put a PowerPoint template out there is because we didn't want people to get too attached to it right it's like we need a snapchat for customer journeys like this journey only exists then second I love it but yeah you know we have a million PowerPoint templates and PowerPoint presentations and people can create them pretty quick and pretty easily making something that's beautiful and illustrator it's like okay yeah maybe there are some instances where that's warranted depending on who your audience is for the story that you're trying to tell but yeah it does make it seem like this is an artifact for all time so to conclude this first topic what you're basically saying is think about the journey, forget about the map yes I couldn't have said it better myself Jerry let's move on to your second topic and your second topic is called key principle for customer experience so I would say what if what if what if we rethink the key principle for customer experience so I think that well even going back to my book outside in the subtitle is the power of putting customers into the center of your business and so the idea is like it has been really bringing customer insights in to the organization there's been a lot around driving employee engagement and culture as some of the key principles but again I think there's value in getting away from not getting away from that all of that is of course important and realigning around this core principle of the customer journey and really having the journey be the principle that drives all customer experience efforts so Mackenzie did a report it came out in March of 2016 and they basically did some analysis and I unfortunately don't know all the details of this but they found that when you look at journeys the performance of companies the economic outcomes are significantly greater than if you just try to optimize individual touch points or channels so that's really it it's really about shifting shifting our entire mindset and actually I would argue this isn't just a key principle of customer experience I think that this needs to be a key principle of our organization doing business right yeah I mean we've been built around efficiency for so long and this makes sense right so I have a whopping two person company right now right and so there's some division of labor that we have but I am essentially our marketing team and I'm making updates on the website and I'm human resources T-shaped people that's what we are exactly and T-shaped people are great but you know when you're trying to play many many roles in an organization you of course get spread very thin right I'm trying to do finance stuff and marketing stuff and actually do research and finance and so this is why you know 100 plus years ago we started to have this strong focus on specialized roles within our organizations and we were focused on efficiency right we have you know a marketing department we have a development department we have a finance department and everyone can specialize in what they do and that is great and I don't think we can get away from that because I can tell you you know just from my own experience you can't do everything all the time right if you're gonna really grow and be you know a large organization and so certainly during the industrial revolution and you know the mass production of products Henry Ford of course we like really created a science around all of this but this efficiency is is one point of view right it is you know the organizing principle that we have had not just in customer experience but certainly there as well but within our entire organizations and I think it's really important for us to look that in the face and recognize the parts of that that are beneficial for our organizations it doesn't make sense to have a finance person also be developing your website but we also have to realize that it is a point of view that it isn't the way that organizations have to exist and that we have to take the good parts of that but supplement them with other ways of organizing ourselves and our work in order to truly deliver on this promise of customer experience and the customer journey being you know a path to better economic outcomes so this is probably something a lot of people are watching this episode upload and they can relate to but how do we what do you do to extend this story beyond our community right how do you how do you get business people that are organized in their head around efficiency to to join in on the on the story what works for you yeah I think that I think that part of it has been what we've all been preaching within the services on community and the greater customer experience community and the and the larger business world really understanding customers right and so that's why you know we we don't want to I don't want to move away from that right this is you know just of a full you know turn to something very specific but but I think it's and in the opposite direction but I think it's it's just a greater awareness that you know the the market is changing consumers have greater power and we need to understand our customers better I think that's really the first step we can then introduce this concept of the journey as as a way to connect our silos but I think it's first understanding you know just how much customers have changed and how much we really need to understand it understand customers what is your what is the question you have around this topic of the key principle what challenges you when you think about this topic well what challenges me is really I think the again multiple hundreds of years of history that have been ingrained in the way that that we all work I mean if you ask anyone about the silos within their organization and you know how well they communicate across silos you know every organization has challenges you know anytime you get you just a handful of people you know in an organization startups certainly struggle with this all the time you know everything's fine when there's two or three people but all of a sudden there's 10 people and you know the communication starts to break down because not everyone is involved in every single decision and so so for me it's just this history that is ingrained in us and you know our inertia we we recognize that the silos are a problem but it's this inertia for getting away from that that's the challenge maybe that's a nice step up for the third topic so let's see how this works out and the third topic is called organize around that's Dutch for around organizing around the journey yes so maybe my question is how far should we go to organize around the customer journey I don't know if I reused any of those questions or not but that's what I'm using so yeah I I think that this really needs to be something that we make tangible in our organizations not not just an idea right oh the journey is a nice concept right I mean the journey is floating out there on multiple levels right on the one hand it's the artifact on the other hand it's this kind of nebulous concept and I think that we do need to make the journey tangible but we need to make it tangible in the way that we work together every single day and so I do believe that we need to start bridging the silos in our organizations