Audio transcript (edited)

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Kat Goldsworthy. I am a research fellow here at the Australian Institute of Family Studies working in the Evidence and Evaluation Support Team.

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Bunurong people of the Kulin Nations, who are the traditional owners of the lands in Melbourne where I am speaking to you from today. I also pay my respects to the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to lands and waters. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present.

Today's webinar is part of a series designed to share information about the evaluative work that social service providers are undertaking across Australia. For some it's going to be a little bit different to our regular webinar program in that it will be a brief conversation between me and one other guest. Today my guest is Monique Rappell, who is joining us to talk about customer journey mapping and how it can help us to improve services.

Before we dive into the discussion though, I do have a little bit of housekeeping to cover. So the first thing is that the webinar is being recorded. The recording will be available in about two weeks' time and you can access the recording either through the AIFS Newsletter, if you subscribe to that, or it will also be located on the AIFS website under het Webinar banner.

There will be some related readings and resources that we're going to link through which you can access through the Handouts section of your GoTo Webinar. Of course, this is a big topic and we can't cover everything so, if you do want to do some follow-up reading or find out some more information, that's a good place to start.

There's also going to be a short feedback survey that's going to open at the end of the webinar and we would really appreciate you just taking some time out to provide some feedback to us so that we can improve our webinar program, particularly this one because it is a new model that we're trying.

But now let's get to the discussion.

Monique, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. I wonder if we could just start with you telling our audiences a little bit about who you are and the kind of work that you're doing.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Thanks Kat. It's really a pleasure to be here. So I'm a Strategic Service Designer and I work with purpose-led organisations to help amplify their impact, and I do this via applying human-centred design methodologies and systems thinking to help them both develop new services, improve the services they have, and innovate in new areas that might be challenging for them.

So a lot of the work that we do is what we're talking about today, which is working directly with customers or employees to identify what desirable experiences are and how then to implement those desirable experiences so that both customers, employees and organisations can benefit from that work.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: I just love hearing you talk about this. I mean, I first saw you - I got in touch with you because I saw you present an FRSA conference, I think it was last year, and you were giving this great presentation about customer journey mapping, and you had just been working on a project that you recently completed, and I knew absolutely nothing about this process that you were talking about, customer journey mapping. I have an evaluation background, I spend a lot of time talking about evaluation, but this was something completely different, almost trying to get to the same objectives, similar objectives, trying to understand and unpack the same kinds of things that sometimes evaluation is trying to do but you were talking about this in a completely different way and going about it in a different way. So immediately I was just completely engaged by the topic and I think everyone joining us today will be equally so.

So I'm very excited that you're here and I do have a lot of questions but I think - you've given us a little bit of an overview about what you do but could you tell us a little bit more about what customer journey mapping specifically is and what it entails?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Yeah. Customer journey mapping is - I think it's almost more like a mindset but it is a series of tools and frameworks, but it's a way of approaching and understanding customers' needs by different goals. We talk about good service designers being at the nexus of desirability, feasibility and viability, so that's what do customers need, what do employees need to be able to deliver against what customers need, what can a business or an organisation sustain, a service sustain, and what can the technology sustain? Those three things need to come together.

Most innovation in services is done when technology changes or when the demands of the funders change around what a service should do. Service design that's based on customers looks at that desirability component, and customer journeying is essential for understanding that desirability section of that triangle. So customer journey basically starts with looking at customers and how they go about solving a particular problem or meeting a particular need. What steps do they take, what tasks do they undertake, what decisions do they make, and we begin mapping that.

Now, some of that might intersect with your service but some of it might begin well before the service and end after your service has actually come into contact with a customer. It's a really important way of helping organisations to move beyond well-worn, rusted-on beliefs that they might hold about their customers, so it enables services to stay current with what customers are doing, and what we're seeing, actually, at the moment, is a lot of behavioural change with people generally - post-COVID, the rate of change around how people engage with services is phenomenal. So customer journey work really helps you to get a handle on what's changing and why is it changing.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: And so presumably a lot of the work that you do is brought about because a service has recognised that there's some kind of change happening in their service system or things aren't quite working as much as they want and they're trying to figure it out, or are there other reasons that are kind of prompting people to adopt this approach?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: So a lot of reasons that I get called in to look at services are sometimes to do with efficiency and effectiveness. You're not getting to the right customers and you're not sure why. You're experiencing a rush of customers that you normally haven't had. Now, by customers, everybody needs to understand I include clients in that. So we sometimes in the social sector refer to people as clients. I'm calling them customers, but we assume they're the same thing. So it can happen when you're failing to meet your funder's requirements and you're not sure why. We can come in and do journey work because you want to expand your service and you're not sure what the impact of that scaling is going to be.

