About The Playbook
Korio is a group of professionals who came together to help companies re-platform and become agile and fast. We prefer to work with established companies in the mid-market who might be struggling with the transformation to digital. Collectively, we have gone through dozens of transformations. We have witnessed successes and failures.
Based on what we have learned, we have become quite opinionated on what works and what doesn't. This short post is part of a larger Playbook that we have assembled based on what we have learned.
For details on each on our approach to data and analytics, explore the links below.
The Play: Start with Value Maps & Valued Outcomes
As we learn more from our clients and if we think that the learning is: A) actionable, B) validated and C) doesn't state the obvious, then we will add it to our Playbook.
Remember, everything we propose can be done incrementally and with very little lead-time. If you want to adopt the plays in a more gradual manner, go ahead but consider setting each up as an experiment: have a hypothesis, measure the impact and act on what you learn.
The Play: Start with Value Maps & Valued Outcomes
While we would never dispute the good sense of starting a transformation by understanding customers and their ideal journeys, we almost never take this through to its logical conclusion. We rarely carry this good thinking through to implementation and ongoing optimization of the digital and more conventional aspects of our business. Why is this the case and what are we missing by stopping short?
While the Voice of Customer has been on everone's radar for quite some time, it has only been in recent years that it has evolved into a more concrete methodology known as Customer Journey Mapping. While we at Korio are encouraged by the increased use of Journey Mapping to understand opportunities to improve the customer's overall experience, we believe a critical opportunity is being missed.
At Korio, we refer to Customer Journey Mapping as Value Mapping. Value Mapping, as a methodology, forces certain critical conversations and amplifies elements of journey mapping that tend to end up on the proverbial shelf.
Most importantly: we consider it mandatory to rearchitect your platforms around Value Maps. Other plays in our Playbook go into detail about the importance of modularity and Small Autonomous Teams - we won't repeat that guidance here, but suffice it to say these two tactics demand a rethinking of how our technical platforms are architected. To get to modularity and to empower teams and inform them with data, we must organize our system architecture around stages of the customer journey. Each stage, for us, is a Value Map.
Using journeys as the basis for modularity and team ownership has the follow-on benefit of making the Value Maps, as artifacts, not just planning documents but they are elevated to become an integral part of the system itself. The Korio low-code platform helps produce modules with limited coding required because it uses Value Maps directly to generate code.
In addition, the point of departure for Value Mapping are what we call "Valued Outcomes". Exploring Valued Outcomes forces us to revisit why we exist as a business and to work backwards from outcomes to design experiences that maximize the value delivered to customers and maximize the perception of value delivered. As a result, Value Mapping is meant to drive customer delight while, at the same time, it acts as the core of your platform architecture and your advanced analytics capabilities.
How
- Commit to designing your systems architecture and analytics capabilities around Value Maps (do this first so that Value Maps don't end up as an artifact that sits on a shelf)
- Break the end to end journey into a comprehensive set of stages. To guide you, use models like the traditional Customer Lifecycle to tease out the full flow (e.g. Awareness, Interest, Trial, Use, Care/Retention, Advocacy, Renewal)
- For each stage, define the Valued Outcomes for your primary customer segments and for internal stakeholders. To avoid redesigning your business around internal departmental needs, pick a single senior proxy, like your Board of Directors or CEO, to represent internal stakeholder needs.
- For each Valued Outcome, identify the key metrics that can be used to comprehensively guage whether the Valued Outcomes will be achieved in the context of the emerging Business Architecture
- Identify individual Value Maps by considering the stages, Valued Outcomes and Metrics to define the processes and experiences required to make sure those outcomes are achieved at the levels dictated by the metrics. Value Map boundaries set by creating logical groupings of these experiences and business processes.
- For each Value Map, define the "Happy Path" journey and the various "Unhappy Path" deviations.
- For each Value Map, define the required journeys, touchpoints and business processes required to recover a customer on the Unhappy Path and return them to the Happy Path. This kind of explicit design of Recovery experiences and processes is unique to Korio's version of journey mapping.
Why Bother
- Most businesses are locked into functional silos, we need an artifact and set of planning tools that shakes us free of functional constraints. We need to plan - and act - around the needs of our customers, not our internal departments.
- Our platforms are typically organized around dated and unnecessary notions of technical purity. This point of departure causes confusion and dis-engages the customer-facing teams. We gain nothing by this approach. Architecting our new platform around segments of the customer journey, i.e. Value Maps is a powerful way to build systems, re-engage stakeholders, measure value creation and trigger necessary optimizations.
What To Avoid
- Most journey mapping and system architecture efforts are intentionally disconnected. Don't let this happen. Digital experiences and business process designs tied to journeys is, by far, the best way to build your new platform. This may, in some instances, challenge the thinking of conventional system architects who might be chasing marginal gains in system performance by other means. Be sure to press forward with this challenge and refer them to the technical principles of Domain Driven Design, which is aligned to our Value Mapping approach.
The Fallback
- If you have already undertaken comprehensive Customer Journey Mapping, there may not be a requirement to start from scratch. Your Journey Maps can kick-start your Value Mapping efforts.