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#3: Cracking the Code

B2B Journey Management

Cracking the code is a phase we use to remind ourselves to focus on the needs of our customers and what is valuable to them. In this instance the code to crack is how to employ journey management. For this issue we are focussed on B2B journey management.

Thoughts. The untapped journey management potential

 

Journey management may be seen as consumer focussed but the potential for impact in B2B is arguably greater. In B2B contexts where there is a greater use of account management and higher touch there can be an assumption that customers are well served. Ironically this can lead to B2B customers having poor overall experiences as the connections between silos are not joined-up in a coherent whole for the customer. In B2B it is a powerful advantage to facilitate their teams to work together for mutual advantage.

A relationship lifecycle enables management of the 'business' we do with customers

A relationship lifecycle enables management of the ‘business’ we do with customers

Journey management can address some of the key business goals of most B2B businesses. These include; ensuring new customers are activated and getting value quickly after contract or purchase, ensuring that they are aware of the full capability of a supplier and ensuring that they are able to adapt and adjust their renewal or repeat purchase with ease.

All of these goals have a complexity that journey management can help to overcome. As businesses are teams not individuals we need to understand and navigate different needs and perspectives. Journey management can address this by building in support for decision making and showing how information and data can flow through various journeys and support customers at each stage.

The complexity of B2B also manifests in very specific requirements that can be missed or poorly served – perhaps a specialist role in the customer business has a need that is critical to the success of a journey. Journey management is able to identify these roles and zoom into better ways to ensure they do not become bottle necks or break points. For example a specialist technical role – such as a specifying engineer or actuary – will have highly technical needs that we can uncover and cater to if we identify and manage their specific sub-journey.

Journey management can also have a big impact on internal effectiveness for businesses. When colleagues from different departments work together on journeys with a focus on customers they find that they are able to improve the connections and hand-offs between each other. This enables operational flow and improved processes.

We are very positive about journey management for B2B. The challenge we see in deployment is primarily in the adoption by teams. B2B journey management requires a little more sophistication as customers can be complex entities. It also requires the cultural ability to change what can often be entrenched ways of working in departmental silos that people have grown comfortable with. With this in mind any use has to be introduced carefully and with strong sponsorship to keep it going through inevitable challenges.

Below we have first hand experience from inside a B2B journey management operation from Kate Kapp at Kimberly Clark. If you have perspectives to add please let us know.

 

We want to include the stories of others using or considering journey management and would love to hear from you if you have a tale to tell or an approach that you are proud of and think others could benefit from.

Methods:  When the customer is a business what do you do?

 

When Livework started out in 2001 we had an opportunity to work with Experian on business risk and credit services. At the time we had no B2B experience as design is very geared up to address a single human as the customer. So what do you do when the customer is a business?

We soon learnt two things. First, businesses are full of people and we can understand their needs and experiences in very similar ways to consumers or citizens. The tricky part is that there are many humans in a business, with different needs and experiences. Second, that a business is also an entity in itself that has its own needs (if not experiences) such as; to grow,  make a profit or manage cash flow.

What does this mean for journey management? To address the first factor, that businesses are full of people we have to consider multiple roles within the business, the needs of each role and how they interact with each other. This can make B2B journey management a little more complex than a consumer application. But also more interesting. What we have found is that journey management becomes more valuable as if you can understand and address the range of needs in a customer business you have the opportunity to add significant value to your offer and relationship to them. You can become much more attuned and provide better service.

For the second factor, to the business as an entity with needs itself. This can be thought of as a kind of customer segmentation where different business priorities for different customer businesses can be identified and addressed in the way a service is delivered. For example, one customer business may value speed and another value cost control. Understanding these needs can guide journey management to define ways to address a range of business customers. For example a business may need to manage risk journey management can help to identify and structure where risk occur and how to mitigate them. crucially this approach defines how this is done together by the supplier and the customer and views it as a holistic activity.

Image: Using a journey to focus on a specific business need.

 

To break that down lets take a buying journey. A business needs to buy a product or service (lets make it an expensive one like a new bit of complex equipment). The business has needs. It needs to find the right product that does the job required, for a price that fits the business case. It may also need to be legally compliant for the type of use, usable for the people using it and come with support, maintenance etc that ensures its ongoing usefulness. Buying is a process that probably involves; finance, legal, operations and the CEO who has a favourite brand.

