Niels Corsten | “Sorry, but the menu has changed”.

Transcript

Agnese:

Okay, so welcome and just quickly about MadeFor. your host of this event. My name is Agnese, I'm Director at MadeFor. and MadeFor. is a learning organisation. We provide immersive and hands-on learning experiences to upskill customer experience professionals, and it can start from service design to product and data. So we cover a broad scope for CX, however we have this customer experience umbrella on top of it to make sure that we're always thinking about the customer experience that we deliver through all of these functions or capabilities that we are building.

So, we met with Niels in one of the UX networking events in Amsterdam years ago, and I was really impressed how Niels was already simplifying the difficult question of what the real benefit of customer journey mapping is and the understanding for organisations. Back then we were still busy with convincing organisations that it is a valid and necessary exercise for literally any business. And since then, maturity of the customer experience field in general has increased. And I'm very, very excited to see Niels's take on where we are now.

So, welcome Niels. We've been waiting for it quite some bit and we are happy we managed to organise this. Niels has spent more than 10 years working in design and products and service design and plying his trade for some of the big players such as Koos, Vodafone and Deloitte Digital.

Okay Niels take it away.

‍
Niels:

Thanks so much for the introduction, Agnese, and I'm happy to finally start the talk that we have been talking about for quite a bit now. So, really happy to be sharing some of my ideas and thoughts with all of the audience. And let me first start with thanking you, Agnese and thanking MadeFor. and also David, for the opportunity to speak to you all. Also, the preparation, especially with David, we had some great conversations going on there. Also loved some of the suggestions that David gave me, which you'll be seeing some of in the coming hour. So let me just quickly share my screen, and welcome everyone to my talk.

Well, let's say the future of service design and more specifically about journey management, journey analytics and journey orchestration. And I'll be telling you a bit about those three concepts and show you or take you along in some showcases of projects that we as Deloitte Digital have been working on in the past few years. So let me start by saying that I'm not trying to create a kind of like dystopian world of a world where service designers are not necessary anymore. What I do see is a huge development in the field of service design and a few nice trends, and opportunities that I think we as a service design community can actually leverage.

So that's something that I will be talking about today. Just to give a really short introduction Agnese was already kind enough to explain a bit about my background just now, but I have been working in service design for more than 10 years. I've been moving into the domain of CX transformation in the past three to four years, and I'm just very passionate using the design mindset to try and make organisations more human-centric. I've been having a few nice jobs, one of them, was at bunq, which is a mobile banking start-up back in the days now, that is becoming a multinational bank platform or mobile bank platform.

I've had my fair share of service design agency time as a service designer and service design lead at Koos Design, which is an Amsterdam/Lisbon based service design agency before I moved over to VodafoneZiggo,, which is the Dutch business of Vodafone where I led the customer experience and service design team for approximately two years. And then in October 2021, I moved over to Deloitte Digital, where I now work as a lead of service design and CX transformation helping businesses to design great services to make businesses more customer oriented and help them design and deliver great customer experiences. So that's all about me.

And, in the in the preparation, me and David had a few great conversations, one of which was about the title of this talk as well, and some of the themes that what we were going to deal with during this talk. And he proposed a bit of a food related theme here which I kindly took over. So, I'll be kind of be your chef or your restaurant chef for today, where I'll be hoping to present you with a few nice dishes here and there, and if the dishes are not too much to your liking, then I hope at least some of the ingredients can be a bit of inspiration to you guys.

So, just to share a bit of what's going to be on your plate for today. I'll be having four parts in my presentation: First one is, “Sorry, the menu has changed”, explaining why the go-to tools and methods that we use as service designer are partly not sufficient anymore. And in the second part, I will be discussing how service design has become much more of a business management and ever, rather than a design matter. And in the third one I will be presenting you guys with a few meals in the form of a few showcases and projects that we have been working on in the past few years. Also highlighting some of the aspects that are going to be important to us as service designers, especially in the coming few years.

And I hope to finish off the talk with a bit of a generous tip, a few tips from me as a person, some of my learning highlights and a few things for you to take up in your in your endeavour to become a better service designer. So, without further ado, let's jump into the first part on why exactly the menu of service design has changed in the past in the past few years and in the coming years. I will not be talking too much about like, artificial intelligence and those types of like big trends. I'm looking much more at the specific trends and developments that are happening within the service design field.

I will be touching upon a few artificial intelligence and machine learning topics. But we'll start dealing with them later in the presentation. So just to set a bit of a level playing field, I think all of us know the double diamond by heart which at least for me has been the go-to framework that I use when running service design projects in the past decade. So, we must discover, define, design, and deliver type of phases where we have this diverging and converging sequence. And all of you probably recognise, doing customer interviews doing in-depth interviews with customers, trying to understand their needs and their behaviours and trying to identify how the service experience has been in the past.