with people whose job it is is to look after the customer journey and really own that customer journey so you know we've had product managers in our organizations for decades and you know this is a very common role now both in you know huge massive legacy organizations and in startups and for me the role of this new role that I'm talking about is very similar could be very similar to what that product management role is today within organizations so thinking about a journey manager as someone who owns the vision for a particular journey really is responsible for understanding the gaps in it understanding what customers really want to need understanding the competition making the business case for it and then wrangling people across all those silos to make that vision for the journey come to life and I think that's one of the key things with this is that the product manager within an organization the development team doesn't report up to the product manager right but they're still beholden to the product manager in some way and it's the product manager who is on the line for making sure that that product vision comes to life in certain ways and meets business goals in some ways as well and that's really what I see happening and I have seen it in a few organizations there's a utility company here in the U.S. that has actually created this journey manager role and it's actually directors and VPs and they look at every part of the customer life cycle and broken it into journeys and then it's kind of the new matrix you know we I think we created matrix organizations because we realized that we were stuck in our silos and people needed to have multiple reporting roles there's a whole mess of problems of course with matrix reporting structures but this is kind of similar because you can think about the journeys kind of cutting across our vertical silos or channels or functional areas of expertise which again we've created because we need that level of efficiency within our organizations but we need to bridge them with these roles that are looking across so the question was in my mind is have you seen this implemented in a good way and you talked about the utility company do you know any other examples and what what did they do to actually make this a success? Well I think it's a nascent practice for sure and so I don't have a lot of great examples but from here in Silicon Valley I mean this is the way that a lot of tech companies have been organizing themselves for years so when I think about eBay years and years ago they had their design teams divided by buying and selling there was a buying journey on their site and there was a selling journey on their site and they had design teams focused on those two things over at Uber they've got teams that are devoted to driver journeys and teams that are devoted to rider journeys and even very specific journeys within those two Uber categories but so I think that actually the field of design is a good leader and a place that we can look to for this because they started to organize that way anyway I'm really curious this was a topic on the shelf for instance with people laying where we talked about the journeys are fractal so you can divide every journey into endless sub journeys you know it will be interesting to see how large of a chunk of a journey a journey manager can or should handle right because if you narrow it down to a single touch point that will be interesting to see I often get that question a lot from clients is like how big of a journey should we bite off and it's like well I mean on the one hand you can look at the entire journey of your customer becoming a customer and then leaving you eventually but you're not going to be able to get to a good level of detail with that type of journey to actually start making decisions and understanding what to implement and what to change on the other hand I've worked with a company that journey mapped out with their customers the whole process of signing up for an account and resetting their password and so you know at first blush that was a pretty a pretty fractalized that's a word a pretty fractalized journey but it was actually quite complicated and took a lot longer than I thought it did and crossed more channels than I thought it would but I think for this journey manager role or journey owner role I think looking at just some of the key parts of the customer life cycle is a good place to start maybe breaking the customer life cycle into four, five, six, seven chunks and starting there you know but of course it's going to vary for every organization we'll be interesting to see if we find some sort of a sweet spot and in which situations Kerry to round off the show I always ask people you do a lot of public speaking so you get approached probably by a lot of people and when people ask you Kerry could you give me an advice or well let me frame it differently if they ask you Kerry what is the topic that keeps you awake at this moment what are your what is your biggest question and what is the question that you might want to share with the audience so yeah my biggest question right now is really about the future kind of macroeconomic state of the world and how things are going to change potentially because of recent political changes especially here in the US but how that ripples across the world and you know it's interesting when companies go through a hard economic time and I'm not saying they're going to but there's a lot of uncertainty in the world right now companies kind of tend to have two different approaches to customer experience one is it's the first thing to get cut because it's seen as fluffy and you know not a core part of the operations of the organization or they double down and they say you know what we need to make sure that of everyone out there we are providing the best customer experience so that we can get whatever dollars are available but for me certain economic times bring a lot of uncertainty to the customer experience world and the design world in general so that I think is probably the biggest thing keeping me up at night I think if there's a question for the viewers that I have it's you know how are you making your role and the role of service design and customer experience essential to your organization so that you know if we do go down a bad path from a global economic scale that you'll be ready to help your organization push through that successfully awesome really curious and share the comments in the comments section really curious big question though I think that surprised you a little bit it's good to have holistic holistic topics on the show Kerry I really want to thank you for your time in sharing the things that you are thinking about working on it was my pleasure thank you my pleasure too what are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Kerry let us know down below in the comments the service design show is all about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing real-life stories of people that are currently shaping the field if this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews be sure to check out some of the past episodes and if you haven't done it already click that 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