Customer Journey and Personas: A Three Phase Evolution
Company: Autodesk
Phase 1: Solving for an Organizational Realignment
Role: Roll-out, Adoption, Maintenance, Data Updates
THE CHALLENGE:
Autodesk underwent a company-wide reorg in 2017. One of the new departments combined three formerly disparate web platform teams (Digital Platform Experience). These three teams had never worked together, and had conflicting goals and mandates.
Business processes were run differently
Platforms were built differently
Design systems were created differently
Data was collected differently
THE SOLUTION:
We created a platform-agnostic journey map and unified personas representing our customers’ digital experiences. Together these highlighted key customer pain points and needs, resulting in coordinated efforts to add value and delight.
We grounded our work in quantitative and qualitative data
We led the training for internal adoption of framework and personas as tools for prioritization and alignment within the new DPE organization
It enabled the coordination of work across digital platform teams
We conducted a data gap analysis with options to fill gaps
It supported the alignment of multiple disparate web surveys
It gave customer pain points and needs a seat at the table in developing product road maps
Phase 2: Solving for Data Alignment and Automation
Role: Sponsor, Team Mentor and Coach, Strategist
THE CHALLENGE:
While creating the Phase 1 assets, we uncovered the lack of consistency in how we collected customer data, making it very challenging to see the big picture in how our customers engaged with us across parts of the overall journey.
Customer feedback data had been stored in different isolated platforms.
The data structure was not reconciled - there was no shared taxonomy.
Collecting and making sense of this data was a tedious manual process.
THE SOLUTION:
We created a convenient one-stop data platform aggregating newly-reconciled data from our customers, and where internal employees could identify/diagnose customer pain points and opportunities for improvement.
The Journey Explorer platform
Considered employee time constraints and lack of expertise with data
Find the answer to straight-forward questions quickly
Answer more complex questions easily
Easy export of data for detailed analysis
Helped prioritize goals by quickly identifying problem areas and trends
Was useful to employees in any org who need data & analytics about our customers
Had clean, reconciled data in exportable formats for more detailed analysis
Looked across aggregated data sources for holistic views of customers
Enabled easy access to data without needing a data analyst
Reduced manual processes
Viewing cases by various filters and timeframes
The Explorer’s search functionality
Phase 3: Solving for Company-Wide Alignment
Role: Strategy, Roll-out and Adoption
THE CHALLENGE:
The DPE org’s journeymap framework was not representative of our customers’ experiences across ALL of Autodesk’s public-facing touch points, such as Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.
The journeymap represented their digital experiences using our website properties
Other orgs within Autodesk had not adopted the journeymap, even though they knew about it
Other orgs had shown interest in the Journey Explorer platform but the journeymap framework didn’t align to their mental models
We needed to pivot towards a holistic single framework that all of our customer-facing orgs could use
THE SOLUTION:
In order to create a company-wide framework that all employees could adopt, we stood up a team of representatives from all customer-facing departments who could speak to known customer activities and needs.
Used research, both qual and quant, to define various modes and decision-making moments
Presented our proposals to sponsors and executive leadership
Upon approval, rolled out and trained up across the company for adoption
Mapped and migrated embedded instances of DPE’s journeymap into New Lifecycle
Retired DPE’s journeymap