Podcast Ep. 14 – Making omnichannel-ready experience maps – Yuri Vedenin

How can you make omnichannel-ready experience maps, instead of the fluffy abstract journey maps we’re used to seeing?

In this episode we hear from Yuri Vedenin, founder and CEO of UXPressia. He explores various user experience methods, such as customer journey maps, and how they can be best used to drive meaningful results in teams and products.

He and Noz Urbina examine the nuances of effective user experience strategy and methods, and how to garner effective insights from research. They explore various user experience tools and how they can be best used to drive meaningful results in teams and products.

A common definition is a digital representation of the path that people take when they interact with a product, organizations, or brands. “However, to me, a customer journey map is a generic name for things like ‘user journey map’, ‘experience map’, etc. The word ‘customer’ in the term ‘customer journey map’ doesn’t matter here — depending on the audience and the domain, it might be a ‘patient journey map’, ‘student journey map’, etc. Analyzing and using this map is crucial in catching problems and analyzing solutions.”

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina 0:02

Hello, everybody. I’m your host Noz Urbina, and this is the omnichannel podcast brought to you by OmnichannelX, where we interview leading minds and content design governance and systems from around the world. If you like this episode, remember to like and subscribe on whatever channel you’re using and check out on OmnichannelX.digital. For more info on our annual conference blog and mailing list for exclusive offers and content. Now enjoy the show.

Okay, hello, everybody. My name is Noz Urbina, I am the program director for the OmnichannelX ConferenceI. I’m very happy to announce that I’ve got with me here Yuri Vedenin. If I haven’t mangled that too badly, who is the founder and president of UXPressia, organization that is all about user experience. I have used the tool I am a fan. I don’t say that very often because I try to shut up about tools. But if I really like I want to do mention it and I do use this one for my work. So that’s a really nice added value. So, Yuri, thank you very much for your patience. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Yuri Vedenin 4:00
Thank you. Hello, everyone.

Noz Urbina 4:03
So Yuri, um, I don’t know, you know, I met you who maybe two three years ago on the on the IA conference circuit, which is, which is, which was an interesting one. So but I don’t know if I don’t know if people know you in the in the in some of the other listeners of podcasts and the kind of wider content strategy area. But you’re definitely known in the UX and user experience community. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you came to be where you are.

Yuri Vedenin 4:30
My name is Yuri Vedenin, and I’m the founder and the president of UXPressia, which is an online platform where visualizing customer and user experience so we help people to build customer journey maps, personas in book maps and other stuff. And before prior to becoming founder of the product. I ran a UX consulting businesses, which I still do, and UXPressia actually as a product was was born out of the need for a great customer journey mapping tools, that’s how we started. So we needed those tools for our consulting work. And our customers. Also, were constantly asking whether we could recommend some great journey mapping tools for them. By the way, that was back in 2014. Yes, 14 for the record. So we did some research and found disinterred mapping tools. But since we didn’t find great ones there, we thought to ourselves, why don’t we make a great journey mapping tool. So that’s how UXPressia was born in a nutshell. And today, we have more than 170,000 users across the globe, which use our tool. Yeah. And this being used by UX and CX professionals at Michelin, Deloitte, Pfizer, many other businesses large and small. Yeah. And prior to that, since you asked about the background, I used to work as the developer and then I had a rewarding career as a business analyst, certified business analyst professional by ID, by the way, and yeah, I support local communities. So I was one of the founders or organizers or for local business analysts, community UX, community and product managers community in Belarus

Noz Urbina 6:20
Fantastic. So we are so delighted to have you be a supporter and contributor to the OmniX community. And, and thank you for coming on the show. You actually presented at OmniX. Do you want to tell tell the listeners a little bit about your experience? Because I think you’re the first podcast, interviewee who was actually a presenter?

Yuri Vedenin 6:42
Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. I definitely love that. And thank you for inviting me . Yeah, I met some incredible people there at OmniX that actually, were talking about omnichannel from different perspectives from like, you know, perspective of big and small companies from perspective consulting services, products, from both content specialists, and CX and UX walks and other perspective as well. So I love that was, you know, I heard a lot from different perspectives. And that’s, yeah, that was really cool. Needless to say, it’s always great to catch up with you as well. So yeah, thank you once again, for inviting me there. And I definitely recommend other people to visit the conference.

