Customer Experiences Mirror Employee Experience

To deliver a seamless customer experience frontstage, there must be a mirrored frictionless employee experience backstage.

Understanding customers and putting their needs at the forefront of business decisions used to be a strategic differentiator but is now the minimum requirement. What differentiates leaders versus laggards within any given market is how well businesses can seamlessly deliver on those needs throughout the entirety of a customer’s lifecycle.

Building true product experience differentiation requires a deep understanding of a user’s needs across the entire end-to-end journey. However, delivering a coordinated and consistent end-to-end experience can be especially difficult within a large enterprise where different parts of the customer’s journey are owned by different parts of the organization’s functions and business units. Therefore, by nature of interacting with large enterprises, a customer will encounter a myriad of touchpoints, from multiple teams, across a single organization that may or may not provide a consistent experience.

To bridge those natural but painful breakages and inconsistencies, our team of service designers at IBM created the Journey System. The Journey System is a set of repeatable methods, frameworks, and tools that help IBMers at the enterprise level focus business priorities and orchestrate teams around serving end-to-end journeys.

To prove out the efficacy of applying this type of lens to the broader organization, the Journey Team, a multidisciplinary squad of user researchers, service designers, and data scientists, was formed.

The Work

The pilots always began by mapping an “as-is service blueprint” which provides a bird’s eye view of the entire customer’s end-to-end journey. To create a shared understanding across all stakeholders, the team used the service design concepts of “backstage” and “frontstage” to map out how customers interacted with IBM.

On the frontstage, customers interacted directly with IBM through multiple touchpoints (websites, sellers, events, etc.), while in the backstage, IBM teams and business processes workde behind the scenes to support and provide exceptional value to the frontstage user.

Service blueprinting, though built with a focus on the frontstage customer, really helps to uncover the root cause of customer pain points that often hide backstage.

To create the service blueprint, the Journey Team conducted primary interviews (with as many as 40 discipline leads and practitioners) and secondary interviews (with as many as 30 researchers) across multiple business units. Once the team’s POV on the as-is ecosystem was built, the service blueprint was reinforced with real customer interviews on the dedicated journey. Then, in order to create a more robust narrative and understanding, qualitative interview insights were paired with findings from quantitative digital user behavior data.

From here, pain points were mapped all along the user journey, both frontstage and backstage, to dive into root cause identification and later solution prioritization.

The Findings

When looking at only the frontstage of a service blueprint, the “root cause” of a customer’s pain point might seem obvious, and therefore, so would the solution.

However, when looking at the entirety of the interactions both frontstage and backstage, often times what appeared to be frontstage fractures were manifestation of broken backstage employee experiences.

In a perfect world, the backstage efforts should not be visible to the customer. A “line of visibility” separates frontstage interactions and backstage processes. However, at the end of each pilot across different product teams, the Journey Team discovered that quite often, broken internal backstage efforts bled through into the Line of Visibility and the Band-Aid efforts attempting to mask these fractures rendered into unpleasant frontstage experiences for customers.

Siloed objectives and incongruous incentives were not enabling employees to best serve customer progression within a journey. Furthermore, teams were not empowered with the right tools, framework, metrics or shared understanding of the “journey” to work together to serve end-to-end needs.

There are quick win tactics to alleviate breakages for a customer’s frontstage experience. However, the most impactful and lasting work to the frontstage actually occurs backstage. This is achieved with re-envisioned handoffs⁠, or processes endorsed with incentives and tools that encourage collaboration across disparate functions and business units. The result is a single end-to-end journey.

To deliver a seamless customer experience, there must be a mirrored frictionless employee experience backstage.

The Work

Unlike frontstage quick wins, backstage reconfiguration is a long term transformation effort across the organization. It can be painful, it can take a long time, but the impacts are far reaching. Understanding the high impact of backstage transformation work, the Journey Team is now moving beyond case by case pilots and into strategic efforts that intertwine the piloted and refined Journey System methods and tools into the DNA of IBM.

To deliver differentiating customer experiences, deeper education on the end-to-end journey framework is crucial in changing the way people think; but to change the way people work, teams need to be empowered with tools and processes that actually embody the ethos of the framework.

If the tools and processes that employees live and breathe are not foundationally built to support a new infrastructure, the invested efforts will topple down. Therefore, the Journey Team will now be focusing on not only providing new tools that enable end-to-end journey methods, but also uncovering how to integrate journey principles into the existing tools that teams use today.

Stay tuned to hear about the learnings from the Journey Team effort to scale journey principles across the IBM organization to improve customer experience and business revenue.

For more information from design at IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/design

The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.