So if we are selling this expensive product we can design a journey that understands these considerations and facilitates addressing these needs. We start with a business customer with a clearly identified product need and value driver. We can then design the journey it is taking to buy something. Within that customer journey you have the roles of the stakeholders listed and their needs at each step of the way. This enables the design of a better interface with the buying customer. See our Kone case study for an example. 

You might say that this is just good sales practice. We challenge you to show us a sales team that has mapped the needs and experience of their customers in a way that enables the whole organisation involved in the sale and delivery of the product to know how they contribute to success. And the buy journey is just the start of journey management for B2B.

 

At Livework we have developed end-to-end ‘accelerators’ for a number of sectors to help our clients build on our knowledge, experience and best practice. If this is of interest do get in touch.

Perspective: Kate Kapp

Kate Kapp

Kate Kapp

 

Learning from experience

Introduce yourself

I am Kate Kapp, a Customer Experience and Journey leader, working at Kimberly Clark International. My backstory is that I graduated in the dotcom boom and found my way into UX. Quite quickly, my curiosity about what happens before and after the digital touchpoint led me into service design, where I’ve specialized ever since. It’s definitely where my heart is. In recent years, I’ve moved into a more holistic CX and journey leadership space. For me, CX embraces all those knotty business elements which are essential to enable great service and brilliant journeys to happen, and spans everything from how we measure success to how we build the right customer focused culture and align teams across the business.

 

What is journey management to you?

I think how I would describe it is like the business nuts and bolts, or the scaffolding that you need to have in place if you are to create great experiences for customers. It gives us a framework for how we prioritize and measure the impact of customer centricity and helps make the often intangible nature of services much more visible and tangible to the business.

The other really important thing for me is that journey management adds a new, really important skillset into the mix: the journey manager. They bring in an operational mindset that enables the service design and customer experience to deliver improved experiences. Journey managers focus on prioritisation and impact, which allows service designers to focus on how the experience actually works and feels to its users.

 

How do you think it is most effectively employed?

My mantra is: start small. That could mean just focusing really tightly on a few core journeys. Or it could just be, in a global company, starting with one region or a single country-level pilot. You really want to prove your worth and communicate early wins clearly and visibly.

The other thing is metrics. I would really make sure that you’ve got a few core metrics that you want to drive. I’ve suffered in the past from having almost too many metrics. I think keeping it really simple and aligned to the company’s core strategy is how you start getting exec attention.

 

What is the biggest risk of failure?

Bloat is my concern for the industry. I think the risk is growing too quickly and becoming a silo—trying to map every single journey without focusing on what is strategically important. Hiring too quickly and growing a great Titanic of a team that becomes an extra layer of middle management, rather than helping the organisation move faster to fix things. For me, it’s best to stay as agile and as nimble as you can be.

I think the other point that is also problematic is not tying journeys relentlessly to the corporate strategy. In a cost sensitive environment, it’s essential that we prove the value to senior leaders.

 

What is your most impactful journey management example?

In terms of impact, often the most impactful work isn’t the headline-grabbing changes, but the things that enable everything else. It’s about the simplification of processes, avoiding duplication, and fixing core journey foundations like product data. With the rise of AI, this has now become even more critical because you can’t build innovation on weak foundations. Journey management helps make those gaps explicit so teams can prioritise and fix what really matters first. These behind the scenes changes might not be what your CEO wants to talk about but they make bigger, more visible improvements possible further down the track.

 

Can you talk a little about how you approach journey management in a B2B business?

Exactly the same. Treat the customer as you would a consumer, with as much care.

I think that B2B is more ripe for journey management as the relationship lifecycles are longer and the interactions are more complex. There is more invested in a journey and its touchpoints. Journey management can have a greater impact because it helps with the complexity. B2B is not one-to-one; it is one-to-many. You need good relationships with many people in a business. They may come and go, so you need to really understand when to deliver a brilliant experience.

It makes more business sense, but it often gets less attention.

Next: Please contribute

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If you have ideas or perspective to contribute get in touch with us. We are keen to learn and build out the promise of journey management.

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Ben Reason Founding Partner

I am a founding partner of Livework having set-up the company in 2001. My focus on keeping Livework at the forefront of service design practice and ensuring we continue to create value for our clients.

Livework
London

29 Clerkenwell Road

London, EC1M 5RN

Rotterdam

Goudsesingel 96, 3011KD, Rotterdam,

Netherlands

São Paulo

Rua Sader Macul 96

Itaim Bibi 04542-090 São Paulo Brazil

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