Noz Urbina 7:56
Thank you so much. Yeah, we would love to have you. I was impressed with your presentation. I remember. I remember going Oh, well. He’s coming from a tool, vendor and tool vendor presentations, you know, but it was actually really good. And really, and you know, you were the were one of the later ones in the second day, but you knocked it out of the park. So I thank you for that. Thank you. So, so let’s, let’s start, you know, most of our users will have an idea. But I think it’s important that we kind of level set and discuss when we say customer journey map, what exactly do we mean? So what can you give us your definition of what a customer journey map is? And what is it for?

Yuri Vedenin 8:37
Sure. Let me give you one of the because, yeah, since we’ve been working in the field for many, many years, we’ve heard a lot of them. So one of them, that you can stick to that customer journey map is actually a visual representation of the path that people take when they interacting with product or organization services or brands. That’s the essence. However, for me, customer journey map is like a really generic name for things like user journey map experience map, so you’ve probably heard them under different names. And on top of that, I would say that the word customer in the customer journey map is not so important here, because depending on the case and the domain, it might be patient journey map, students journey, map, participants journey map, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So and journey mapping is probably more important than than the artifact itself. So as it is the process of visualizing that path that happens over time and across multiple channels, by the way. Yeah, and we can go further and say that it’s not only about visualization, I mean, the journey mapping exercise, but also about analyzing and using that map as well, to come up with, you know, some insights to find to spot the problems and gaps, and then to find the solutions. So that’s the customer journey map for me.

Noz Urbina 10:05
Excellent, excellent, excellent. I talked about this topic a lot. And I am it makes, it blows my mind, how many different kinds of definitions there are going on. Some people consider it to be synonymous with the buyers journey, which kind of gets on my nerves, because there’s so much to user experience other than buying, you know, it’s so it we I use the term customer journey, because it’s the most popular, but yes, we experienced map would be just as value, valid user journey map. You know, and I do them from a from an information requirements point of view. So they’re the kind of the consumer of the information. But yeah, whenever you do it, all sorts of insights come out, I can, I can testify to that. It’s i i like to talk about the the Insight roller coaster, in the sense that you’re, when you go, when you’re journey mapping, you sometimes people feel you’re going really, really deep, like oh, wow, we can’t, we’re analyzing the experience. In in such detail, we can’t possibly do this for all of our user experience, possibilities. But you learn things in that process, which you can then apply to your whole business, to the product design to all sorts of different stuff. I would be very interested because you you know, this is it’s something that I that I do with my customers, but it’s your kind of your whole life. So I would be very excited to know about what kind of challenges do you find what besides, you know, tool tool, stuff like that they want features in the tool, but in terms of a discipline in terms of adopting into their business? How do you see, what do you see as the challenges that organizations have around taking on journey mapping and using it properly in their in their organization,

Yuri Vedenin 11:58
I would say that there can be different scenarios for sure, like customer journey, and that has many functions, and different teams start using it for different reasons. But what challenges might drive them to start doing customer journey mapping. I would say that understanding that it’s experiences that matter and great customer experience is a competitive advantage. That’s one of them. So comparing to similar in terms of, let’s say features, service providers, the one with a better customer experience has higher chances to win customer loyalty. And more people tend to understand that including upper management. So that might be one of the I’d say, for someone, it’s a challenge for someone, it’s a goal. Yeah, and designing another one might be designing new products or redesigning existing ones. So companies want to build a good experience and turn to customer journey map to make it happen. That might be a trigger as well. And one more thing is that the need for like customer journey map might be might also arise out of the feeling that teams are not synchronized regarding customer experience, because every stakeholder might have their own vision in mind. Yeah, and so that might trigger and the last is trendy. Overall customer journey mapping is a great communication and visualization tool that helps explain complex things in a way that everyone will be sure to understand it, it combines both visual tags and other stuff and you can play on a different hierarchy level. So you can make it’s like very high level you can go into details if you do it properly. And yeah, it can really help to make the communication side of company more transparent across different departments and levels. Of course,

Noz Urbina 14:02
which of course is essential to any omnichannel strategy is getting getting those different perspectives aligned and then working together. So so that’s why you start is it also easy once you get going? The how I have seen more than one customer journey map which has been a very nice couple of days in a workshop and then life goes on exactly as before. So how do you make the effort actually deliver on the full potential?

