Running a Customer Journey Workshop With Remote Stakeholders?
I keep hearing that it’s impossible to run customer journey workshops without getting all stakeholders into one room. It can be done, and this is how…
A few years back, I was running a fully remote design team at Namecheap. The company commissioned a project involving external suppliers at a design agency. Eventually, the project was handed over to the in-house team. My team became responsible for the overall experience, and we were asked to help in exploring the strategy for further growth.
I had the pleasure to have on my team Nuno Martino, who’s now the Namecheap’s Head of UX Design. With his permission, I want to share with you, how we did the impossible.
Discovery Phase
As a part of our efforts, we needed to understand the existing customer journey (what is it?), and to outline how the future one would look like. The project involved many internal stakeholders from business development, legal, customer support to engineering. To get everyone on the same page and get everyone’s perspective, we decided to run a journey mapping workshop with them. We couldn’t fly everybody in and we settled for the next best thing. We engineered a remote version of it.
The goals for the workshop were clear. We wanted to understand our current journey, to identify its low, high an trouble points, and to draft opportunities for the future journey.
We also needed to discuss our constraints. Obviously, it had to happen online using readily available tools. We knew it would be challenging to keep everybody’s attention over an extended period of time, so we planned for a two-hour workshop. Given the time limitation, we agreed that we’d do most of the heavy-lifting ourselves. It seemed that our workshop would be more productive, if we gave the participant some food for thought prior to it.
Even though we didn’t enjoy all the benefits of an in-person workshop, it turned out to be a solid alternative that would leave us with pretty steady results.
Preparing the Workshop
We put quite a lot of effort into the preparation. As with most things, the better you’re prepared up front, the better the end result.
We summarized available information
We spoke to our business development and project management guys, who were able to acquaint us with the business goals, but who were also at the forefront of communication with the suppliers. We reviewed all the available documentation. We distilled all this information into a few comprehensive deliverables: a set of personas we were after, a set of stages involved in the journey, and a bare bones version of the existing customer journey (originally a physical artifact on Nuno’s office wall that we’d discuss over a Skype video call that would later move to RealTimeBoard app, so everyone could collaborate on it). All this served as a starting point for the workshop.
We chose participants
As I already mentioned, we had a lot of stakeholders. In the end, we shortlisted 12 people who’d cover all different aspects of the product because we wanted to have as multidisciplinary team as possible. Some of them were innate to the project, others were new. It was important to keep in mind that we’d run group activities. We needed to have equilibrated groups. We wanted to keep them up to 5 people each.
We knew we needed a facilitator to accompany each group during the group activities. It didn’t seem reasonable to have a single person constantly switching between calls. The facilitator would essentially shadow the group, and take notes. At the same time, they were there to help the group to move forward in case they’d get stuck.
We wrote down the names that would form each group, including the facilitator. We also named each group. We’d use these names throughout the call.
We scheduled the call
We all had a busy schedule. Often booked back-to-back. Saving the date early was key to make sure that everyone was available. Especially, because we needed two uninterrupted hours of their time. We also blocked out the time in our video conferencing tool, and shared the link to the event.
We prepared materials for review prior to the call
At this point, we reviewed all the materials that we needed to share with our participants beforehand. We found out that we were missing a few things. We added a brief intro to customer journey mapping covering what it is and why we even bother. We also made a video introducing our existing journey and the tool that we were using for it. Then we made sure that everyone had correct permissions. Once we were 100% ready, we sent out an email asking the participants to go through all this before the workshop through the lense of their subject matter expertise. We also asked them to take notes throughout their review process. It has proven to be an effective way to get everyone on the same page, and to increase the productivity of the workshop.
We prepared the agenda for the call
We wrote up a step-by-step guide for the call. Each step would list the topic, a few talking points, the slide we were going to show at that time, and a checklist of to-do items we needed to complete in order for us to be ready.
The structure of the call was simple: quickly sum up the purpose of the call, explain goals of the upcoming activities, cover the tactical details of the workshop (like group members, splitting into the small groups, etc.), then dive into the activities themselves.
We designed the group activities to spark discussion among the participants. In the first one we asked the participants to do a group review of our research, and to compare their notes. They’d focus on things prompting any flags to them. In the second exercise, they were looking for low, high and trouble points of the current experience, and to identify opportunities for the future journey based on these. The groups would present their findings after each activity and there would be a room for a discussion.
Tactical support for the call
We decided to hold the meeting in GoToMeeting (our video conferencing tool at the time) because we could record it. We knew it wouldn’t allow us to host multiple calls at once. We opted to have groups in Skype to be used during the activities. We added one for the facilitators as well. Each group was labeled accordingly.
We prepared two docs for each activity — a collaboration doc for the participants with activity’s summary and supporting links and another one for facilitator’s notes.
We built a presentation that served as a guide through the entire call and was shared on screen. It made sure that each person knew what they are supposed to do at any given moment as well as the timeframes for each activity. (The presentation was simple. Just a few bullet points with a subtle touch of branding.)
Last check before the call
On the day of the call we’d recheck that we ready and all the facilitators knew what to do. We also created all the necessary Skype groups. Then it was time to take a deep breath and put the wheels to motion.
Running the Workshop
We were nervous. This was a lot of people on a highly interactive call. Most of them never participated in a workshop like this before, not even in person. Conducting the workshop remotely was a new format even for myself and Nuno. I really wanted to succeed, because whenever I take part in an unproductive meeting, I start counting how much it costs the company. I did’t want to waste anyones time or money.
The workshop itself went well. Except for a few last minute changes in the attendee list (that made it harder to keep the groups equally strong), and a few hickups with sticking to our time schedule. Overall, the activities produced constructive outcome. Facilitators had a lot of notes from the entire meeting. We had a lot to chew on and to build into the future journey.
After the Workshop
In a few instances, it turned out that we needed to follow up with specific people to understand some parts of the process more in depth. After that we compiled a new version of the customer journey portraying where we wanted to go.
Once the workshop adrenaline washed away, we had some time to reflect on our achievements. We received positive feedback from our team mates. More importantly, we were able to take an existing in-person methodology and adapt it to our company’s unique needs. Most importantly, we managed to put all internal stakeholders on the same page, and gather a lot of information we’d be able to use to inform the future customer journey for our product. We created an artifact that we could keep updated, and everyone knew where to find it. And that was a win.
Our work didn’t stop there. We were off to prepare our research from the suppliers’ perspective, so we could validate and further inform the product strategy.
Appendix: Tools that We’ve Used
I’m sure that there is a ton of alternatives that you could use. I recommend using tools that you and your co-workers are already familiar with.
- Real Time Board — A remote whiteboard tool allowing you and your co-workers to quickly add or remove stickies, and comment on it in real time.
- QuickTime Player — A tool to make a movie with screen capture and voiceover.
- Vimeo — A tool to share your video privately with the team.
- Google Docs — An all time favorite for co-authoring documents with multiple people at the same time.
- Go To Meeting — A video conferencing tool that allows you to show slides and record the screen.
- Skype — A tool that allows group voice calls.
- A lot of screen real estate for the workshop facilitator (can be an external monitor or several laptops).
