Are you using Customer Journey Maps in Customer Service and Support?

@Dave Seaton Great question!

I've worked with four large and midsize B2B SaaS and tech clients in service and support and facilitated workshops to create CJMs several times, so this one's near and dear to my heart! To your questions:

Is your Customer Service and Support team using CJMs to bring customer insight into strategy decisions about processes, channels, and technology for support?

• In my experience, CJMs are relatively new in service and support but becoming increasingly popular. It's a great idea to pursue and a powerful concept.
• The key is to have internally-created CJMs validated by live customers (which many companies skip) in order to create powerful insights -- almost every time, it's something the teams were completely unaware of that make for the greatest improvement opportunities. @Doug Caviness and @Steven Forth are absolutely right with their focus on business outcomes and value delivered - when customers validate the maps, you can also validate customer-desired business outcomes and how value is measured, a foundational element most companies do not yet have to ensure value is delivered.
• These insights result in a variety of pain points that can be addressed, usually through new or improved business capabilities (people, process, technology). I've found TSIA has been instrumental to help teams understand possible best practices to improve the Customer Success, Service and Support experience.
• Transforming the experience has required investment, usually in technology, sometimes headcount. There are ways to fund this but few approaches succeed without executive sponsorship. So, your "bottoms-up" comment caught my eye.... Many teams spend time mapping all these things out, but if the executive sponsorship isn't there, you can't actually make the changes that the team recommends, which is a bummer for the team. It could make sense to develop CJM skills perhaps, and see if there might be low-hanging fruit, but manage your team's expectations along the way as to what might come from the effort to prevent disappointment.

If so, who champions the creation and maintenance of the maps? Does Support own their own maps, or do you partner with Marketing or Commercial?

• Every company is different here -- I suggest partnering with all willing participants and prioritize those who can drive change. The CJM is a "tip of the iceberg", a visible 5-15% of the effort -- under the water level, and not visible until the CJMs have been completed, are changes you and your team will want to implement to improve the customer experience. Some of these changes are where 85-95% of the effort goes, which require funding and internal partnerships.
• As a result, the approach I've found best is to partner with executives that you believe will be required to implement the likely changes that the CJMs will suggest for the markets and products being explored. For my clients, functions like Marketing, Sales, Product/Engineering, Customer Service, Technical Support, IT, HR, Finance have participated in end-to-end transformations. We have brought each function's representatives into workshops to participate in developing the CJMs and underlying capabilities. The support functions are also needed: HR on culture change, Finance on business case development, and IT on capability development.
• That level of End-to-end support for the whole customer journey requires a senior executive sponsor to get all the functions to play along. Depending on company size, it might be the CEO, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, even a highly regarded SVP of Marketing, Services or Support. The role requires passion and the ability to get others to make putting customer experience a priority and help fund the changes. It doesn't make sense to develop the program or bring functions together if there's little budget to affect change due to a recession, COVID, etc. Some prep work on potential strategies to fund capabilities is time well spent. If you can't fund changes, you can't make changes, and if you can't make changes, you're not going to be able to show results from the effort.
• If it's not possible right now to get the full end-to-end cross-functional partnership due to competing initiatives or short attention spans, narrow your scope to the service and support phases of your customer journey and any other functions who will play along. You can still invite functions who may not yet have exec sponsorship to send a representative for part of the workshop (in my experience, this has most frequently been Sales and Product). We have said, "Our focus is to improve service and support but we want your representatives to help make sure we understand the upfront steps the customer goes through and the underlying processes and systems." Usually, while it's not our focus, we always identify simple changes that can be made in these other functions, too, that they were previously unaware of, which surprises them. They may or may not be able to fix depending on resources needed. But, the next time you ask (for the next target market segment, the next product, the next customer persona you focus on) they're more likely to join in because you showed results from the first time. If you have results to show, you may get the attention of one of those senior cross-functional sponsors the second time around.
• Each map should represent one type of customer (persona) seeking one business outcome. So, in reality there are many maps. For a workshop, we might explore 3-4. It's confusing and not super helpful to have a map with every customer and every product. So who you bring in depends in part on the products and services being addressed.
• Ideally, you want a complete end-to-end Customer Journey Map (current state, future state), maintained by anyone willing to maintain it! Most teams I've been on have someone with a lot of pride of authorship and ideally some "design flair" so they are used widely to communicate and the "owner" gets a lot of kudos. Initially, the owner has been a program office or experience design team, or someone familiar with CJMs, and eventually becomes part of the ongoing operations.

I hope that helps!