Sometimes it's just to update what you're doing and to really - if you're, for instance, moving from having a very centre-based approach to having a more organisational approach, you often need customer journey work to ensure that you've got that continuity and consistency and predictability of service while still holding on to that local knowledge and that face-based context, and customer journey work can help you to do that, because it's based on qualitative research directly done with customers, and so it's bringing in information to an organisation that is often very different from the information that the organisation gets to see on a regular basis. The sort of information that goes into customer journeying often is not available to you from within your business or within your organisation. You have to go out of your service sometimes to find that information.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Do you mean just because we can be a bit blindsided by how we think about things, you need that objective perception? Can you elaborate a bit more on that?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Yeah, I can. What happens in all organisations is they develop datasets based on the immediate needs of the organisation. For most social sector or not-for-profit, that will be at the demands of, for instance, a funder. So most of the data you're collecting is being driven by what your funder wants. A lot of the information that you gather internally is stored but not used, and so a lot of the information that social services carry is not turned into effective insights or into meaningful recommendations, and a lot of what we carry is actually still very manual, so we've still got a lot of really manual information.

We talk in service design about an inside-out and an outside-in perspective, and an inside-out perspective usually carries at its core your organisation's expertise and its hard-earned understanding of its customers and what they need, but some of those things can get out of sync with what's really going on with the customers and they start to lose relevancy and they start to lose currency.

An outside-in perspective is where you are taking the view of your customers and drawing it into the organisation and informing the decisions that you're making based on what's really going on for them.

When I worked at TAFE - I'll give you a really simple example of how this works. When I worked at TAFE New South Wales that has 550,000 students at any given time, there was a lot of moaning going on about the fact that the students couldn't read our course instructions, that they couldn't understand what we were asking them to do, and we were ending up with a lot of students being enrolled in the wrong courses, and when we started to do journey mapping around that to see how they were making decisions, they were using information in much, much smaller parcels than we were giving it to them, and so they weren't actually comprehending a lot at the beginning.

All we had to do was change the structure of that information and align our information with their decision making and we were getting them into the right course first time, but we had to see what they were doing, rather than just going, "Nobody's reading properly. It's all hopeless," we go, "Well, how are they reading, how are they absorbing information and what do we need to do to support that?" So that's the sort of example of outside-in thinking.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Yeah, because I guess we are, we're all guilty of making assumptions and letting our past experiences kind of inform our thinking about what is going on and why problems are occurring, you know, I mean that happens for everyone in every organisation or the work that we're doing, because we're human, right?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Assumptions are really important in business, in organisations, services and businesses, any kind of service entity, because you can't - it's a form of shorthand. It's like you don't have to look at a map every time you drive to work. If you did, you'd go a bit bonkers because you know how to get there, you know how to get from home to work and you can do it efficiently. So those sorts of assumptions are really important, but they have to be evidence-based, and in the past a lot of them weren't. A lot of our assumptions weren't evidence-based. That is outside of clinical practice because a lot of what we do in clinical practice is evidence-based but the service elements that sit around it weren't necessarily evidence-based.

And they need to be updated and frequently what happens is they just get soldered on and nobody re-evaluates, and even if things are starting to fail, things are starting to not work very well, staff are starting to suffer and you're seeing collateral damage with your employees, we're still maintaining that this is the right thing to do.

Now, the easiest thing to do is check, just go out and check and do the work with your customers to see whether those assumptions are still realistic, they're still viable, they're still working for you and the customers, and if they're not, work out how to transition your service to align with what your customers need, and often we feed that back to your funders so that they are also cognisant of what's changing, because they've got an even stronger lag in terms of what's going on within a service. So our obligation is to make sure they understand.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and I always think there's such power in - such a powerful thing to be able to do something like customer journey mapping, which again I'm still kind of getting my head around, and you too, that's why we're talking to you, but even from an evaluation perspective, trying to take a step back and just think about what don't we know, and interrogate some of our assumptions that we have about how things are working or not working and how they're designed and trying to get some evidence to show well actually, this is what's happening, and maybe we'll learn something along the way that we can then use to change and improve things for the benefit of everyone, and I know, in the work that you've been doing, it's for the benefit of the customers but there's also other benefits for practitioners and people working in the services, and inevitably -

MONIQUE RAPPELL: It always pays huge dividends. I mean, I did work eons ago that was for a bank and they had this - they really believed that women could not be trained in a certain area of banking practice, and when we did the customer journey mapping and we had employees testing new initiatives based on the customer journey mapping, the female employees could pick it up in 45 minutes, this thing that supposedly they couldn't learn, and it revolutionised the way they did training.