And from that data, you basically start mapping out a journey with post-its. You know, you hang a nice brown paper on the wall. You start discussing or co-creating with fellow colleagues on how that experience looks and where are some of the opportunity areas to innovate from there, we start to just do some brainstorming. We come up with all kinds of great ideas and well, typically after those types of sessions, we do a bit of voting, as most of us know it, to do a bit of selection or prioritisation of some of the ideas to then move them forward into some cases, into a kind of like To-Be state visualisation of the journey, which is great to just point at and, and, and smile a bit.

And then you have this kind of 'To-Be' state customer journey hanging on the wall and you identify a few of them. A few of the improvements that were done need a bit of validation. You start creating prototypes and testing them out with customers. So this is like the typical design, sort of design process that, that I have been executing in the, in the past decade. And most of the elements will probably be very recognisable to all of you as well. And I'm not saying that this entire process should go into the bin, but there's a few issues with you know, journey maps in, in, in specific. And the first issue is that most journey maps are mapped and improved on an incidental like based basis.

So there's just this project running. Within the project, we are typically mapping out a, a customer journey map. We are using that to better understand the service experience and to also identify great opportunity areas. Journey mapping is also a, a co-creative activity but often with a subset of relevant stakeholders just because we can't really involve all relevant stakeholders into one co-creative session which results sometimes in leaving out important knowledge and interest of other stakeholders within the business.

Third one is that customer journeys are most of the time static artefacts that well start to function as office wallpaper if you let them hang for too long, here they also kind of like live in isolation of other journeys, right? There's very little connection to other journeys that live in the bigger service ecosystem of most organisations. And the fourth issue is that prioritisation and selection, as I just already showed you with, with the use of dot voting, is it kind of like arbitrary and often not very holistically determined way of, of prioritisation, especially if you have more journeys relevant within your organisation, that dot voting in that one brainstorm is kind of like activity in isolation where you cannot really take into account some of the other opportunities and other journeys let alone some of the already running initiatives that that are happening.

And then issue number five is that those 'To-Be' State customer journeys that I just showed you, that you can typically point at a lot. Become obsolete very quickly. And as context and customer expectations and often also technology changes fast. These customer journey maps, or these 'To-Be' State customer journey maps tend to be obsolete or at least outdated to some extent within already a few weeks or months after creation. So, you know, this accounts for some of the issues around customer journey maps, but the fact is that most of those issues also apply to, let's say, service blueprints. So you can imagine that some of the cornerstones of the service design practice of the past few years are showing already a few issues, let's say.

And apart from the issues that I just mentioned with you, there's also a few developments going on in the field that makes that there islet's say a new development of the customer journey, practice going on in the past few years that I would very much like to take you along with. So looking at some of the concepts that I already mentioned at the beginning of the presentation we see a development of the customer journey practice from journey mapping to a concept, which is called customer journey management.

And might to some of you, this might be already a known concept. But I will dive into a little bit more depth in just a few minutes, and then we have the concepts of journey analytics. And then lastly, journey orchestration. And I will dive into all these three concepts a bit more, but I'll also just briefly explain what those three concepts are about.

Customer journey management is compared to customer journey mapping. A ongoing practice of researching, mapping, prioritising, and optimising your customer journeys at scale. So, this is, this not only overlooks one journey, but all journeys relevant to any business and also looks at it from a continuous improvement lens. Then journey analytics is the gathering, tracking and analysing of any behaviour and customer data of the customer journey and analytics allows us to get or to gain a more data-driven insight into what customers are doing in the journey. And where, where some of the bigger opportunities lie.

And then lastly, we have Journey Orchestration, which is the process of applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to customer and behavioural data to then analyse, predict, but also configure what is called the next best experience. So, think about what is going to be the next touchpoint for this specific customer, for he or she to have a really good experience. So, this real very much allows for personalisation within a customer journey, both at scale, as well as almost real time. And as you can see, some of those concepts start being introduced to organisations whilst the customer experience maturity grows. And this is not a, per se, a very linear development as it shows on the slide.

It's much rougher than that, but it does show that there is a maturity aspect playing a big role here in terms of the introduction of these concepts to any organisation. So, introducing those concepts meaning that service design, as we've known it, is going to change or has already been changing for the past few years. And service design has not been too much about the design matter in itself, but it's becoming much more and increasingly more about service enablement, which is much more a business management matter, I would say. So, looking at, at least at my own perspective, but also in some of the survey designers that I see within organisations, the role and the activities and the type of activities that people run through are really changing.