Yuri Vedenin 14:37
We are touching one of the I would say important topic. Why some of customer journey mapping initiatives why the either stop or fail or I would I would make it even more general like what organizations are doing wrong with their, with their efforts. Trying to do customer journey mapping. Yeah. So other than what you mentioned that people create customer journey map and then put it on the shelf, I would say, and they’re not using that other than that, which is quite popular. I would say. Like, let’s start from the beginning, a lot of people are creating either customer journey maps or personas, based on hypothesis, so they are not backed up with actual research data and built based on assumptions. So then you use hypothesis, hypothesis made maps to make decisions. And that might decrease the trust, of course of other people. And so the whole initiative might go wrong. Yeah, so not involving that second one might be not involving other stakeholders and not getting management buy in. So it’s like a one man band, trying to create customer journey map without any resources for implementing the change without any any support. So that is what what we see might be the problem. And usually, it’s either customer experience user experience, or marketing specialist who tries to be hero. Trying to Yeah, I got to do that. I just read a blog or pass some interesting exam or something like that. And, yeah, that’s cool. I mean, they have a lot of energy. But at the same time, you have to spend some time and involve other stakeholders. And management, of course. Yeah, so and you, you mentioned data as well. Yes, yeah. Yeah. And data for sure. So um, some companies also had the problem that build they build customer journey from companies perspective. So it’s more like process based, not a customer centric, but I would say company centric. It’s the customer journey. Sorry. It’s still CGM, but it’s company journey map? Probably. Yeah, I would say that my, that’s a good exercise. But afterwards, it’s when you combine customer journey map and service blueprint together, you can find the real

Noz Urbina 17:22
gaps. I’ve seen a few times where the customer journey map is not actually mapping the user experience, or the actual real world scenario. It’s mapping the fantasy. It’s exactly it’s mapping the organization getting together, and kind of kind of quite happily painting this picture of how they wish the world was, as opposed to how it is.

Yuri Vedenin 17:49
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s 100% True. And a lot of teams, on top of that they build those journey maps. For some, I would say, abstract user or customer, like assumed, that doesn’t help to build empathy. And eventually you’ll get an app that isn’t credible. Yeah. And the one that you mentioned at the beginning, customer journey map is often treated as a one time initiative, rather than rather than a living document. So yeah, that is that is a real problem. So one shouldn’t expect real organizational changes. For one time customer journey mapping efforts, I would say, yeah, that it should be, it should be treated as a living document that is up to date, with actual data from different sources, from different channels, and readily available for all team members across the entire organization. And in that case, that will work. So communicating personas, customer journey maps to the frontline employees, very important to sales, to marketing to customer support and success, guys. So if you don’t do that, it’s like you creating something in a lab. And then people that are responsible for communicating with your customers, they don’t understand, let’s say at least they don’t know about that. Or they don’t understand how to use that in their everyday activities. So that’s just part of the potential wrong scenarios and problems. But if you want, we can talk more about that. I have more

Noz Urbina 19:31
more hors d’oeuvres I always liked I haven’t maybe it becomes a bad habit. I always love to talk about what goes wrong. And we’ll make sure we avoid that. And then if we avoid all the major things, and hopefully we’ll kind of find the right path. But, but thank you for that. I have, you know, I have my perspective on customer journey mapping, which comes with the kind of work that I do. And the way that I you know, you have a much broader experience, of course, the way that I got into it was from content modeling. So I was, I was being asked all the time to, to develop information models and content types and content models, and personalization matrices and things like that for content. And I was doing that, and I, you know, I had a long career doing it. But what I found was that the, the customers didn’t really know what they wanted, or they knew they knew what they kind of wanted, which was a less inefficient way to do what they were already doing. As an I kind of got into customer journey mapping, as a way to question the original requirements of content. And say, what why are we going to personalize when are we going to personalize, for whom are we going to personalize, and et cetera. And it was a way of saying, we’re not looking at internal efficiencies, we’re looking at, we’re coming back to the basics of what is our purpose here, and you mentioned, you know, sales and sport, and so on, and getting those people in the room to understand the role that the different aspects play. So understanding how design adds value, how support adds value, how content adds value, etc, to the process, I think I’ve always found it a very powerful tool, because it’s, it’s when you visualize something, if you do it based on the real world, then everyone come together and say, Okay, that’s, that’s what we’re all contributing to.

Yuri Vedenin 21:29
That’s the big picture.

Noz Urbina 21:32
You’ve mentioned several times a living document. How, how does an organization decide whether it needs a user experience map? Or five or 10? Like, how do you how do you see that playing out when you do singular, multiple, high level low level?

