9 minutes
Three foundational building blocks need to be optimized to consistently deliver engaging member experiences over the phone: people, processes and leadership. Our series of nine monthly articles will cover each in detail. This month’s article, and fourth overall, focuses on journey mapping.
Credit unions interested in streamlining processes, improving the overall member experience and better aligning support and front-line staff should consider journey mapping, an often-overlooked, but powerful tool.
Journey maps are a visual representation (often flowcharts or infographics) of the desired employee and member experience for a particular transaction (e.g. balance inquiry). In a call center environment, a typical map would cover everything from call opening through post-transaction and capture key moments of truth (points during an interaction that gives the member an opportunity to change their opinion of your credit union) that, if planned out correctly, will better position your agents to consistently deliver emotional experiences and, over time, help build member loyalty.
In addition to the aforementioned benefits that journey mapping provides, going through this process will also better assist new hires in becoming productive, thereby bringing down the expenses pertaining to learning the job.
Data alone will not always tell you where member frustrations lie or where to improve processes. Therefore, if your end game is building member loyalty and/or increasing share of wallet, it’s critical you increase your understanding of your members’ desired experience when they interact with your credit union. The better you understand this, the more likely you’ll be able to making game-changing service improvements. And being that most call centers don’t go through this process (manpower/bandwidth is typically the main culprit), your credit union has an opportunity to differentiate its member experiences by venturing into the journey mapping process.
To help get you started, here’s a step-by-step approach to begin the journey mapping process within your call center:
1. Identify Why Members Are Calling
For starters, it’s imperative you understand why your members are calling so you can determine the types of transactions you’ll need to map. If your transactional data is automated and readily available, then you can get started right away. If not, don’t worry; you’ll just have to spend some time, typically 30-60 days, manually tracking calls (type and frequency). If you are super excited about journey mapping and want to immediately begin, an alternative is simply asking your agents what the most common call types are and spending some time listening to calls. This will, at minimum, give you a starting point while you develop your list.
Once you have a list completed, identify the top 80 percent of call types and rank them in order of frequency. This is now your starting point for determining which transaction types you’ll begin mapping.
2. Meet With the Call Center Team
Pick any two transactions from your list and meet with at least two employees from the team. Ask them to walk you through the process of handling a particular transaction – one at a time. For example, starting with the call opening, how do they currently answer the phones? Next, ask how they verify the member, questions they typically ask, system procedures (an electronic version would suffice) and also gather insights on after-call work needed to complete the transaction.
During these conversations, you should also solicit feedback on some of the challenges, along with ideas, on how to improve the process to make their lives – and the member experience – much easier. Repeat this for all your transaction types.
It’s critical to get various department call center employees involved and incorporate their voice and feedback into the maps to help ensure you have a thorough understanding of what they are going through or dealing with during each interaction. And, perhaps even more important, engaging them in the process will make buy-in much easier – since it’s likely, that after the process, a significant number of changes will be made that will impact their day-to-day work flow.
3. Review Process
Once you gain an understanding of how the call center staff processes transactions, and have a draft mapped out, you’ll need to get support areas involved. This is where the fun starts. That’s because, as you review the process (as shared with you by front-line staff) you’ll very likely notice that at least one member of the support staff will disagree with how the front-line staff is processing a particular transaction. You’ll hear something like “they always do this wrong” or “that’s not how you process this transaction.” When this happens, don’t get frustrated or act surprised; this is good news, because it simply reaffirms the need to go through the journey mapping process.
4. Reconcile Differences
It’s very likely, even after your initial meeting, you’ll have a few transactions where front-line and support staff will continue to disagree on various processes. In these situations, you’ll need to get each relevant department head in the room and make final decisions so everyone can get on the same page before moving to the next step.
5. Put Yourself in a Member’s Shoes
Now that you have everyone aligned, your team’s sole focus should be on the member experience and significantly improving it whenever possible (it’s OK to have some short- and long-term fixes). Specifically, ask if the process is streamlined to minimize customer effort and consider what else can be done, during this specific transaction, to create an exceptional experience. Are there opportunities to forge emotional bonds during various moments of truth?