So we are moving away from, let's say, executing interviews, mapping our journeys, and then prototyping towards running activities that help us skill services and, and skill the mindset of customer experience across the business. So, in that domain, I'd also just like to mention what different steps in CX maturity you can observe or expect within any organisation. And this is what they, what I call the five E model. So, it starts with exploring customer experience within a business before then actually establishing. Customer experience or service design has a specific capability or expertise within a business. And then especially moving from stage two to stage three, where you are really starting to scale some of the capabilities, but also the focus of customer experience and customer journeys across the business.

This is really where the concept of journey management starts to take place. And I'll be zooming in on that specific phase and the concept of journey management in a bit. And I'm looking at customer experience, maturity in general. There are five drivers that you could distinguish where if you want to enable service design or enable customer experience or customer journey thinking across an organisation, these are the five drivers or the five factors that you need to consider in order to enable the rest of the organisation to also become, let's say, more customer centric.

So, the first driver to consider is people and organisation. And this is just a driver that considers the extent to which people in the organisation are involved and organised around customer experience. So, you could think of, you know, do you have a specific customer experience team, or do you already have journey teams allocated to specific journeys? Those types of things. And the second driver is around capabilities and ways of working. Because simply speaking, you can have people in the organisation with the right roles and functions, but if they don't have the capabilities to also execute upon their role, then it doesn't get you far. And this is also where the way of working and typical capabilities like journey management and customer interviewing and journey mapping are taking place.

The third driver is around what I call beliefs and behaviours, and that's very much about the extent to which prevailing beliefs and mindset and behaviours or habits in the organisation promotes customer experience actions. And then the fourth one is around processes, data and technology. This states the extent to which those three domains are set up and support. The design and delivery of great customer experiences. Think about, you know, stuff like a great CRM system having all your data aligned and put together at one place. But also having all your processes in place to, for example easily run customer interviews to just name something.

And then the last driver is run metrics and performance, which states the extent to which, you know, the impact on effect on customer experience is present, but not only present, also measured, and to some extent even incentivised. So, to what extent are people in the organisation incentivised to design and deliver great customer experience and to put the customer in the centre of everything.

So, if we then move into the domain of, of journey management. So, moving from mapping as a kind of one off practice into a continuous way of work where journeys are being updated and being improved on a continuous basis, you see that you already start touching upon all of those five dimensions or drivers. And it not just only touches upon, you know, setting up a new way of working where you have journeys being updated and improved on a continuous basis, but also it will demand new roles around journey manage mentor assigning journey ownership, for example. It also demands new processes new governance processes around journey management.

It also accounts for new journey management tooling that I'll be discussing in a bit as well, but it would also mean that we have a fundamental shift in metrics and performance as well, where a lot of more people in the organisation will have CX related KPIs, for example. So I think the most important thing here is it's not necessarily about the concept of journey management in the way of working, but it's really a concept that drives across all of those drivers that help you create excellent customer experiences. And I'll just take you along in a showcase of a project that I've been working on in the past year where we touch upon all those five dimensions. Maybe just also for those that are amid implementing journey management or like continuous improvement across journeys within your own organisation.

These could be activities that could help you out driving that change. But I think the most important thing here, and that's my first Chef special tip that I'm going to share with you guys, is that there's really no right order or timing of these activities. So, it's not necessarily that you need to start in people and organisation and then move on to ways of working and, and then move your way up. It's just very much finding your first entry point for change and then see how you can kind of build that out from there. So, there's no rigid process to follow. If you want to implement journey management, you just need to be very opportunistic, and see where are the opportunities within your organisation to already make a few first steps and then basically go from there.

So, I think for now this is enough of the theoretical and abstract ideas, and I think it's going to speak a much more to mind explaining what journey management is on the basis of a case that I've been sharing with you guys, so this is typically where I am serving you the meal of today. So, let's first dive into the concept of journey management that I've been working on at a company or an organisation within the public sector in the Netherlands, which is called UWV - this is just a Dutch abbreviation. And I'll be touching up on also Journey Analytics, and journey orchestration later. But for now, the prime focuses on journey management, and this will also be the biggest chunk of the talk because this is most relevant to most organisations. So just to also give you a bit of context on what UWV it is the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency, which is part of the Dutch government in in the Netherlands.

