The Year of the Customer Journey │Ragnarokast #1

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Steven

I’m Steven and I do all things product and services 

Spencer Barrett

And I do all things operational and people related. 

Steven Aldrich

So we’ve been speaking a lot at different thought leadership events over the last few years and you know, it just kind of came around to us that it’s time to get in and do a podcast. 

Spencer Barrett

We were trying to figure out what do we want to talk about first? Well we’ve been writing blog posts and those are fairly effective at getting a message across. But not everyone has the time to read a blog post, but you do have time to, you know, listen to something quick on your way to work. You know, a lot of people are working remotely. You may not, maybe on your way to the living room, the way to the couch, wherever you work from. 

Steven Aldrich

You gotta walk the dog at some point. 

Spencer Barrett

Yeah, you gotta walk the dog, maybe take a meeting while you’re walking the dog. 

Steven Aldrich

You gotta get to the deli to get yourself an egg sandwich. 

Spencer Barrett

Yeah, if you’re like me, you might bike and take a meeting at the same time. It doesn’t go well. 

Steven Aldrich

Those are fun. That wind just, just whooshing every time. 

Spencer Barrett

I haven’t been on the receiving end of that, but you have. Why are we doing a podcast? Well, we have a lot to talk about. Steven and I are known for being talkers, if you can tell. But last year was crazy with the economy. This year started out a bit rough. We think there’s a lot we can all collectively do in the marketing world to get through it. Alright Steven, so let’s open up our first podcast with something that’s at the very core of what we do. Tell us what is CRM? 

Steven Aldrich

Yeah, Spencer. So CRM is that customer relationship management, which is, you know, the audience listening here will be very well versed and familiar with, but essentially how we define it is it’s encompassing of that business strategy and the underlying technology that nurtures that customer experience and personalizes their communications as they flow through any of our customers’ products. Whether that would be from an acquisition program all the way through the actual usage and replenishment depending on what industry they’re in. So the goal that we really have around this CRM program is to drive revenue and profitability, really focus on customer satisfaction and really focus more on the actual customer experience rather than just what the individual things that we’re selling are. 

Spencer Barrett

What does CRM have to do with customer journeys? 

Steven Aldrich

This is kind of the interesting thing here is when you think about a customer journey, we have to sort of be all-encompassing here and it’s very easy for somebody who’s coming from a CRM world, they come from retention background to only think about the communication that they’re sending that goes into that journey. But what we should really be thinking about is the holistic experience of that customer journey. So, you know, the part of whether the piece of communication that I received from you, the email or SMS is the prompt or it’s the entire experience of somebody maybe organically coming back to the product or using the product. 

And so that journey, that customer journey from my perspective is the entire map, the entire flow of that user’s individual experience that they will have in all the ways they interact with the product. Whether through the messaging channels or directly within the product itself. 

Spencer Barrett

So you can have, you know, a beautifully documented journey map but then you go down the rabbit hole of of being two OCD about one specific thing, especially as teams scale that can really, you know, start to eat up a lot of time in efficient way. 

Steven Aldrich

That’s actually a really good point is sort of being too hyper-focused on one area that may seem like a big point of friction but is almost an expectation that people might have around the product or something that they can just kind of overcome on their own. It’s kind of like this, as you guys well know, I’m up and coming gonna be a father soon and so I’ve been reading a lot of —

Spencer Barrett

Congrats. 

Steven Aldrich

— Thanks, man. So I’ve been reading a lot of these different baby books and you know, one of the more interesting thing that I’ve been reading about is this idea of like sort of unstructured play. Like let them figure it out on their own. There’s almost an element of that in everything that we do, right? We can almost be so micro managey about the experience that we create these objectives that we want people to go through. Because for us it’s the ideal experience, right? Oh, you read an article and you fully understand our product, you completed our introduction quiz, you found the right fit for you, you gave us your email address and look you bought the product. 

It’s not really how people go through and experience these things, right? We all have our own individual ways of digesting information, of creating sense out of very chaotic world that we’re in. A good example of this and why bring it back to the baby book is the customer you may be serving right now could have seven crying kids around them and there’s just no way your ideal customer experience is going to happen. They could also be 10:30 at night and they’ve got two minutes on their phone and they saw you in an ad on Instagram, which was their downtime, their wind downtime. And for them, you know, the most important thing that they get is the problem solved. 

As we create these customer journey maps, we often sort of see these like, oh this person’s, they have these behavioral patterns, they seem to be moving through the thing too quickly or they don’t seem to be going to all the experiences that we want them to go to. And that sort of scenario, the journey map kind of falls through because you’re looking too much at an idealized scenario. So one thing that I like to do and apply to these scenarios is to sort of take in a variation of every single activity to say, hey, this is the end goal. Here’s all the ways that you can get there. And if I am chaotic life person right now, I’m calm life person. 

I’m on my lunch during work, you know, all these different psyches or personas that this, this, this customer may have at the time that they’re experiencing the product, which is a critical part of it. ’cause we’re not who our demographics say we are. We are who we are in the moment that we’re interacting with your product. And so what we’ll see is having those variations in there helps to kind of humanize the experience a little bit more instead of just thinking of individual emails and pages as boxes and arrows on a whiteboard. 