Let’s assume we created a journey map for reporting credit card fraud. In reviewing the process, does your credit union require members to complete several forms and get them notarized? If so, try to understand the emotional state of the member and look for ways to streamline the process.
For starters, members are likely to be upset during a fraud situation and nervous that other cards or personal information could be compromised. Therefore, making them complete several forms or wait several days for the issue to be resolved (or to receive provisional credit) is not going to make them feel any more comfortable.
The challenge then becomes how to offer members added peace of mind. Maybe it’s just hand-holding them through the process, educating them on identity theft services or getting them a new card ASAP so they don’t start using a competitor’s card.
My wife had a recent experience with a local bank where they required her to complete a few forms and list each of her 60+ fraudulent transactions before the resolution process could begin. What’s more, they required a quick turnaround for her so the investigation could start. Saying she was unhappy about her experience is an understatement.
An effective exercise is to ask various employees what their experience has been, with outside financial institutions, on similar transactions (one of the reasons your employees should also have accounts elsewhere). An alternative is to bring a few people from the outside (members, friends, vendor, etc.) to share their opinions on your proposed experiences.
Once agreed upon, get your compliance team involved to answer and/or approve any additional changes. (We find that it’s always best to engage them once you have an ideal experience mapped out, than to partner with them to bring the changes to life).
6. Signing Day
Once you have all the common transactions mapped out, you should print them (a plotter printer would help) and have a signing day (or spread it over a few days, depending on availability of people) where department leaders (those who conduct or support particular transactions) can give a final review and sign off on each transaction. Make it a fun event, since it’s the start of a new way to deliver member experiences and celebrate all the hard work your team contributed up until this point.
This is important so there is no finger pointing for future issues and, more importantly, because it ensures everyone’s aligned moving forward. Include senior people if possible so they can see everyone’s contributions.
7. Make Maps Easily Accessible
Journey maps should be easily and quickly accessible, so reps can easily retrieve them and get answers very quickly.
8. Assign Responsibility
Change is constant, especially with frequent system and regulatory compliance updates. Therefore, over time, journey maps will need to be updated and new ones will need to be created. Therefore, one department, usually the training or quality department, should take ownership and be held responsible for updating and communicating changes to employees.
9. Train Employees
Now that you have final sign-off, your agents will need to be re-trained on any processes that have changed. If significant changes were made to several transaction types, sometimes the best approach is to launch in phases so you don’t inundate agents and deliver less than standard experiences to your members. New hires should also use the journey maps to expedite their learning curves.
10. Coach and Listen
Change takes time. Employees will make mistakes. Therefore, it’s critical that front-line leaders listen to conversations, track issues and constantly coach employees to ensure adherence to the new processes. It’s also important to get member feedback (both good and bad) on the new processes and pass the information along to the gatekeeper of the maps so changes, if needed, can be made quickly.
11. Repeat the Process
Over time, new journey maps will be created. Therefore, you’ll need to go through the same process. However, your employees will be better prepared and your members will ultimately have a better experience because of the time invested to develop the journey maps.
In sum, while very time consuming (bandwidth is one of the main reasons most organizations don’t venture into journey mapping), journey mapping is a critical ingredient for organizations that want to deliver consistent experiences to their customers. Remember that manufacturers create blueprints for their products/formulas to ensure consistency, so why shouldn’t call centers do the same with various transaction types?
Good luck with your journey mapping initiatives, and hopefully you’ll enjoy next month’s article on ways to personalize member experiences with minimal investment.
Prior to starting his new company, Bill Stavros spent over 13 years of his professional career in the credit union industry, most recently as VP/marketing & member experience at $513 million Proponent Federal Credit Union, Nutley, N.J. At Proponent FCU, Stavros was responsible for conceptualizing, architecting, developing and deploying a new vision for delivering customer service for the inbound call center, based on his learnings from highly regarded service oriented companies such as Zappos, Ritz-Carlton, Disney & REI. Now with Blueprint Interactions, his goal is to help other credit unions achieve similar results. He can be reached at bill@bpinteractions, by calling 888.757.8338 or at www.bpinteractions.com.
