The voice of the member in credit union analytics How do you start and go about building a great digital organization? Five activities provide a rich foundation for analytics driven transformation along with some core strategic analytic capabilities:

• Digital collection audit – Collect the right data.
• Member journey map – Create and agree on an enterprise-wide model of members and their various journeys.
• Two-tiered segmentation – Segment the member journey by visit purpose as well as capture digital’s real-time nature.
• Voice of member system – Collect, classify, integrate and distribute true voice of the member.
• Unified measurement – Develop a unified framework for measuring and optimizing campaigns and enterprise performance.

What Is a Member Journey Map? A member journey map visualizes the process that a member goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s for understanding and addressing member needs and pain points. To get started, your team needs to compile a series of member goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. As a next step, flesh out the skeleton with member thoughts and emotions to create a narrative. Then condense the narrative into a visualization you can use to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

When Do You Need a Member Journey Map?

Journey maps should only be created to support a known business goal. The goal could be external, such as learning about a specific persona’s behaviors, or addressing certain parts of the customer experience. A few more potential business goals that journey mapping can address are listed below: Shift a credit union’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in. If a credit union lets internal processes and systems drive decisions that affect member experience, a journey map can help turn the culture of that organization by refocusing on the thoughts, actions and emotions of members. Journey mapping sheds light on real human experiences that credit unions may know little about. Break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide vision. Because journey maps create a vision of the entire member journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Journey mapping could be the first step in building an organization-wide plan of action to invest in member experience, as it helps answer the question, “Where do we start?” by highlighting areas of friction. Target specific members. Journey maps can help teams focus in on specific personas or members, whether that means understanding differences or similarities across the journeys of multiple personas, prioritizing a high-value persona or exploring ways to target a new type of member. Understand quantitative data. If you are aware through analytics or other quantitative data that something specific is happening—maybe online transactions are plateauing or an online tool is being underutilized—journey mapping can help you find out why.

Key Elements of Customer Journey Maps

While journey maps can (and should) take a wide variety of forms, the basic elements are: Point of view: First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Whom is this journey map about? For example, you might choose a Millennial or a Senior, each of whom would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually align with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative. Scenario: Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Actions, mindsets, and emotions: At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Touchpoints and channels: The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the credit union) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or branch) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered. Insights and ownership: The entire point journey mapping is to uncover gaps in the user experience, which are particularly common in omnichannel journeys, and then take action to optimize the experience. Insights and ownership are critical elements that are often overlooked. Any insights that emerge from journey mapping should be explicitly listed. If politically possible, also assign ownership for different parts of the journey map, so that it’s clear who’s in charge of which aspect of the customer journey. Without ownership, no one has responsibility or empowerment to change anything.

Rules for Creating Successful Journey Maps

Successful journey maps require more than just the inclusion of the right elements. Journey mapping should be a collaborative process informed by well-defined goals and built from research. Keeping the process on the right track and building the buy-in needed to evangelize the insights it provides requires hard work. Below are some tips for making sure that the process starts and continues in the right direction: Establish the “why and the “what.” First, identify the business goal that the journey map will support. Make sure there are clear answers to these basic key questions before you begin the process:

• What business goal does this journey map support?
• Who will use it?
• Who is it about and what experience does it address?
• How will it be shared?

Base it on truth. Journey maps should result in truthful narratives, not fairy tales. Start with gathering any existing research, then add additional journey-based research to fill in the gaps that the existing research won’t cover. This is a qualitative research process. Collaborate with others. The activity of journey mapping (not the output itself) is often the most valuable part of the process, so involve others. Pull back the curtain and invite stakeholders from various groups to be a part of compiling the data and building the map. Engage others with the end product. Don’t expect to get buy-in and foster interest in your journey map by simply sending a lovely graphic as an email attachment. Make it a living interactive document that people can be a part of. Bring up your story in meetings and conversations to promote a narrative that others believe in and begin to reference. One idea is to create a journey-mapping showroom where anyone not on the direct team can come experience the process and resulting artifacts. Need more help in your digital transformation journey? Continue to follow this blog series and join our webinar “Let’s get to work” on August 16.