What customer journey maps are leaving out
How creating a Rep Experience Map helped HubSpot visualize the customer experience.
I work as a product designer at HubSpot, and this story starts on a train.
Before COVID-19 turned all our worlds upside down, I took the commuter train home from work almost every day. Back when we saw crowds as an inconvenience at worst, I paid little attention to how everyday employees had to deal with those crowds. I’d get on the train, try to find a seat, and get my ticket punched by a conductor. In our new reality, where an employee dealing with crowds is much more hazard than inconvenience, it’s a reminder that there are two sides to how products and services are experienced — by the customer, and by the employee.
One Friday evening before the world changed, I noticed something that related to work we’d been doing on our Rep Experience team at HubSpot. After leaving work, I boarded an especially crowded train, and overheard the conductor grumbling to himself:
“I tell them this 5:30 train is overcrowded. There are seven hundred people on here. We need at least two more cars…”
What he did then really caught my attention: nothing. He stood by the door and let riders off at their stops, but he didn’t check anyone’s ticket. For me, and anyone else with a punch card (or the app, which savvy riders only activate when the conductor asks), this was great: I saved seven bucks! For the conductor, he was - in his own way - pushing back against an employer who wasn’t listening, or who wasn’t doing the right thing.
In my role working with HubSpot’s internal reps and systems, I’ve become a huge proponent of customer journey maps. They’re a great way of capturing the customer sentiment as they move along their journey, and help identify patterns of friction where things are breaking down. My experience on the train however, hinted at something that my team’s been grappling with over the last few months: Customer Journey Maps are only telling half the story.
If you were to map my experience on that train, it might look like this:
The train was crowded, but it left on time, and hey — I ended up with a free ride! Big spike into green-smiley-face land there. But when you flip that to the train conductor’s experience, you see a different picture:
He probably saw a problem that he knew was going to happen, something he told others about, but he’d been ignored. His response was to stand back and conduct his own mini-workers’ strike and cost the MBTA a few thousand bucks.
If we care about the experience of our customers, a customer journey map is a great place to start. But to fully understand the back and forth customers have with our products and services, we also need to flip the journey on its head and look at the rep experience as well. Just as my trip on the train told only half the story, learning from only half of those involved may actually be obscuring a big part of the overall experience.
What is “rep experience?”
Time to get something out of the way — Rep Experience is not the same thing as Employee Experience. Employee experience is a hugely important subject for any business, concerned mainly with the job satisfaction of employees. It’s the complete experience that someone has while working at a company, from hiring to benefits to 401Ks. Whole books are devoted to it. Culture Codes are written with it in mind. Rep experience isn’t that.
The best descriptor for rep experience is its name: Rep. As in Representative. Reps are those employees that interact directly with the customer, and “represent” the brand, product, service, or all of the above. The bigger a business is, the more rep teams they have, and the more ways a customer might experience interactions with the company. That’s where a rep experience map comes in.
How we created our Rep Experience map
A little over a year ago, my team created a complete end-to-end customer journey map. We interviewed customers worldwide and asked them to describe their experience as a HubSpot customer over their first year. We identified highs and lows, helping us identify the areas of friction that really stick out in the customer’s mind. Going fully end-to-end also helped us highlight where positive and negative themes showed up in multiple places along the journey.
The customer journey map was big, and teams saw themselves in it immediately. We printed copies out and hung them up around the office. It was great, but we came to realize something was missing. We’d identified where customer pain points showed up across teams, but we still didn’t have a clear picture of how teams were solving for that pain.
At the end of 2019 our Rep Experience team was created. We knew that the perfect place to start in understanding the overall rep experience was to create a mirror of the customer journey. We already knew much of the friction that customers were feeling. It was time to work with the reps themselves.
Our process was very similar to the customer journey mapping process, but because we were dealing with internal users, the research process was done in a fraction of the time.
With customer journeys, the biggest challenge is defining the persona(s) you want to dig into, sourcing interviewees, finding time with busy customers worldwide, and more. All told, our customer journey research took nearly three months during the initial interview and synthesis phase! On the flip side, internal reps are usually just a Slack message away - making it possible to line up interviews with willing reps within a day. It does take dedication (we had to table any new work for two solid weeks) — but we were able to move through research and synthesis in a fraction of the time.
As with our customer interviews, we recorded reps as they described their day-to-day interactions with customers, and we left the conversation open. We didn’t lead them in a particular direction, we simply asked what they do, and what would make them more effective at their job. We made sure to save audio from every interview — we learned when presenting our Customer Journey map that actually hearing someone express their frustration is absolute gold to an audience. We compiled all the highs and lows of each rep, and began grouping them into overall themes. This is probably the most intensive part of the exercise, and it’s best to work as a team. What are folks all saying? Where are the overlaps across different teams? As with a customer journey, finding shared areas of pain is huge for crafting a story and identifying problem areas.
