How to Explain the Importance of Customer Tasks to Business Teams

This is the second article in a two-part series explaining how to present journey map elements to a business team. Why are some journey map elements more important than others? How opportunities identified in a journey map are linked directly to your company's business model.

Introduction

Last week, I wrote the first article of a two-part series, in which I introduced you to Tom, the CEO of Crescent Forge Industries (CFI), who has a business problem. Tom needs to find a way to increase the revenue for an important customer segment. In short, CFI has a revenue generation problem.

Now, Tom has tapped Logan, VP of customer experience at CFI, to find the most valuable opportunities for their SMB robotics customer segment to help achieve a 20% year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth target. Tom chose Logan to lead this initiative because this business problem requires CFI to solve its customers' pain points. The customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) teams are ideally suited for this initiative.

In the first article, Logan tells Tom that the CX team will use the journey mapping method to identify opportunities for the SMB robotics customer segment. Then, I broke down each journey map element and explained how to frame the value so your business audience can relate to and understand it.

In this second article, I’ll give you more context, beyond the journey mapping elements, about how to approach a meeting with a potential executive team or other cross-functional teams that require an explanation of what journey mapping is and why you should use it to identify opportunities for revenue growth.

In this post, I’ll answer the following questions:

1. Why is the customer task the most important journey map element?
2. What is the link between customer tasks and the business canvas model?
3. How can you persuade the business to allocate investment money based on customer task analysis?

Part 1: Why Are the Customer Tasks the Most Important Journey Map Elements?

Customer tasks are the most important journey map element because customers actively try to reach their goals using a set of tasks. Out of all the journey map elements, customer tasks (and touchpoints) are the only elements a business can improve by spending money on enhancing software or services that help customers complete their tasks.

The other five journey map elements are essential but less important than customer task and touchpoint elements. Together, all seven journey map elements form the "big picture." You must combine data from all seven journey map elements to spot the valuable opportunities that move the needle for your business.

Improve How Customers Complete Tasks and Continuously Unlock Value For a Business

A business needs to unlock value in order to survive and thrive. In other words, when a company is looking to generate more revenue, it needs to look to its customers to help solve that problem. It should start with asking these questions.

• How are we currently helping customers complete their goals?
• Do our capabilities enable customers to complete all their tasks as they interact with our business’s different touchpoints?

When opportunities present themselves in a customer experience, you should always start with customer tasks and follow up by inspecting the touchpoints supporting those tasks.

However, only the customer tasks are actionable, in the sense that you don't only have to know them; you have to ask how you can improve on them from an experience perspective.

Journey Mapping Customer Tasks Helps Pinpoint Valuable Opportunities

So far, we’ve reviewed the customer task journey map element from a business lens. Now, I want to approach journey mapping from a first principles or ab initio perspective. When we break it down to its simplest form, we can conclude that journey mapping is ultimately an exercise in spotting valuable business opportunities.

As we’ve established, customer tasks are the most important of a journey map’s seven elements. Therefore, businesses lose their customers when those customers experience pain trying to complete their tasks. Plumb the depths of the tasks and you’ll find immensely valuable opportunities to exploit.

Why do we need to identify what is of value to a business? A company's business model is, fundamentally, what it does to create value, and because almost every business operating in America has a business model, you can take that valuable opportunity and feed it into the value-creation process. The value-creation process requires inputs such as valuable new opportunities in order to sustain the business model.

Part 2: The Link between Customer Tasks and the Business Canvas Model

Some time ago, I wrote a Triangle Offense post about the concept of opportunity backlog and voice-of-customer (VOC) pipeline management and the importance of having a process to regularly review opportunities regarding how a business provides products and services to its customers. Customers will supply feedback through surveys, interviews, and product reviews, and that feedback is generally concerning some task they were trying to complete.

When you manage your opportunity backlog and VOC pipeline, you’ll come to recognize the opportunities in front of you are really just customers telling you how you can improve their ability to complete tasks using your company's software or services. It's really that simple.

Here’s the crucial thing I want you to understand. Those opportunities are essentially value propositions from customers pitching how you can improve your business's value. They’re telling you—for free—what could make your business more profitable and valuable.

An Opportunity Is a Value Proposition

Seeing opportunities as value propositions is where a lot of teams can adjust their thinking. Forget for a minute that you’re a CX or UX team member. Your mission is to help the business solve problems, right? And you happen to solve business problems that require interfacing with customers. Do you have to solve CX and UX problems? You bet, but that's not the end game. I see too many folks so wrapped up in their CX and UX process that they forget why the business employs them in the first place.

Consider the following quote:

A business model is the organizational design used to exploit an opportunity and create value - Adam J. Bock and Gerard George
(The Business Model Book)

You exist to exploit opportunities. The business that most effectively and efficiently exploits opportunities wins!

You’re employed to exploit opportunities that provide the most value (ROI) for your business and that simultaneously satisfy the customers as they utilize the business’s products and services to reach their goals.

Note the blank image of the Business Model Canvas below. I want to show you the direct link between the opportunities your team pinpoints and how those opportunities link back to the business model your company runs for the specific customer segment you’re targeting.

But first, you should be familiar with three business model canvas components.

1. Value propositions
2. Customer segments
3. Channels

You need to learn more about these specific business model components because they’re all connected. Let me explain.