Yuri Vedenin 21:57
Yeah, it’s always hard to say how many journey maps the organization might need. But I think the good rule of thumb is to identify it first. I mean, if you’ve never done before customer journey mapping and would like to start from somewhere, I would recommend starting from identifying all the processes. Here, I assume that you have them somehow documented, or at least you can identify them in your organization that are customer centric, where you let’s say, either a customer interacts with the organization, or you interact with your customer, and identify all of them and make a list. And yeah, that’s that’s the actually the potential is potential candidates work a grading customer journey maps, you then need to analyze it and to see which one to start from, which is more critical. And at this specific point, meaning like, where, in which process, you can identify the most significant gaps are the most significant problems after visualizing the customer journey map. And then you can start from that. And I would say, it can be like 10, or 20, or dozens, or for some organizations, probably hundreds of process. And for some people, it might be very frustrating to see that that entire list at first. But when you define the scope, it’s easier to play with that. And once again, you don’t need to create custom instruments for everything. It’s not silver bullet, you can just start with that. So yeah, I hope I answered your question. It’s not it’s not about the number four specific organization I like for all religion, but for specifically for you start with customer, not central customer routed processes that you already have.

Noz Urbina 23:57
Right. Okay. I think a little also will get the same get the same question all the time about personas. You know, should we have one to 525, et cetera. And it’s hard, you know, there’s no, there’s not a single answer to this kind of question.

Yuri Vedenin 24:13
Yeah, yeah, same, same on our end, because we are we’re not only consulting others or helping others to create personas as consultants. But we also been doing that for ourselves. And you know, when you’re doing that for yourself, it’s like, you see, okay, here I can break it to two personas. Oh, no, that will bring me to having 10 personas in general and 10 is like really big number. So we tried to keep in mind here that from five to seven personas, or any objects is okay to manage. Yeah, so you can you can add Please keep them in mind and work with them. It doesn’t mean that if you’re, you have a really big variety of target audiences, and you have a very broad target audience, let’s say, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to know that you have, let’s say dozens of personas, potential potential personas, but we’re talking about focus. So yeah, I would stick to a small number of them, like five to seven. And during one period of time, I would say quarter in a year, I will try to focus just on a couple of them 123, from which you can, but if you’re a bigger organization, you will have a number of departments, probably each one of them can focus on different personas. So it’s, I mean, it’s really dependent on how, how big are you, and how big is your target audience, it’s

Noz Urbina 26:00
because some businesses are conglomerates of brands. So if you’re talking about, you know, a single bank, for example, you might have, you know, the personas for that bank. But then you can get very interesting if you’re talking about the investment side of that bank, which dealing with brokers and etc, or the consumers at a bank. And then if you talk like a brand, like a, like a Unilever, or something like that, which is actually has hundreds of household name brands under it, then each of those brands may do their own their own work. So I want to definitely keep time on the on this because I, I could talk about this topic with you for hours. But we try to keep these to a certain length would love to, would love to. So I want to kind of focus in on the kind of four areas which were specifically interested in at, at a in at omni channel x, which are content design, governance and systems. And I talked a little bit about content, how we use that as customer journey mapping is to figure out who needs what content when along their journey. But, you know, I would love you to talk about, for example, how does the customer journey map really help staff collaborate around those other three, design governance and systems?

Yuri Vedenin 27:27
Okay, so I think, as for me, the closest would would be design. So yeah. Speaking about design, how it might help. I mean, because majority maps, it’s actually, we are using that in the same way. And we know a lot of organizations are doing the same a lot of teams. It helps people to create their product roadmaps. So customer journey maps, they help design teams in making sure that each feature contributes to both businesses, customer goals. And on top of that, they get to visualize the impact of of changes, no matter how small this changes on the overall customer journey. And, yeah, I’ve seen people using user story maps as well for that for creating product roadmaps. But even when they do that, they have what they call it like, like a backbone as a backbone, they have customer journey map. And then on top of that, they, they quit user stories probably and stuff like that.

Noz Urbina 28:44
I just want to stop you there. Because I love that distinction. Because I think that’s a really important one. The difference in a user story and a customer journey map. I’ve specifically I’ve actually have like a kind of hierarchy diagrams in some of my presentations. Because I’ve had customers who’ve who’ve who’ve talked about the journey on a single webpage, like the journey on that page. And I’m like, That sentence doesn’t make sense to me. Or talking about a login journey. Like they go on a login journey, and I’m going logging into a website doesn’t sound like a journey to me. So I just wanted to stop you there. Because it’s such an important thing that we you can you can use a customer journey mapping tool to look at a user story. But a user story like those little interactions don’t are not a customer journey.

