Tell us a little about yourself. What is your job at Telefónica?
I am a strategic and service designer, and I have been working in digital innovation for almost 20 years. I rejoined Telefónica 3 years ago after 10 years in banking. I landed in 2022 in the New Business area to conceptualise products that are currently on the market. For the last year I have been working in B2B, in the Sectorial Solutions Department as Head of User Experience. I combine my work with teaching at the University of Design, Innovation and Technologies, UDIT.
My work at Telefónica is based on two fundamental pillars:
Innovation: I bring innovation methodologies in my management to achieve the business objectives set and apply techniques to articulate the strategy in tangible artifacts that validate the hypotheses. I am currently focused on prospective design.
And also, the focus on people: Ensuring that experiences are centred on people’s real needs, motivations and problems; in my case, being in B2B, the challenge is greater, as our clients are companies, so we have to work with two or even three layers of needs (company, intermediate user, end user). For this I apply attitudinal and behavioural research techniques with real users and heuristic analysis to design the best experiences.
For those of us who are not very clear about it, could you explain what the customer journey is ?
A customer journey is a tool for organising information in order to visualise in a simple and chronological way the experience that people have or will have with a certain product or service, focusing on the actions and emotions of that person in each phase.
It relies on qualitative and quantitative research and analysis methods such as User persona, interviews, safaris, conversion funnels… in order to be created.
What types of journeys are there?
There are as many journeys as there are experiences that each of our users can have. But to represent them we have several typologies. The two that I consider to be the most decisive are:
According to the focus: Product Journey vsExperience Journey :
The Product Journey maps only the points of contact that a person has with our product. They reflect the situational context and only focus on the interaction between a customer and a product, service or brand.
Whereas experience journeys visualise the overall experience, they take into account any activity and/or emotion that is on that journey, regardless of whether it is a touch point with our company. This approach can lead to better insights into what people really want to achieve and uncovers many experience gaps, thus generating many business opportunities by mapping it in this way.
Another typology is according to depth: customer journey map vs Service Blueprint:
The customer journey map defines the roles or systems that are directly involved in the interaction with the customer. This is often called the Frontage: interfaces, communication channels, key players …..
Whereas the Service Blueprint maps all the activities needed in the company to produce the service or product. In every corporation, there is a complex network of systems of record and automation systems not visible to users that support all the processes; what we call the backstage. The blueprint seeks to map these processes and systems chronologically with the stages of the front end. Of course you have to know when to put in the extra effort to include the back-end of a Journey, but often a poor customer experience is related to internal organisational deficiencies and when the root of the problem is systemic a service blueprint helps you expose the map of dependencies.
What is its importance for companies?
Journeys are key to two relevant aspects for companies:
Innovation: If you are looking to design a new service that combines interactions across multiple digital and face-to-face touchpoints, a journey is the ideal tool to work with.
Improving products already launched. Generally, the longer a service has been operating, the more siloed and opaque its processes tend to be, and this produces inconsistencies and overlaps that have a very negative impact on the experience. The journeys detect all these weaknesses.
Can you give us some examples?
For example, the Journey at a very global level of a restaurant would start in the pre-visit: search, reservation, arrival… passing through the visit to the restaurant: ordering, waiting, consumption, payment… ending in the post-visit: return home, sharing that experience…. If you are interested in digitising, you will focus on interaction and channels; if you are interested in analysing the moments of truth, you will focus on the emotion of each phase ….
When I worked in banking, I used journeys a lot when we wanted to make a transition from a high-touch service to a low-touch service, such as moving from in-office investment fund trading to a digital advisory service. Thanks to journeys we were able to detect the key touch points and the appropriate channels, even improving the conversion of the other channels.
And at Telefónica we have used Journeys in the photovoltaic energy sector as it is necessary to understand many actors (solar expert, customers, suppliers, small installers, local administration,…). Having the journeys mapped helped us to manage the complexity and improve the weak points, achieving a reduction in the pre-installation times of solar panels.
What advice would you give to anyone who has to make a customer journey for the first time?
The first thing is to be clear about the objective we want to achieve with this Journey: is it going to be a communication tool, an alignment tool, a conceptualisation mapping tool?
Then I would identify the scenario by specifying the zoom we want to give to our Journey, and then identify all the frontline actors involved in the delivery of the service. Analyse their actions, responses and experiences.
And most importantly, understand that the customer Journey map is only a tool, a builder, the real experience is out there or as Jorge Luis Borges said: ‘The map is not the territory’.
What are the main elements to take into account when carrying out this task?
Depending on the objective you have set, you will have to choose the elements that will be involved: stakeholder, channels, dramatic arc, pains, evidences, backstage…. There is no point in mapping them all, just the elements that help you with your objective, you have to be efficient when creating these tools, to be able to iterate them over time and make them fit for purpose.
How can customer journeys improve customer satisfaction?
FT focuses on the steps taken by the customer, a customer, not the possible steps, not the functionalities, but everything that is happening to him/her, so understanding, analysing and improving them increases satisfaction.
What are the benefits or advantages of these maps?
They not only have benefits in terms of customer experience KPIs but also have other equally interesting functions such as: finding business opportunities, extending the Journey of the experience beyond the main task; making internal processes more efficient: detecting the emotional impact of each point of contact; helping digitisation; aligning the team’s vision: generating more tangible conversations… they are a great tool for communication, analysis and decision-making. Whenever I’ve done one, the business team has always taken action based on the journey data.
Which colleague do you nominate for this interview who you consider excellent at their job?
I nominate Nuria Ordóñez Peleáez, an expert in value propositions for Social Services, with an impressive technological background, a bold business vision, but above all with an uncommon sensitivity towards people, especially those most in need. I have learned a lot in the area of the elderly, working with her.