And this is the, let's say the central executive organisation that does all the execution of laws and regulations around social security. So practically speaking, it just executes the benefit payments that people allow for when they become ill or become unemployed are pregnant or disabled. So, this is kind of like the social security system that is in place in the Netherlands. Once you become unemployed or you become disabled, or Ill, you still have this monthly payment to pay your bills and UWV the organisation paying all those bills. And then another thing to consider before explaining why all this matters so much at UWV currently is that, back in 2018, we had what we in the Netherlands called the childcare benefit scandal, which hit light in 2018. This was where authorities wrongly accused all kinds of parents in the Netherlands making fraudulent benefit claims.

And that requires these people to pay a lot of money to the to the government getting these people into all kinds of difficulties of which the financial difficulties are just one of them. So, these wrongly accused fraudulent benefit claims basically drove people into very severe financial hardship. And this very heavily hits the National Tax and Customs Authority, and on the back of that, the Dutch Childcare Benefits scandal led to a national reform, but also very much a refocus on human centricity across the Government organisations. So, in any executive organisation in the Netherlands the kind of like human sector or human centricity in general is a huge thing.

And this also led to UWV to think about how we can offer more human oriented services and how can we make sure we are not just executing rules and regulations but take it to account the human aspect as well.

So specifically, for UWV this meant driving a human-centric customer experience through the democratisation of customer journeys. This democratisation of customer journeys was a big transition in three different domains. So, in the previous situation for UWV basically had a small team of customer experience specialists or service designers that were responsible for customer experience in general, but also the mapping of customer journeys to be more specific. And basically, that small team of service designers were mapping customer journeys and improving upon them on an incidental and let's say project driven basis. So, there was someone in the organisation coming to that team saying, hey, I want this journey to be mapped out - could you guys help me out?

And then they would help them out, and map that journey for them. And then again, I already mentioned it earlier, but prioritisation and then also effect determination. So, what was the impact of certain improvements was very fragmented and done sporadically, and they wanted to move to a desired situation where responsibility for customer experience was widespread within the organisation. Many people needed to work with customer journeys, not just those few people in the CX team, and they wanted all of these people to not just create like one-off journeys, but to work on these customer journeys and improve upon them and monitor them on a continuous basis under the leadership of what, what, what is then called a journey owner and prioritisation and the determination of impact or effect.

Needed to be well grounded and, and integrated, integrated, implemented within the organisation. So, these were some of the big transitions that were also the vantage point for us to help UWV out making this happen. And I'll just explain you a bit on the different steps that we went through together with UWV to make this a reality. And just also to make you aware, in my presentation and the showcase of UWV, I will be touching upon all the five drivers of, of CX excellence. So, if you pay close attention, you will see all of them coming back in the story. So, when starting with u a on how to democratise customer journeys, we started looking at the language and the formats around customer journeys.

So, what are the typical words and what is the language that is being used when journeys are being used within the organisation? And one of the things we quickly observed was all the different like standards and all the different formats that lived around the domain of customer experience. And here you can just see four examples of customer journey maps that were just mapped out in the previous years, and, you know they are not just different colours, different sizes, different shapes, different styles, but also the kind of information that was met in these types of journeys was also very different.

So, one journey could map out, you know, some of the touch points., the other one could focus primarily on like the customer emotions. One other one would focus more on, let's say, the customer needs and activities. The other one would focus much more on the pains and the opportunity areas. So, it was a very fragmented image of journey maps, so we fake it. If we want to have a lot of people in the organisation start working with these journey maps, we need to do a bit of standardisation here. Together with UWV, we defined a very simple five building blocks that any customer journey should constitute of.

We looked at any journey, if in the future we are going to map out any journey, it can be anything. It at least needs to constitute these five building blocks, so it always needs to describe different phases that you go through in a journey. We have a part that is explaining the experience side or the customer experience side of things, we are somewhere documenting all the interactions and touch points that are happening. We are also then looking into all the processes and systems that need to be in place from an organisation's perspective. So, in a design language, you could say, we are mapping the service blueprint as an integral part of the customer journey.

Then we also look at like inventor, which improvements are already happening. This is also where we document ideas on new initiatives, so, if you then would drill that down into all kinds of different swim lanes that need to be in place within one customer journey, then this is what it typically looks like. And it's not necessarily about what is you know, what is stated on this slide, but it is about that we are setting a standard on how customer journeys are being mapped and, for example, how exactly do you write down a customer need or how would you phrase a customer pain? And to standardise those types of things, we made it possible for the organisations to, to also start speaking the same language and to also read each other's customer journey maps and understand what's on there.