So it has all sorts of expansive impacts. We did a piece of work recently for a large family service and that was, I think, the Children's Contact Services. One of the things that came out of doing very vapid journey mapping there was the need to change the way we were upskilling people in that service, and it became very, very clear very quickly what that skillset was and how it needed to be trained. So then that becomes an initiative that you can take away and say, "We've got this thing that can help improve the working lives of our employees while also meeting the needs of our customers."

And the process of using qualitative research to do customer journey work is a really bonding process. Usually the customers come away feeling really good about your service. They feel that they've been heard and that their needs are going to be incorporated into the service and, because we also do a parallel journey with the employees, it's a really good way to build employee engagement and collaboration. So the mechanism by which we do it is almost as important as the output.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: So this might just be the point then to ask you about - to just give us an example, I guess, of what the process looks like, because I guess we've been talking about this now in fairly high-levels terms. You're obviously now saying that qualitative research is a big part of the customer journey mapping process. Could you talk us through, as briefly as possible, an end-to-end process of how customer journey mapping looks like? How do you start, what does it involve, what are the results. Maybe share an example of something you've worked on?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: The secret to really good customer journeying, because it can be done badly, like anything. Anything can be done well and it can be done badly. Good customer journey work is based on insights that you derive directly from customers, and what you speak to them about is how they behave. So you do a lot of recall work, a lot of, "Talk to me about how you would get from this point to that point. What's important about that?" and what you're looking for is how do they behave, and then those behaviours identify their needs. If you ask them what they want, you're never going to get the right information from them, because, as human beings, we can sometimes not be able to articulate that.

So the great thing about customer journey mapping is it can be really, really detailed. Like when I was working for the family services organisation that I've just finished with, we did nine metres of work. So we had a customer journey map that took up nine metres on a wall and was exhaustive. It was very comprehensive in the detail.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: So you're physically mapping it out on paper?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: You physically map it out.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Wow.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: I've just done one for a start-up where we've gone from A to finish insights and implementation in four and a half weeks, so it can be done at different levels. So you start by interviewing customers, and the minimum you can interview, really, to get patterns forming is about eight. You talk to them about, in a particular context, about how they go about solving a particular problem, and from that you begin to map out the touchpoints and the phases that are important to them. Not your process but what's important to them and how they go about - what you're looking for is how they make decisions, because decisions drive momentum through a service.

So how are they making decisions, where do they need information, what sort of information do they look for, who do they go and speak to? So you get all of that information and then you sort of block it out into phases. That's your basic customer journey.

Underneath that you then usually have some sort of emotive response to this, and this is to help build empathy for when they're struggling or to give you some insight into when things are working for them. We often call that pain points or gain points, but really it's what's causing them to stress, what's causing them frustration, what do they really like about particular interactions, and then you can map that out.

So that's your basis. That's your skeleton. I think I've talked to you about this before. You build a skeleton and then you build up over the top of that, and you do this by aggregating data. You can't do it based on one or two customers. You have to see multiple customers, and what you're looking for is common patterns that they all have. The great thing about mapping a customer journey is once you have those common elements, you can then say, "Well, what would this be like for a particular inclusion group?" and you can do additional research, say, for customers that you might not be getting into your service in the way that you've committed to your funder to or that you want to and say, "Well, why are they having different experiences?" and you can begin to map that over that common sort of customer journey.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Can I just interrupt you quickly, Monique? I had this question as you were talking about how do you choose which customers to do this work with, because in social services obviously there's a lot of diversity really in terms of who's coming through the centre. There's a lot of talk about the hard to reach or the more vulnerable population groups that we're not always reaching through services and there's just everyone on the spectrum coming into services all the time. Is that important in terms of picking the customers?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: I think you've got to be realistic about what you can do. So the first starting point is to look at your own customers and to get that range. So looking at something like relationship counselling, we looked at basically we need couples, individuals, we need adult parents, we need separated couples. So we need a range of people who have had different experiences and that's why they're coming in to the service.