Spencer Barrett

So I just have to call out the phrase “chaotic life person.” Thank you. Can you define that for us? “Chaotic life person.” 

Steven Aldrich

I think it’s this, I’ll call it a point in time, right? Because we’re not chaotic all the time. I mean, if you are, God bless you, that sounds like a hard life. But you know, there, there are sort of these moments in your life where you have a dire need or there’s something burning in the back of your mind and you need to get it done with, right? So let’s say I am, you know, I’m, I’m customer X, hello customer X, you know, and I’m, you know, I’m shopping for B2B telecommunication software. Okay, well I have two things going on in my mind right now. One is my training and my experience that tells me how I should be thinking about shopping for business telecommunication software. 

And the other is I’m working, I’m a single dad working from home, I got dogs barking, kids crying, and I can’t even think for more than 30 seconds without having to go deal with something else. So this sort of chaotic experience, what I’m describing is the sort of animal part of your brain has, has is sort of taking over the experience, and when we sort of discount the fact that that could be happening at the time that your rational brain should be making the decision, that’s where I’m sort of seeing this sort of chaotic piece that we, we need to take that into account of like, somebody might not be rationally buying your product, and if they’re not rationally buying your product, they might skip over things that would set them up to being what you would think of as an ideal customer. 

And so the, the, the way that we should be thinking about that journey is all of these different things that could happen along the, the, the cycle of them getting through a, a customer experience where they’re falling off and, and, and potentially why they could be falling off and having a little bit more forgiveness if you will, and, and sort of elasticity in the experience to account for that sort of chaoticness or chaos that might be happening in their daily life. 

Spencer Barrett

So we had a client about four or five years ago who’s in the moving industry, can’t really say the client name, but it’s still a useful case study. So it was Steven and myself and our first full-time employee who was actually our friend from college. We went to the office of the client and, you know, we were learning more about the project and the issue that they were having was there were too many steps in the signup process, and they were trying to get people to basically do all of the things that you have to do in order to move. And that’s a lot of information to collect. And so part of what we were doing was auditing that flow and figuring out when and where people were dropping off. 

And then after that, figuring out how we could eliminate some of the steps or combine some of them together to make sure that people actually completed it. Now in that case it was a little different because they actually needed that information, but I think one of the things that was decided was that some of it could be done at a later stage. So some of it you had to get upfront,  and then a bunch of it was made optional so that you could do it later so that you could at least get to the schedule move button. 

Steven Aldrich

Oh yeah. And you know, it’s funny you bring that up because that makes me think of one of their biggest customers that they worked with was New York Movers, which if any of you have ever moved to New York, it is the most chaotic experience that you can think of. I mean, first off, you have to like show up with a checkbook to like get your bid on this available unit before everybody else does. And it might not be ideal. The hot water might not even work for all, you know, but you know that you need a place to live having to go through into a whole moving exercise on top of going through this like crazy trudge of getting an apartment and getting out of your current apartment and lining these all up. 

So you get out of your current apartment on the last day of your lease on the 31st, and you’re, you’re all your stuff is packed up on the 31st and you are moving in at 12:01 AM on the first. This is literally how people do things in New York by the way. And so that that sort of, that sort of chaoticness when you need to sort of understand, well how many chairs are you moving, how many desks are you moving? Right? Real practical questions that one would need to inform a quote becomes a hard thing to do because you’re, you’re sort of like, oh, I gotta pack now, and oh, I gotta do, you know, it just, it just becomes a bit of a nightmare. 

So in that sort of scenario that we’re describing, even just minimizing the steps and taking little pieces of information at a time and collecting more as they progress closer to their move date, that was the sort of the big solve there. The big learn for us is like we could capture this information a little bit at a time. 

All we really needed to generate a quote or to get somebody to pick a quote is like very little, little bit of information. As they started to fill that out more, their quote became more refined. And then just like all movers in New York, you know, they’ll just charge you the difference when they show up. You know, and here’s 17 wardrobe boxes that you didn’t know you needed, and here’s a $5 charge per moving blanket that we’re gonna give to you. And that’s just, you know, the nature of the business. 

Spencer Barrett

Bring it back home this year, 2023, like even though the economy is going through a bit of a rough spot, there’s still a lot of opportunity for growth, and you know, seems like the moral of the story is bring it back to basics. If your customer journey’s overly complicated, take a look at it, get to know what your customers are actually doing, who your customers actually are, the situation they might have at home, the way they actually buy what they actually need, and simplify as much as possible. So, you know, reduces points of friction. 

Steven Aldrich

And if you’re telling yourself, I can’t do that, my customer journey just really is complicated, take another try at the exercise there. Because what most often will happen is overcomplicating is a symptom of thinking way too much about all the different steps as opposed to thinking about all the different ways that those steps are quite simple. It’s just a different person going through it. 

Spencer Barrett

Okay, well that is all the time we have for today. So thank you so much for listening. Everybody, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast network, find us on LinkedIn and also head over to ragnarokmarketing.com. Subscribe to our email newsletter for more marketing and MarTech thought leadership. 

Both

Bam, bam, Ragnarok.