Yuri Vedenin 29:39
Yeah, yeah, that’s the that’s true. And I’ve seen a lot of teams, they’re like skipping that, that important step of defining at first, why boom, they are building the product and they start coming up with you know, features or any ideas and solutions. So it helps you to Get back to think about who you building that product for or those features? What are their challenges their problems. And by that you’re actually helping your own product to be more successful, because you’re building it for your customers, instead of dealing for your assumed customers or your imaginary customers. Yeah, so I think it’s, it definitely helps. Yeah. And I would say like, if you don’t mind, we can get back to the, to the content part. Just absolutely, please. Yeah, cuz it’s more about I think, like omni channel, all the stuff. So I personally believe that both personas and customer journey maps and personas, specifically, how build content strategy. So defining the tone of voice, defining best channels and formats for each part of the audience. That’s definitely something that should be based on personas. That’s my belief. And I think it’s super effective. And as for customer journey maps, here, they help content teams actually to see the whole picture and zoom in to particular interactions and build these either small or big communications, in line with their customers path. So I would say that our email campaign, not only one but the first one that we built for our own product, he we built it actually, based on customer journey map, and it was at that point, I call the email, but I would say it’s communication, because we use at least two channels. Intercom as the chat. Yeah, which I both think with push messages and emails. And we build it throughout the the, I will say life of some of our customers. And we then redefined the messages that we can come up with. Recently, we realized that we need to continue that initiative. And Arthur, who is speaking to our team, who is responsible as well, for inbound sales, he was working on retention for high touch customers. And he, he came to me with a suggestion to send a bunch of emails throughout the year lifecycle. And I asked him why, like, why not to build a customer journey map here, like really quick not to go into super details, but please spend one or two hours now. And state each each step where you are going to send the emails, they their user goals, potential user problems that you that you already know, our goals, and probably will come up with some some ideas. So after I did that, and after a couple of days, he came to me and he said, I really rewrote all the emails after that. So I improved them significantly. Thank you for reminding me that we should actually eat our own food here. So yeah, it definitely helps.

Noz Urbina 33:37
Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, I didn’t want to skip it. But I don’t want to I didn’t want to make I want to make sure that we get to everything, kind of before we run out of time. The other two I wanted to address what I’m very intrigued because we have people who are interested in systems, how does a customer journey map and maybe help you understand how you what your what you need from your technology stack? What you need your tool or your your overall systems that you’re implementing to support your content and your design? How you build requirements around that how you how does the customer journey map help, kind of with figuring out the technical, technical side of experience and conduct?

Yuri Vedenin 34:22
And here’s the I would say tricky thing because if I were myself several years ago, I would say yes, definitely customer journey map will help you with that. But now I realize that it’s I mean, customer journey map alone won’t help you with that. Okay. It’s it’s just a tool, but being combined with both mentioned service blueprint will definitely help you with that.

Noz Urbina 34:57
Can you make that distinction? service blueprint versus customer map?

Yuri Vedenin 35:00
Yeah, yeah, sure. So customer journey map is actually customer centric is the way you view it from customer what they like to say customer eyes or work working in the customer shoes. But as far as service blueprint is your internal organization processes. And when you combine these two, like you haven’t, we usually, we usually draw it or visualize it, customer at the top, and organization at the bottom. So when you have it like on the top on the bottom, and you combine it, you see where all the gaps you see, which would say departments, which roles are supporting customers at each point, how customer flow in between them. And by that you can also yes, and in service blueprint, you can also specify the systems that you need, or specific probably features in those systems. After brainstorming, you can see that okay, this is sales department working with with with customer, and then it’s the customer support guys who are working with the same bunch of customers afterwards. But they’re doing that in different systems, one or would like to first working definitely with customer with CRM, and the other is working with like an old customer support solution. And you see, okay, they might be lacking some data on the customer support side. And you think, okay, how can I help them, I need to define some kind of integration, probably pull the data from CRM, or push data from CRM to there. So that’s some of the examples how it might help. But once again, combination combination, and the backbone is customer journey map, then you see how it goes with with your internal processes. And when you combine that you can identify the points where you can improve.

Noz Urbina 37:11
Excellent, I really liked the idea also, because I think it’s very important that people realize that you can do a customer journey map and then you can come back to it and keep layering on value. One of the reasons that it’s it needs to be a living maintain thing is that you can add new levels of value new layers of information on it, new perspectives onto it. And you use the term service blueprint, so make sure we’re using kind of all the buzzword bingo. I am assuming when you say service blueprint, that that’s the output of a service design process, which is driven by design thinking.