Once we had our themes, we crafted a map design that allowed us to color-code the themes. This helped clearly illustrate where the same problem was being tackled by different teams, but each doing it in their own way.
A great example of a crosscutting theme was around Customer Goals. From sales to onboarding to renewals, our reps know how important it is to understand what our customers are hoping to achieve. Sales reps can show them how HubSpot is the right tool to hit those goals, Onboarding specialists can get new users on the road to hitting goals early, and renewal teams can show how successful customers have been over the last year.
A major point of friction identified during our Customer Journey research was that customers were constantly answering the same questions — “please, just don’t make me repeat myself!” It became clear that on the rep side too, we need to consistently capture what those goals are and share them across teams.
The rep experience map has highlighted the fact that the more we invest in solving for internal friction, the better the overall customer experience will be. Because of this, work is already being done to bring teams closer together. In a survey of one rep team, we learned that when considering the notes left by another team about a customer, only 29% found the notes useful. A majority of reps were ignoring the notes and simply asking the customer to repeat themselves. A new set of tools are being put into place for reps across the business to communicate more easily, allowing for smoother customer handoffs. While it sounds like a small step, giving reps stronger lines of communication like this makes a huge impact on their experience, as well as that of the end customer.
Some of the other themes we uncovered included:
- Learning on the job. Reps across all teams told us that they needed to learn on their own how to work most efficiently, sometimes doing the opposite of how they were trained — really good information for teams that are onboarding new employees.
- Unclear ownership. Across the board, we heard reps describe situations where they weren’t sure if they were the customer’s current “owner.” Should they be reaching out to them, or should the customer be talking to another team? This kind of uncertainty can lead to the support-call juggling we’ve all experienced.
- Incentive conflict. Another cross-cutting theme had to do with empathy across teams. One renewal rep put it really well: “It was only when I understood how other reps were measured that I could communicate with them well.” Without this understanding, reps felt as if customers were getting conflicting messaging. Across all teams, there were clear examples of one rep’s goals being misaligned with another’s downstream. This really helps us put into context customer complaints of feeling like they’re being bounced around by disconnected voices.
Thinking back to the crowded train and the exasperated conductor, it was clear that his frustrations aligned somewhat with my own — the train was crowded — but there was more to the story. In his mind, those in charge weren’t paying attention to the needs of their workers, and he took out his frustration by costing the company money. Perhaps the leaders at the MBTA were doing research on their users, and had data about rides. If they asked me on that particular day I would have said it was a perfectly normal ride, and the ticket data would show that there weren’t that many riders — because no tickets were collected! If they were to mirror my customer experience with that of the conductor, they’d see that there was much more to the story.
Tips for creating your own rep experience map
If this all sounds interesting to you, great! Now’s the perfect time to reach out to customer-facing reps for a chat. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Start with the customer experience. This might sound counterintuitive in an article about rep experience, but understanding the customer should always be your first step. If you’ve got existing customer journeys or other research, start there. If not, make sure you interview real customers. There’s a tendency for teams to assume they know enough about the customer to get started, but there’s no replacement for hearing how customers understand their journey with your business (chances are it doesn’t align directly with your org chart).
- Go wide. While you’ll probably want to enlist the help of stakeholders across your organization, keep in mind that they have their own priorities and ongoing projects. The key to a rep experience map is to look for shared pain across the journey of the customer, and it helps to explain how solving for shared problems is the most effective way of improving the customer experience.
- Get the data. The more data you can use to back up your research the better. The good news is that if you’re working with internal reps, their teams likely already have a ton of data around how they work. In a lot of cases, that data is used only by the team that originally looked into it. The more you can link together the data generated by multiple siloed teams, the more you’ll be able to highlight problems shared across teams.
Seeing the full picture
Customer journey maps on their own are incredibly valuable, but understanding how reps experience customer interactions can help us understand the full experience of our products and services. Just as customer journeys show common areas of friction in different steps along their path, rep experience maps can uncover how multiple teams helping customers are facing many of the same problems. In understanding these shared problem spaces, we as designers have a unique, efficient foundation for improving the overall customer experience.
We now live in a world where Instacart shoppers and Amazon workers have walked off the job to because of health risks. Whole Foods employees are striking, and Trader Joe’s workers are petitioning for hazard pay. To them, delivering a delightful experience shouldn’t mean putting themselves at personal risk. It’s a reminder that there are two sides to every experience, and we should be using all the tools we can to improve experiences, from the inside out.