Then you start to do a breakdown based on demographics. Is this reflective of gender, is it reflective of background, all of those sorts of things, and you get as much of that as you can. I don't think doing that general mapping really gives you enough nuance around particularly groups who might be under-represented in your service, and so what I personally think you're better to do is to do your general customer journey mapping and then speak to those customers specifically and do a second set of mapping over the top of your mapping for them, because you're going to get much more nuance then and a much better understanding.

The general rule in service design is after about eight customers, you will start to see common behaviours around a particular context. So you can't map everything. It has to be a particular part of the journey that you're mapping, or a particular service. But what you can do is, if you've mapped mediation over here and you've mapped counselling here or you've mapped children's contact centres, you can then see how they intersect across the customer's lifespan, so you can start to create a much bigger understanding end-to-end of customers and how they move between services and how they understand their rights to move between and access services.

So it can go from being very simple to very complex depending on the question you're trying to answer, and it all comes down to what is the problem you are trying to fix. What you're going to find is stuff that you didn't know about because your customers will tell you things you didn't know about, and that's why doing customer journey mapping is so exciting.

I mean, when we did the relationship counsel one, there were whole touchpoints that were in customers' heads that they thought were really important that just didn't feature at all in our service.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: When you say touchpoints, you're talking about the different things that they interact with in a service? What does that mean?

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Not necessarily. I consider a touchpoint to be almost like a decision point. At this point I do something. So I'm taking a particular action, I'm making a particular decision, and there's a certain outcome that I want from that in order to move forward, and good service design is all about helping customers to move through all of those activities, decisions, interactions as smoothly and as seamlessly and as supported as you can. A lot of services, customers just drop out, they fall out of service, they have these blind spots, they have black holes, and what you're trying to do is to get consistency across all those touchpoints.

So for me it's not so much - when people are doing not great customer journey mapping, what they're putting onto those touchpoints are things that are part of their process. This is our process and this is where it sits, and that's driving their understanding of the customer. But a lot of those processes ideally should be invisible to your customer. What they're seeing is how do I understand the next step.

And it's interesting, the thing that comes out in journey mapping all the time is that we never give our customers the next steps well enough for them to feel confident in their decision making. It comes up in every piece of service design. At some point in your journey, you have failed to give them the right information to be able to make an independent decision.

So that then puts pressure on your service because they have to ring you and ask for help because they can't understand what they need to do next or they have to ring you to check in because they're not getting the information they need to know how long something's going to take to happen. And so those moments where you're failing to support their decision making usually put a huge burden on your resources that you can actually get rid of if you understand what it is they need at that point, give it to them, and then you don't have to over-service them by multiple phone calls, in social sector dozens of emails and lots and lots of communication.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: It's really sensible, isn't it, because these are the invisible things or the things that - again, assumptions - we kind of assuming that are working, and I can talk about my own work that I do here at AIFS - assume that these things are working, you don't spend too much time. In a service environment, too, people are really concerned about taking care of their clients and having connection and building rapport and trust and making sure that they're cared for and looked after, and rightly so, but I think, of course, there are other ways - there are other points at which clients need to be thought about, I guess, and considered, and doing this kind of approach allows some of those things to become a little bit more visible by the sounds of it.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: I think the other benefit of customer journeying is it really supports whole-of-organisation understanding of customers, because you can have your practitioners in any service having a really high level of understanding of your customers' clinical and service needs, but the people who are speaking to them before and after have got no idea what's going on. People sitting in finance don't understand why the financial constraints they're putting on the service or the way the payment systems are working are creating havoc for those customers.

You can have the people who are designing your website and your marketing information not comprehending what the detailed therapeutic needs - and I don't mean that they have to become clinicians, but one of the things that we did work on when we were working at this relationship counselling was how to extend the therapeutic space, how to take some of the pressure off the practitioners at those critical points they're working with and extend some of that therapeutic sense of safety and security through the rest of the service.

Because what we tend to design in the social sector is the practice not the service. So we tend to design in quite a lot of detail how we will interact with our customers from a clinical or practice point of view, and a lot of the other service elements are sort of tacked on.

