MARKETING
Is it time to add a Journey Manager to your customer experience team?
Product managers have long been part of product marketing teams, but Kerry Bodine, customer experience expert and coach, says it’s time for businesses to consider a new role: Journey Manager.
“I would argue that every single thing your organization does influences the customer journey,” said Bodine.
Bodine shared her ideas on the journey manager role and responsibilities, as well as a framework for building and managing the customer journey process at DX Summit in Chicago on Tuesday.
The biggest obstacle in the customer journey
Bodine, writes about and provides customer experience consulting to organizations like Adobe, FedEx and IBM, believes silos are the greatest impediment in the customer journey process.
“Silos enable us to do things at scale that would essentially be impossible otherwise, but it’s terrible for our customers who are trying to accomplish things,” said Bodine.
Her take — that customer goals naturally cross different departments, or silos — highlights the fact that the business itself is secondary to whatever it is a customer is trying to accomplish. The key is to focus on your customer’s goals.
5-step process for building the customer journey
“No customer wants to go through your lifecycle,” said Bodine. This is why it’s crucial for companies to understand the customer journey and how each team is supporting the customer’s goal.
Bodine’s framework for building and managing the customer journey is a five-step process:
- Empathize with your customer.
- Define the problem their trying to solve.
- Brainstorm solutions to help your customers meet their goals.
- Prototype solutions.
- Test your prototypes.
Bodine believes that many organizations are so siloed, they forget about empathy and connecting with their customers. “We have to be thoughtful, we have to plan,” said Bodine about the journey mapping process.
The journey manager role
Once a business is able to see what their customer journey is, it has to make sure each silo within the organization is aligned with the journey and focused on seamlessly moving the customer through it. This is where the journey manager role comes in.
Bodine describes the role as, essentially, a product manager, but focused on journeys instead of products. A journey manager understands the customer’s needs and can identify gaps, says Bodine, and can create a long-term vision for the customer journey process. They are also able to pull together all the cross-function stakeholders involved with executing the customer journey process — proactively breaking down the barriers between the silos within an organization.
Journey managers should also be tracking — and measuring — the ongoing impact of the customer experience. The role, she says, is a necessity for businesses that are serious about mending gaps in the customer journey.
Instilling a customer journey mindset
Lastly, Bodine laid out three key initiatives for building a customer journey mindset: listen to customers, measure pivotal points along the journey and move away from aggregated data to more connected data sets.
“You’ve got to listen to your customers tell their stories,” said Bodine. These stories will give you insights into how you’re helping them achieve their goals. Businesses also have to look at all the different data points along the journey to get a clear understanding of how they’re helping their customers — this is where businesses can transition from aggregated to connected data.
“You need to think about creating value all along this customer journey,” said Bodine. If not, businesses are destined to keep making empty promises they cannot deliver on.
About The Author
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.
-
SEO6 days ago
Contact Us Page Examples: 44 Designs For Inspiration
-
SEO7 days ago
Google’s Advice For Ranking: Stop Showing
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 22, 2024
-
PPC7 days ago
The 8 Best Lead Generation Ideas from Marketing Experts
-
WORDPRESS7 days ago
WordPress Block Themes Explained in 250 Seconds – WordPress.com News
-
SEO7 days ago
Save Time With Keywords Explorer Tool
-
PPC6 days ago
Mastering Lead Generation in Paid Search Advertising
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google March 2024 Spam Update Done Rolling Out