But obviously, you know, those customer journeys don't live in isolation, as I already mentioned earlier. So, what we also looked at is what are the different types of journeys that are being mapped within the organisation? And one of the things we noticed very quickly is that there's different hierarchy levels or different levels of detail that that, that journey maps apply to. We had journey maps ranging entire life events or entire end-to-end journeys. We had specific journeys just zooming in on the application process of your benefit payment, for example. And we even had like very small journeys just zooming in on, on just one touchpoint or, or just a sequence of touch points. And understanding how all these journeys relate to one another is essential for you to understand how to also then, Turned the right knobs to improve those, those journeys. So what we did is that we introduced a customer journey framework where we distinguished four different levels of hierarchy in terms of journey maps.

The first one was just end-to-end journeys, one of which could be if someone is in search for a job. You know, the highest level was an end-to-end customer journey where even within that journey, we could distinguish more than one customer journey where customers could run through, for example, becoming unemployed and then applying for an unemployment benefit payment is one of the things that happens within that end-to-end journey. And then we look at what we call the stage journey, where we zoom in on, in this case, the application process itself and see what are the different activities or steps that customers need to run through in order to apply for benefit payment. And then the level four is around what we call a customer moment journey, or a contact moment journey.

And this is just zooming in on one specific touchpoint, in this case, the form that you need to fill in, in order to submit your application, and all those things tied back together. One of the great things that this enabled us to do was to also understand how small changes in that specific form, or how small changes in the website aggregate to a bigger impact on the end-to-end journey level. So UX designers understood how they were contributing to the actual journey and, and CX metrics as well. One of the things, maybe to make this a list a little bit less abstract is one of my other chef special tips is to think about the different levels of hierarchy in your journey framework as of being Google Maps, right? Imagine being in Google Maps and you see the whole of UK, right? Start, once you start zooming in on Google Maps you know, you could maybe see London, Manchester, and Liverpool, then Glasgow.

And once you start zooming in on London, you start seeing all the different neighbourhoods in London, right? So the more you zoom in, the more specific and detailed information and data you get presented, and once you start zooming in on one of those neighbourhoods, you start seeing like street names, and house numbers and those types of things. This is also what you could kind of translate to a journey framework where you have different levels of details when it comes to your journey maps. So, this is the example of the, let's say the customer lifecycle that was created at UWV where we distinguished five different end-to-end journeys.

And it's not so much for you to understand which journeys are in which end-to-end journey, and how this kind of consolidates all of the different journeys, but what is important is that in this instance, UWV decided to assign all of the five end-to-end journeys to directors in the organisation. So, any department director was suddenly not just responsible for the performance of his or her department but was suddenly also responsible for the performance of one end-to-end journey, which is just a big shift on you know, collaboration and looking at a journey perspective as an organisation.

So, this is also where we touched upon that people and organisation side of things where we are, are assigning accountability for end-to-end journeys across the organisation. And then from setting up that kind of standardised journey format and that kind of framework as well, we started moving into the capabilities and ways of working where we built a uniform customer experience way of working. Trying to kind of combine a bit of agile way of working, a bit of design thinking, a bit of, a bit of lean start-up into an integrated way of working. That also helped us democratise customer journey thinking across the business. And it has also allowed us to transition from, let's say, incidental projects to a continuous way of working.

So, one of the things that you would see in, you know, this is the, the kind of way of working that we met out together with them. This isa, as you can see a cyclical way of working. So, this is an ongoing thing. This is a continuous practice that is being implemented currently. So, there's no beginning or end in this entire In this entire way of working or this entire method methodology.

There are a few triggers, for example, here at the very beginning when we continuously monitor the performance of each of those end-to-end journeys, and that could trigger one of one analysis loop and then go into diagnosis and then improving. So, we could have one or sometimes even more than one trigger starting an improvement cycle every month or even every week. And then if you set out that entire CX way of working, then obviously you also need to start training people in, in running through that methodology and gaining the capabilities and the expertise that is needed in order to execute that that methodology. So basically, what we also did is set out a training program.

To tailor for the different roles around customer journeys that we identified across the company. So, anyone that that would just, you know, look at Journeys just to, to basically get the information out of them, all the way to journey experts that would actually train other people and, and facilitate other teams to become good at using customer journeys. And all these different roles have different trainings tied to them in order to basically, you know, develop capabilities across all of these roles. And as you can see here this is one of the classes that we were that we were training of people that were being introduced to the basics of customer journey management. And quickly just going back to the methodology here. Is that because we transitioned from a project-based and let's say demand-based journey mapping practice to a more continuous way of working is that it was not, it was no longer any person in the organisation requesting a customer journey map.