They are now critical and they've never been more critical than they are now, because customers' expectations have changed around the way you bring them into a service, the way you exit them out of a service, the way you bring them back in when they're coming back, and those expectations are really different from what they were pre-COVID, so a lot of social sector organisations are struggling to keep up with the changing expectations that have come out of that seismic shift that we all went through.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Yeah, it's completely - yeah, understandably so really. We've only got really a few minutes left. I interrupted you before when you were talking about - when you were starting to give an example, you spoke about the skeleton, then there were some more steps. I'm happy for you to go back to that example and talk about what else might be involved in customer journey mapping. I guess what I'm interested in is how long does a process like this take. I mean, you've already spoken - and maybe some of the outcomes that can be derived.

You've kind of spoken about several examples, I think, in different bits and pieces about some of the things that have happened as a result of the projects that you've worked on, but if there's anything else you can offer in terms of what it actually looks like in practice and how long it takes. Anything else that you can share that might be useful to anyone listening.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: The longest part of doing customer journey work is doing the synthesis of the data and then making meaning out of it. This is where it becomes really important. So you either need somebody who knows a bit about how to do it to come and help you to do that or a facilitator or something like that, because it's not just about plonking information into a timeline. It's about working out what it means and to begin to establish the patterns across it.

What tends to come out of customer journey mapping is really clear, very targeted things that you can fix within a service and really clear ideas about how, if you want to transform a service, how you actually do that. So one of the things that we've talked about is the difference between qual and quant data. Quant data quite often will tell you where a problem is but it won't tell you what to do about it. Customer journey mapping qual data will tell you what to do about it, how to fix the problem, and then from that you can establish a series of recommendations that can either just be some quick fixes, and you're more likely to get those quick fixes done because your operations, finance, delivery, service and practice teams can all see the same problem that's high visualised in a customer journey. And we've all worked in organisations where we fix something and we just make another problem.

One of the great things about customer journey mapping is you can see the impact upstream and downstream of your fix and it gives you much better capacity to do an intervention that's going to work and it's going to be sustainable, and particularly going to be sustainable for your staff, because we're seeing the rate of change is having a huge impact on our staff, and we need to make sure that, if we're going to ask them to change something, (a) it works and (b) they can sustain it. So customer journey work really helps to do that.

I mean, as I've just said, I've just done a piece of customer journey work that's taken four and a half weeks, it's been really rapid, and we actually reverse engineered that. We actually built a customer journey based on the knowledge of the people I was working with and then went out and interviewed people, because it was really hard for us to get the people that we needed to interview. So in the time that we had while we were getting them, we built it, we corroborated it, discovered what was wrong with our customer journey, and there was quite a lot wrong with it. But even that was a really good learning process because they could see their initial idea and the one that we came back with second and they could say, "Right, we've underestimated a whole lot of things that are going on here."

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: It sounds very helpful.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: In any point, you have to speak to your customers, either before or after, and then once you've done that - when you go through the point of implementing to change a service, the great thing about customer journey mapping is you can keep referring back to it. Are we actually helping this particular touchpoint or this phase or are we making it worse, and you've got a clear visualisation that you can refer to that everybody can see, everybody can understand, that is clear and concise, that you can refer back to and say, "Actually, that's not going to help. That's not going to solve the problem."

Because what we see a lot in service design is that people either solve the wrong problem or they solve the right problem the wrong way, and that's how we end up with knock-on problems. And I really think journey mapping is the easiest way to stop that from happening.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: That's probably a good place to end, just because I know we are running out of time, but I think for me personally that has helped explain or answer a lot of the questions I had around journey mapping. I mean, one of the questions - I didn't specifically ask it, we didn't have time to go into it - is how this process is different from evaluation, and I can kind of see where they're complementary and where customer journey mapping diverges from traditional evaluation methods, but it's absolutely fascinating, and ultimately all trying to just gather evidence about how to improve services, and this is one way of doing it.

So it's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you, Monique, so much for coming along and talking to us about it today. I really appreciate all of your insights and your time.

MONIQUE RAPPELL: Not a problem.

KAT GOLDSWORTHY: Sadly we do have to end it there. I want to thank Monique. I want to thank everyone who's joining us today. Thanks so much for coming along. Thanks also to our excellent communications team, who's doing all the hard work behind the scenes to make this happen. Please subscribe to our newsletters if you haven't already. That's how you're going to access the recording if that's something you're interested in, and complete the feedback survey. This is what we want. We want to know what you think about this. We want to know if we can improve what we're doing, so complete the feedback survey if you can.

And hopefully we see you at the next webinar recording. So thank you. Have a great day. Take care.