Yuri Vedenin 37:46
I would say service blueprint, I use that term here, kind of generically for, for a combination of things like business processes. So if you have defined your internal business process, no matter whether you use service blueprint, or any other, let’s say, notation framework, whatever else, the main idea here is visualized business process. So that’s the thing. And once again, no matter who actually created it, either a service designers, business process engineers, business analysts, or any other people who were actually visualizing it, the main thing is what is insight?

Noz Urbina 38:32
Excellent. Okay, good. Good. So do we have time for you have another couple minutes for talking about governance a little bit?

Yuri Vedenin 38:42
Oh, yeah, yeah. But just once again, to make it more clear. How do you define that here?

Noz Urbina 38:50
So governance, when I’m when I’m asking about governance, what I’m really talking about is the organizational design. Let’s put it that way. So we can design content models, we can design products, and we can design systems, how do we design the teams and the decision making flows? So we get to a point in a customer journey where x happens. And then we have a point where who who resolves the situation? Does the local regional manager who are sitting there the account manager, do they make the decision? Is it a central decision by head office? Is it? You know, is it a technical driven decision? Is it a marketing driven decision? It’s it’s who has the authority? And then what are the escalation paths within the organization? How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? Who gets to decide what? It’s so simple, but very few organizations do it properly for omni channel? So I think there’s potential at saying okay, well, not only have we seen what we should do differently for customers, and for systems and for the product, we also potentially could come up with insights that might help us do change how we work together.

Yuri Vedenin 40:02
Yeah, definitely thank you for for clarifying here, that part that that is what we are, what we see, actually there are organizations, when they start utilizing using customer journey maps, we see that that person’s transparency of the communications actually increases. And sometimes even it happens that, you know, when few teams are together in one in one room discussing that they just build customer journey map. And let’s assume the it is still based on assumptions. So they even haven’t gone in the fields speaking to customers, they just gather everything that they have in their heads. And it happened a lot of times when people let’s say, from sales department, when they saw which issues customer support are dealing with on their stage, these are Whoa. So you’re telling me that you experienced these problems? Because we set these expectations at the beginning? And customer support? Probably we never thought about that. But yeah, it seems like that. And they Okay, why don’t we just not tell our potential prospects or customers this thing, and you want experience that that moment. So that transparent communication, they start, they start and at some point, that it was like an easy, I would say easy gap is easy thing. If it’s more global, that might bring your organization to some structural changes, I’d say you will define you might define more frequent communications between departments, or even for another department, which will be cross I would say, which will go cross steps on the customer journey, and we will make sure that the experience is seamless. So that’s what we been seeing actually that on small level, and on high level, it might drive to change in your organization, and probably even customer experience. Departments might appear in your organization, and they will, they might support the that seamless flow across different departments. And make sure that that is. As I mentioned, that experience is seamless. That’s what we’ve been seeing. And

Noz Urbina 42:51
I think that’s, that’s, that’s great. And I really liked the example of increasing interdepartmental communications. So for example, you can have your example what’s the negative, like the salespeople were setting an expectation they shouldn’t, which then caused, but the exact the you also mentioned the, the, the inverse of that, which is that if we told you what we were saying, then you would be ready. You know, or, you know, if we, if we included you in this process, and got your input, then maybe we could avoid these downstream problems. So I think that anytime that you’re getting as you said these these cross silo cross touchpoints, either communications, or councils or roles or teams, you know, something that is bringing together the organization and making it less fragmented, is a really positive outcome.

Yuri Vedenin 43:47
Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s true. And you mentioned one of the strengths of customer journey, mapping as an initiative or as a deliverable. It helps break silos. Yes, definitely. across organization, yet, people started talking more, they’re less finger pointing, if everyone can see the value of making customer happy, and bringing those customers across different channels and departments seamlessly. I think that is the very good goal for organization that might not only help that departments to, to work together, but at the end, make that organization more successful in the market and comparing to their competitors.

Noz Urbina 44:42
Excellent, excellent. So I want to wrap there because we’re running short on time. Thank you so much for joining us, Yuri and I hope we’ll see you again on the podcast at the conference in future years. And that thanks to thanks, everybody who, who’s listening today, so have a great rest your day.

Yuri Vedenin 45:14
Thank you. Nice. Thank you for having me.

Noz Urbina 45:18
My pleasure. Have a good one. See you around. Thank you for listening. This has been the omni channel podcast with Noz Urbina, founder of Urbina consulting, drop us a comment on our LinkedIn or Twitter and let us know what questions you’d like to answer next time and who you’d like to hear interviewed. See you then.