A Bottom-Up approach to digital transformation starts from understanding the human expectations, motivations and concerns regarding their interaction with technology
“How” we dive deep to uncover the interactions between human behaviours and technology, and what is produced as an output to guide decision making, is where we see digital strategies fall apart.
Two popular tools we see frequently adopted by businesses to understand this interaction are Customer Journey Map and Service Blueprint. However, people generally approach these tools in a dogmatic manner which often is why it fails to produce effective results or get buy-in. Here’s why.
Why Customer Journey Doesn’t Work
Pros: It highlights the end-customer’s emotions across the entire journey, which serves well as guiding principles to understand the human experience and what a desirable solution looks like.
Cons: By only focusing on the end-customer and their emotions, it fails to highlight the internal users and existing systems, which leads to a solution that is not feasible or viable, and hence not deliverable.
What do I do with this beautiful map
Business MIndset
How and who will deliver this process
Tehcnical Mindset
That’s exactly what I need, our technical team just needs to support it
Analyst Mindset
Why Service Blueprint Doesn’t Work
Pros: It highlights what internal users and existing systems are involved to deliver the end-customer experience.
Cons: People often get lost diving into details and complexities of internal processes that are not necessarily relevant for the digital strategy. The solution becomes process and technology driven that fails to deliver the desired end-customer experience. Not to mention the significant amount of effort and time it takes!
This is too detailed for me, I don’t understand what I am looking at
Business Mindset
People just need to be trained so they can follow the new process
Technical Mindset
This doesn’t remove the manual process for me to provide data
Analyst Mindset
Digital Experience Mapping
Both customer journey map and service blueprint are useful, but they should not be followed to the tee. The main purpose of any tool is to help your team to be human-centric and make decisions from a human angle. We call this Digital Experience Mapping.
There is no one-size-fits all approach. We should only borrow what is needed from different tools, such as customer journey, service blueprint or others. What your digital experience map should include would depend on your team’s capability makeup and design maturity. The only thing that matters is ensuring that the output is human-centered and is easily understood by your people.
An example below is a Digital Experience Map we created for a Building Supply Business. It details all four customers and their interaction with data.
The systems and tools are detailed at a high-level that are basic enough for business teams to know who and what interactions are involved, and detailed enough for technical and analytical teams to understand where they provide support. This helped us identify the current-state, future-state, UX requirements and dependencies within a day workshop.
From experience, being flexible is most effective in helping businesses understand their human and technical interactions, and get by-in from multiple teams.
Both the design and delivery of a Digital Experience Map is critical to the success of your digital strategy development and should be considered together.
This shouldn’t take long. In fact, you should start with an assumptive version where you continue to test and iterate different segments of the digital experience to ensure it effectively meets customer needs and stays relevant.
Often we see businesses spend weeks creating a master-piece, only to realise it needs further iteration once it is finally operative, or too much time has passed that the map is no longer relevant. We also see businesses treat the assumptive version as the final design and reject any testing and iterations to be done. These scenarios must never be your delivery strategy.
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