Let's look at the business model canvas when we connect opportunities to the value proposition component. An opportunity going through the discovery process can morph into a value proposition into which a business may invest money. During the discovery process, the product team determines which customer segment would benefit the most from this value proposition.

Then, the business team looks for how best to distribute these new value propositions to its customers via a channel that works well for the business and customer. Once all those steps are complete, you’ll have figured out how to simultaneously add more value and delight customers, all because you decided to build a journey map that reflects how well customers complete their tasks using your business capabilities.

Part 3: Persuading the Business to Allocate Money for Investments Based on Customer Task Analysis

At this point, you should be comfortable explaining the different journey map elements and why they’re valuable. You can explain why customer tasks are the most important journey map element and take it one step further by showing the business team how opportunities are mostly feedback about how to improve tasks, which will create more value for the current business model.

Now, you’re going to tie it all together and start laying the groundwork to solve business problems. You’re about to enter the realm of finance, where the business teams decide where to allocate investment money in order to drive business revenue.

How to Explain Qualitative Insights From the Journey Map

First, help your audience understand the “why” behind your customers’ behaviors. After you complete your customer and user research rounds, would you walk into a meeting and jump right into a report on your jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) or task analysis project? No. People's eyes would undoubtedly glaze over, and they would probably fall asleep. Instead, you want to wrap your tasks or JTBD in a journey map.

Why a journey map? A journey map is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, so it’s perfectly suited to tell the customer's story. You’ll want to call out special moments about which the business needs to be aware, so you draft key moments (moments of truth) because that perspective comes directly from customers' mouths. You connect the pain points to the customers’ key moments, customer goals, and customer needs and use your observations and interviews as building blocks to construct a narrative that sums up all the qualitative research in a way an audience can understand and to which they can relate.

Become the master true-story teller. It’s your job to connect the journey map and all the different steps a customer takes to get to the end, but it has to tell the customers’ story in their words, using their truth. You’re not interested in your truth, or the business’s truth, or any other team’s truth for that matter. You’re just tying the qualitative data together in a way that explains why the customers are doing the things they’re doing.

How to Frame the Conversation

How to Present Data in Journey Maps

When you tell the story right, you include all the correct metrics for each step of the journey. A story that has no numbers in it is just that: a story. But when you add in specifics as to what the customer is doing, you present a narrative that comes across as much more believable.

First, think about which specific business problem the business needs to solve:

1. How to increase revenue
2. How to decrease costs
3. How to increase market share
4. How to increase revenue from existing customers
5. How to increase shareholder value

Then, once you understand which type of business problem you’re solving, try to think about journey map data as a combination of input metrics and KPIs to insert relevant data into the conversation.

• Input metric: A customer/user journey’s critical events
• KPIs: Relate to monetization, retention, and engagement

How to Frame the Conversation

Recommending and Evaluating Opportunities: From Discovery to Investment-Ready Design

When you walk a team or teams through your customer journey map, you have to emphasize the importance of aligning all internal stakeholders with the insights you derived from the customer journey. This alignment ensures that everyone from product development to marketing is on the same page about where to invest. Time and again, people on different teams will sit in a meeting without coming to an agreement about or even understanding the opportunities you want to pursue.

Once you have consensus among all teams responsible for a part of the customer journey that these opportunities are important, addressable, and will solve a business problem, you’ll have the green light to explore them. Next, discuss the importance of starting the design discovery process, so a design team can create a plan to ideate, prototype, and test the solutions with the customers.

It might be tempting for a business team to immediately start brainstorming solutions. Avoid this amateur move at all costs. The amount of delays and morale-damaging pain this tendency creates is staggering. Explain to the team that you want to run a minimum viable product (MVP) or pilot to push the solutions out to the customer. Explain that you’re following this procedure to mitigate the possibility of this opportunity becoming an investment risk. At the end of the day, the business will become more valuable to its customers, but it’s vital to utilize the discovery process and ensure the software prototype addresses the customers’ pain points effectively before the business should make a substantial investment.

I could write so much more about this particular step in the customer journey map design process (CJMDP) that it would fill pages, but I’ll leave that for another article.

Summary

Remember Logan, the VP of Customer Experience from the first article? Logan went to great lengths to explain all the customer journey map elements to the business team from a business perspective.

In part one you learned why customer tasks are the most critical customer data you must acquire and display in your customer journey map. Customer tasks are actions customers take to complete their goals. We use the journey mapping method to visualize and find opportunities you can exploit vis-à-vis customer tasks in an effort to improve their experience and increase monetary gain.

In part two, I explained the connection between the opportunities you pinpointed in the journey map and the company's business model. Every new opportunity is a chance you can use to create more value for the business model, which is important because if a business doesn’t create new value, it will wither and die over time.

In part three, I walked you through how to use a journey map as a backdrop for your story about a customer group and what they experience as they try to reach their goals with your company. You need to become the true-story teller in your organization; in so doing, you’ll influence other teams because your customer knowledge is easy to understand and believable. However, it’s critical to weave metrics and KPIs into your story, so as a narrative it becomes hard to disprove. Once that happens, repeat it ad nauseam, highlight the most important and addressable opportunities (cruxes) to the business team, and convince them to assign the opportunity to the product portfolio’s design discovery process.

I encourage you to follow this process and tweak it to fit your organization’s culture. When you commit to it, you’ll become the true-story teller who connects all the dots across the customer experience. The true-story teller has an enormous amount of influence, which translates into soft power across an organization. I hope that will be you because the customer needs you.

Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant

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