Now, it was actually an ever-present customer journey map there that would, that we would need to update, and we needed to monitor to understand what the performance of that specific journey was. And then if we would see any signals on things going wrong or, or things to be improved, that would be one of the triggers for us, for us to start going into that improvement cycle. So, one of the things we also needed to embed into the entire CX way of working is the concept of journey analytics, or specifically for UWV is what we called. Voice of the customer analytics, and this is typically where we brought together all the different sources where any, like any statement or any outing that a customer could do both positive and negative was gathered and was analysed upon to understand what, what are like typical questions that customers are asking.

What are typical complaints that that customers are filing? What are like typical channel switches that people do? What are typical difficulties that people have across the journey? And to basically have a data-driven approach to monitoring the entire journey performance. And together with UWV, you can see on the left-hand side, we build a few dashboards with them to monitor what the journey performance looked like and where there were problems and issues that customers would have.

You know those issues could be a great trigger to start an improvement cycle together with them, and on the in the middle and on the right-hand side, you can see examples of reports that we would bring out on a quarterly basis that would mention some of the trends and developments and some of the most important signals that we saw happening within that specific journey in the past three months. This was also actually reported on to the board of directors within UWV to help them also getting a grip on the journey performance.

Whilst making those dashboards, we also very much felt the urge to start creating a single source of truth when it came to all the customer journeys that were present in the organisation. And as I already started this showcase with, I showed you some of the some of the variations of journey maps and some of the posters that were created in the past few years. We introduced journey management tooling which helped us enable going from journeys as a kind of like visualisation of journey of customer experience towards a management tool for customer experience. And specifically, at UWV we decided to use a tool called TheyDo, this might be a known tool to some of you might be a new concept.

I'll just explain you a bit on what it could bring us Journey management tooling in essence is a tool in which you can bring all of your customer journeys together and you can actually create a kind of like network or framework of different journeys. And what is very much allows you, allows you to do is to create a single source of truth when it comes to customer journeys. So, no more different posters in different spaces across the organisation. If you want to know what the customers are experiencing in a specific journey, this is the place to go. And because of it being a digital tool, it also allows us to just continuously update all the journeys, which means that we are now moving away from static posters on the wall to an always up-to-date representation of, of those journeys.

The great thing is that this type of tooling also allows you to do meta-analysis across journeys, and you can start identifying problems and issues that customers have, not in just one journey, but maybe in other journeys within the bigger journey ecosystem. And this is great because you can kind of channel all of your effort and capacity into solving those like meta problems, driving value across multiple journeys simultaneously. And as I will be showing you in a bit this type of management tooling also allows you to standardise the way to prioritise your opportunities and to do that in a very value-driven way.

This is just an example of how they do look, so how a customer journey is represented in TheyDo. It's a very flexible tool, I must say, if you haven't really worked with it just yet. There's a lot of choices to be made and there's a lot of flexibility in the tool. And as you can see this, you can't read it, but sits in Dutch anyway, so I can just give you a bit of a voiceover.

This is a journey example of the 'I Am Ill' customer journey, so that's any employee, any employed person becoming ill. And then going into the illness benefit payments at UWV and here you could already recognise some of the swim lanes that we standardised also within each of the journeys where the blue building blocks are the customer needs. Then we have the grey ones representing activities. The green and red ones are done - the gains and pains, and then you already see a bit of a emotion curve being represented. And then if you would move down a bit, you start moving into. Some of the channels and touch points that are relevant and some of the processes and systems that are in place to deliver the service.

And then in the very bottom there was an inventory of some of the biggest opportunities and some of the biggest solutions that we are that we have identified to, to basically improve the customer experience across the different stages of the journey. Also, I think because of time also want to just move on and if you guys are interested in seeing more of, they do and actually seeing how the tooling works we can maybe create a bit of a space there during the Q&A to, to do a bit of a deep dive there.

And one of the last things that we are currently actually working on is, Understanding the performance and quality metrics of each of those journeys. So, we are both looking at, let's say, the process as well as the outcomes of each of the journeys, and then both from a customer as well as an organisational perspective.

And with each, you know, each of those quadrants, we are now trying to identify kind of like a CX measurement framework. Where we are looking at, okay, you know, if we want to have a certain outcome, for example, we want customers to experience ease of use what are the different drivers that would drive ease of use for our customers, and what are the metrics we could tie to those drivers? Then, you know, also tie those back to the, the ambitions or goals that you have. So, this helps us very much to also understand are we performing well in these journeys? And if not, what are the drivers or what are the, the knobs that we need to. To turn in order to improve the customer satisfaction overall.

