Weaving together microjourneys to create compelling customer service journeys

The phrase “customer journey” has become part of everyday business vernacular, bringing a customer-centered and design thinking perspective to the mainstream.

Customer engagement and intelligent automation company Pega uses the phrase “microjourney” to focus on the elements that comprise the customer journey. This is useful both in being able to design a better experience for customers, but also in optimizing each of those elements so they can be woven together effectively across situations existing and new.

I spoke to John Huehn, Pega’s General Manager, Customer Service, to learn about the concept of microjourneys and how they can be used to create compelling customer service journeys. He shares some very interesting insights, watch the video or a rough transcript is below.

TRANSCRIPT
Ross:
John, great to have you with us.

John:
Ross, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Ross:
So we all know about customer journeys, but Pega talks about this idea of micro journeys as part of that bigger journey. So can you explain what that means?

John:
Yes, for sure. Micro journey is a fun phrase for us at Pega. It can mean multiple things, both from a technology perspective and from a business process perspective. But let’s think about it in the business process perspective.

A micro journey is an event or an activity that a customer’s going to need to go through, so much like a journey. We just look at it in terms of a specific event or activity that may have to get done multiple times, frequently by agents inside of the contact center, in our environment. So we look at things like bill payment, or the status of a claim request. And often, to do a bill payment, there’s a process that’s going to be consistent that folks are going to have to go through. There’s a payment system that is going to need to happen in. There’s different channels that it might happen on.

So our world at Pega is really about taking that event and getting it to a place where it’s defined, it’s well orchestrated, maybe it’s even automated, and being in a spot where that event definition can be run across chat and email and social media and messaging or phone or web through self-service or the app. And then we only have to build that one time and that process, to make that bill payment or whatever the process might be, can be replicated across all of those channels and then it will tie into the relevant system.

So in a payment example, you may have a billing system that you’re going to need to update or a CRM system that you’re going to need to get information from about how much is owed on that bill payment. So the micro journey will enable us to tie into all of those systems to run the business process and, at the same time, make that accessible across any channel without having to build the process for this system and this system and this system or for Facebook Messenger and for chat and for email and for voice. So the ability to take a process, orchestrate it, automate it one time, run it across your channels, and tie into all of your systems to make that happen.

Ross:
So is then the value of describing as a micro journey, just to be able to define something which is discrete and where you can then map that out, and it’s something which you can then more easily lay across the channels?

John:
Yes. We just take that and make that simple to make it run across all of the channels. And then what that does is say, from a efficiency perspective, saves the agent from having to, every time that somebody wants to pay a bill, have to manually go execute all of those steps or figure those out. This will actually run that process for you, can automate it, or at least take the agent to the places where they need to go to get the information or to process that. Yeah.

Ross:
So how different or similar is the micro journey for different companies?

John:
Many of the components of a micro journey are going to be fairly comparable. Systems that are on the backend may be different, but you think about validating-a-customer might be a step in your micro journey, verification, seeing if you already have a case open for them that’s similar to what you’re going to do. Maybe compare a step that’s common. How you verify the customer may be different across the companies, but the fact that you need to verify a customer or validate a customer may be common across all the companies.

Ross:
So then, for each company, first of all they define their micro journeys and create those. Is that right?

John:
Yes. I think you think about it from the perspective that there may be multiple micro journeys that get dealt with in a specific conversation with a customer. Somebody may contact you through chat or over the phone and say, “Hey, I want to change my address. And before I do that, I need to pay my bill.” And so the address-change micro journey may run, but first it may be that we’re going to run the bill-change micro journey. And a step in either of those may be I need to verify who you are to make sure that I can actually give you the information that’s in the account.

So there’s a bunch of steps that will be established in the micro journey, like verify, check and see if there’s a duplicate case. Okay, great. Now we’re going to execute the actual payment micro journey. We’re going to go to the system, pull the information about what’s required for a payment. And then we’re going to go ahead and process that payment and apply it against the account. And then that’s going to wrap that micro journey, at which point then, great, we’re going to move into the address-change micro journey that will continue that on.

Ross:
And so Pega’s omnichannel capabilities mean that those micro journeys can then readily be mapped across whatever channel you’re using.

John:
Yes. So what you’re talking about there, Ross, is what we talk about at Pega as our center-out methodology, like the ability inside of Pega to create a micro journey or the business process one time and be able to deploy that across all of your channels, be that chat, email, social media, messaging, phone, web, self-serve app. Take that business process, deploy it across all the channels and have it drive all of the system activity that you need to do. And that’s center-out for us, take the customer journey at the center and plan your work and the systems around them.

Ross:
So that might answer my next question, which is how do you weave together all of the micro journeys into the full customer journey?

John:
Yes, and I think that people use the term micro journey or the term journey, ultimately it’s all about taking work that a customer needs to have done to serve them and making that all happen in a logical, efficient way that’s orchestrated and potentially automated for the frontline agent or for the systems. It could be an autonomous system that’s running that micro journey, but it’s really about making sure that we get the work done for that customer.

Now that can happen in customers, for us, our client’s existing legacy systems. They may have a system that they already use as their contacts on their desktop and we’re going to plug Pega Case Management into that that enables you to define your micro journeys and run that even inside of your existing systems. Or you may choose to take a full Pega desktop, which will bring all of those systems together on a common pane of glass and just have your micro journey run inside of the Pega desktop that can power voice and digital channels across all of your systems.

Ross:
Fantastic. Sounds like a very effective way to do it.

John:
Thanks. We’re pretty keen on that, for sure.

Ross:
Excellent. All right. Thanks so much for your insights and sharing your time, John.

John:
Pleasure. Thanks, Ross.