So, I think this just shows you how all these five drivers are relevant when introducing the concept of journey management in, in a large organisation. Running from, you know, capabilities and ways of working all the way to new tooling, different metrics, new roles and accountability. Yeah, basically touches upon everything. And this also very much changes the role that we have as service designers, I think, and some of those transitions I already mentioned earlier, but I just wanted to quickly highlight them as well. Because we are moving from incidental projects to a continuous way of working, we are moving away a bit from co-creative sessions to an ongoing systemic update of journeys.

So you could actually have like one-on-one talks with you know, someone in customer service, for example, talk them through the, the journey and let them, you know add information to the journey just in a one-on-one conversation. We no longer necessarily need those co-creative sessions. At least it can still be valuable, obviously. And we are moving away from static artefacts of journeys and isolations to a dynamic network of journeys in in tooling that are always up to date. And we are always, we are also using or moving away from dot folding to a more uniform and integrated prioritisation framework. And lastly, we are moving away from 'To-Be' State customer journeys to always as is right.

So be because we are continuously updating our journeys in our tooling there is no ‘To be’ state, we are just continuously improving our 'Current State', and this ends up the introduction of Journey Management and I'm also looking at the time I'm quickly going to introduce you a bit to the concepts of Journey Analytics and Journey Orchestration and Journey Analytics.

I already touched upon it a bit when introducing the showcase of UWV, because we did a lot around that in the voice of the customer. But we also helped the Dutch government when Covid hit and Covid especially. And I think  most of you know, COVID hit the Dutch entrepreneurs very hard. And government offered support there which meant that we needed to set up completely new services and new customer journeys. Overnight. So, in most cases, you know, we set up an MVP type of journey where we just looked at, okay, how can we have a very simplistic journey that could help our customers just for the bare minimum? But creating this kind of journey from scratch also allowed us to also, you know, create it, create a very like digital first journey, and by creating a digital first journey, it also allowed us to gather a lot of data across that journey. You know, think about what are the type of channels that are being used?

When are customer switching channels? What is the duration of a web visit? What are the call frequencies? All those data points. We gathered all that data, data and basically applied them in a dashboard, as you can see on the left-hand side, to understand what the performance in that kind of MVP service was, and then use that data to now also start to drive improvements within that journey. So we could actually, you know, start improving things around what are the typical questions that people would have when applying for support. What are the typical channels that people would use? Are there any issues on the website?

All these things we could gather, analyse, and improve upon.So, this is really where you could also see the benefits of Journey Analytics in improving the experience for customers as well. And then also, very briefly, I want to introduce you into journey orchestration that. I personally haven't really touched upon, but my Deloitte Digital colleagues in Australia did in, in a collaboration with the Commonwealth Bank.

And in journey orchestration, we very much apply journey analytics, but then also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to apply on let's say customer data and preferences, but also customer behavioural data that we have and try to predict what is going to be the best, best way to help that customer in the next touchpoint, right?

This is what we call the next best experience, and this very much allows us to enable personalisation and to help individual customers have a great journey, and one of the things that we helped our customer, the Commonwealth Bank to do is to build what we call a customer engagement engine, to configure what at Commonwealth Bank, they call the next best conversation.

So, what is the next conversation we would need to have with our customers to help them enjoy our products and services better? And this very much started with a paradigm shift for the, for the bank from let's say product focus to being, becoming a customer relationship bank, and by setting that ambition, they also wanted to start acting upon that ambition. One of the ways they started doing so is in the assistive channels. So, the real conversations that frontline employees had with customers. And one of the things that they saw happening there is that those Employees were struggling to truly connect with customers to truly understand the context of these customers, and to then also truly help those customers with the issues that they would have.

And what they were very much looking for is understanding what the next best conversations would be to have with those customers and being presented with those conversations or kind of like pointers for those conversations before the customer would even call. So, we used Journey orchestration software to kind of configure those different conversations, so to say. We started just in one single branch, right? So, we just used one branch of frontline employees see if we could kind of make it work there and scale it up from there, and this is already, I think, four or five years ago, but in the meantime, Commonwealth Bank has skilled this up to 30 million decisions of 30 million conversations a day.

I'll skip this one for a bit, some of the things that have already done right now is move it not just to conversations, but interactions in general or touch points in general, you could say. Where you know, some of the examples of the next best interactions people have in the domain of paying bills is to be proactive. Proactive if customers have upcoming bills, and to also help customers understand those bills and keep track of incoming bills specifically for people in financial difficulties. And then the second one would be if there were bill changes, you know, from like your usual telco or energy provider, if there was any bill chains this bank would send you a proactive alert saying, Hey, there's a change in bill - you know, this could be a trigger for you to know, contact your telephone or energy provider. And one of the other things that they did is to send proactive benchmarks and suggestions for better deals. One, certain subscriptions were over. So, imagine you have a two-year mobile phone subscription.

Generally, that would just be like continued, but now suddenly you could think of the bank proactively suggesting other deals or more, more cheap deals for your mobile subscription. Because they know that the subscription has ended, and then you could imagine that for any type of customer, they would tailor this in the right channel. So, one customer would prefer receiving an email and someone else would get an in-app notification. So, this shows you what are also you know, the benefits of junior orchestration, even on an individual customer level.

Just to kind of round up the talk and leave a bit of space for questions, I'd like to just wrap out, wrap up the talk and give you a few tips here and there on just to get you going. I already just mentioned it a few times, but these are, think are the dimensions and drivers for better customer experience, whether you are introducing journey management, whether you want to introduce journey analytics.

These are the things to think about, and it's more than just the introduction of new tooling or thinking out a, a new template or a new methodology. You really need to consider all these factors. And then if you are new to any of those domains and you just want to start playing around with some tools to see what it could bring you or could bring your organisation these are not all of them because there's lots of them, but just a typical selection of journey management journey and analytics and journey orchestration platforms and tool links that you could try out yourself as well.

And one of the most important things here, and this is my last chef special tip, is that in most cases it's not necessarily about the functionalities of the different platforms or the usability of the platforms. It's very much about the extent to which you can start integrating it with existing technology within your customer experience tech stack. So that should also be, if you make a, a choice of one of those platforms, consider how well it fits into your bigger technology stack. Just to end up a few of my biggest learnings you know, I think as I already, and I think also my talk would emphasise that service design is increasingly becoming a fundamental business transformation.

So we are touching not only on, you know, journey maps, but we are touching up on all kinds of aspects of the business. And to do that well, you need support and sponsorship from top management. It's a bit of an open door, but I've seen it being done much more effectively when top management is involved. And you can basically not change one of those five drivers in isolation because if you change one, you are going to somehow un unavoidably going to impact some of the other drivers as well. So rather than trying to turn up one knob of one driver a whole bit, try to turn it a little bit and then start turning the knobs of the other drivers simultaneously.

In the case of UWV, for example, be very aware that you are not creating new silos, but now across journeys instead of across different departments within the business. And you can fix this with just setting up strong governance models, processes, and ceremonies around your journey management. So just my ending thoughts on the changing service design capabilities. I strongly believe we are moving away from journey mapping, and we are moving towards new kind of ceremonies that you could call, like journey refinements or journey reviews, or journey deep dives. Which is a very different way of going about it than just mapping out on brown paper. I also think that we should seriously up our game on our own business data and technology literacy. Right? Service design or, or just customer, customer experience in, in general is going to be more data driven or in the coming few years. And, you know, artificial intelligence is going to dramatically change the way that we analyse and act upon our journeys. So, we need to start upping our game in terms of literacy and understanding how data and technology is going, is going to impact our service design domain. And because of service design, not being a design matter, but becoming a, let's say, business management matter, it also means that service design is becoming more strategic, right?

I think, the first question would be is are we ready? But are we also willing to take up that role? Are you willing to get out of your kind of design capability and your design role and becoming more of a kind of like business management role? I would almost say, and I think there's some service designers that are, that are reluctant to do so and rather stay in the, in the design role, which I think is totally fine, obviously. But I think there's a huge opportunity there that at least some of us should step into. And if you start moving across all the different silos in your organisation and customer experience is becoming across-disciplinary endeavour. Conservative design is more than ever about collaboration.

You know, you really start, start to collaborate with all the different. People in the organisation, but also in terms of, you know, your technology employees and some of your data analyst colleagues. You really need to start more thoroughly collaborate with them because in the intersect of those disciplines is, is where the magic happens.

And then lastly, I think we very much need to double down on our superpower. That is called empathy because we now have, you know, artificial intelligence able to analyse data much quicker than we could ever that we could ever do. But what artificial intelligence is not able to do maybe just yet, but let's see, is to also interpret that kind of data and to put that into a human context and to also think about what the emotional consequences of some of that data and of these behaviours.

So that's very much where empathy is still playing a vital role. And that we can very much leverage as a, as service designers. And, you know, just as an ending comment I think there's all kinds of new concepts that even I am introduced to on a weekly or daily basis because the landscape of journey management and journey analytics, journey orchestration and all those things is very much in flux. It's very much in development. So therefore, my message would be stay flexible and keep learning and see where, where you could make use of some of these things and just start developing into those domains.

And that's my ending message to all of you. And then I would very much thank all of you for your attention.

Again, thank David and Agnese for the great opportunity to speak and I hope it was inspiring to you all.

Thank you