Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / The Touchpoint Where Journey Maps Ignore Employee Experience
Transcript
- Lucas: So we talk a lot on this show about the touchpoints customer journey maps miss — the return experience, the password reset, the payment failure. But there's one touchpoint I think we've collectively overlooked, and it's not even on the customer side. Luna: Okay, you have my attention. Where are we going with this? Lucas: The employee experience touchpoint. Specifically, the moments where your employees interact with your systems, processes, or each other — and how those moments ripple directly into customer satisfaction. Luna: Right, because if a customer service rep can't pull up an order history quickly, the customer feels the friction, even if they don't know why. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a 2025 study from the Temkin Group that quantifies this. They found that companies with high employee engagement report customer satisfaction scores that are 2.5 times higher than companies with low engagement. That's not a soft metric — that's revenue. Luna: Two and a half times. That's massive. So why do most journey maps completely ignore the employee layer? Lucas: Because the tools we use are designed that way. Most journey mapping software has a customer lane, maybe a technology lane, but no explicit employee actions lane. It's as if the service just happens by magic. Luna: But the service doesn't happen by magic. It happens because someone knows which screen to open, which script to follow, which manager to escalate to. Lucas: Right. So let me give you a concrete case. There's a regional bank in the Midwest — I'll call them Heartland Bank, not their real name — that hired a consultancy to map their mortgage application journey. Luna: Standard stuff. They probably mapped the application page, the document upload, the status check... Lucas: Exactly. But the map showed a huge drop-off between 'application submitted' and 'document review complete.' Customers were waiting an average of four days for a status update. The team assumed it was a process issue and tried to automate reminders. Luna: Let me guess — it didn't fix the drop-off. Lucas: Not at all. So they did something unusual. They shadowed the loan processors for a week. And what they found was that the loan processors were using three different systems to check a single application — the core banking system, a document management platform, and a spreadsheet they'd built themselves because the CRM didn't have a decent dashboard. Luna: Oh, the dreaded shadow IT spreadsheet. I've seen those. Lucas: Everyone has. So the processors were spending thirty percent of their day just toggling between systems and manually cross-referencing data. That's why status updates took four days — not because of a bad process, but because the employee experience at that touchpoint was broken. Luna: So they fixed the employee touchpoint, not the customer touchpoint. What happened? Lucas: They integrated the document management system into the CRM so that a single dashboard showed all application data. That one change cut the average status update time from four days to six hours. And their Net Promoter Score for mortgage applicants went up eighteen points in six months. Luna: Eighteen points. That's not incremental — that's transformational. And it came from fixing something the customer never saw. Lucas: Exactly. The customer never said 'your CRM is poorly integrated.' They just said 'I never hear back.' And the journey map — the standard one — only showed the customer's wait time. It didn't show the employee's system toggling. Luna: So how do you build an employee experience layer into a journey map without making it a hundred-page document? Lucas: You don't need to map every employee action. You need to identify what I call 'critical employee touchpoints' — the moments where employee friction directly creates customer friction. Loan processors toggling systems is one. Another is the escalation path. Luna: Escalation path — meaning when a customer issue is too complex for the front line and has to be handed off? Lucas: Right. In a lot of companies, that handoff is manual — the rep has to send an email to a shared inbox, and then someone triages it. The customer is in limbo. The journey map shows a 'waiting for specialist' touchpoint, but it doesn't show that the specialist is buried under unread emails from five departments. Luna: So the fix might be a simple routing rule in the CRM. But you'd never know unless you shadowed the specialist. Lucas: Exactly. And the beauty is that once you identify those critical employee touchpoints, the fixes are often cheap and fast. The bank's integration cost them about forty thousand dollars. The NPS lift alone paid for that in a quarter. Luna: I wonder how many companies are pouring money into customer-facing chatbots and fancy mobile apps while their employees are still using spreadsheets and sticky notes. Lucas: A lot. And that's the blind spot. We treat employee experience as an HR issue, not a customer experience issue. But the Temkin data says otherwise. And there's newer data from the Service Design Network showing that journeys mapped with an employee layer are forty percent more likely to lead to measurable improvements. Luna: So practically, if a listener is building a journey map today, what's the one thing they should add that they probably don't have? Lucas: A swimlane labelled 'employee actions' — but not generic ones. Specific actions tied to the customer's timeline. What does the employee do when the customer submits a form? What do they do when the customer calls? What tools do they use? And most importantly, where do they feel stuck? Luna: That last part is key — 'where do they feel stuck?' Because employees will tell you if you ask. But most journey mapping workshops don't include them. Lucas: They don't. And it's a missed opportunity. The next time you hear 'our NPS is flat' or 'our call handling time is up,' don't just look at the customer journey. Look at the employee journey that supports it. Luna: You know, speaking of looking at things differently — if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your work, that's exactly the kind of thing that keeps this show ad-free and independent. Lucas: Yeah, it's a good moment to mention that listener support is what lets us keep digging into these angles without worrying about sponsor pressure. If the show's been valuable to you, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar. Luna: It's just buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — all one word, lowercase. And seriously, no pressure. We're grateful you listen at all. Lucas: Alright. Back to the employee layer. One more thing I want to flag: when you add that employee swimlane, resist the urge to make it a laundry list. Focus on the moments that matter. The ones where employee friction directly creates customer friction. Luna: So the critical employee touchpoints — system toggling, escalation handoffs, and I'd add knowledge access. If a rep can't find the answer quickly, the customer waits. Lucas: Exactly. Knowledge access is huge. There's a famous case from a telco where they found that reps were spending seven minutes per call searching an internal wiki. They restructured the wiki based on most-searched topics and saved three minutes per call. That's a fifteen percent reduction in handle time, and customer satisfaction went up because reps sounded more confident. Luna: And again, no customer ever said 'please reorganize your wiki.' They just said 'the rep seemed unsure.' Lucas: Right. So the takeaway is: next time your journey map shows a dip, don't assume it's a customer problem. It might be an employee problem wearing a customer disguise. Luna: I love that framing. I'm going to use that. 'An employee problem wearing a customer disguise.' Lucas: Feel free. And if you want to see what a journey map with an employee layer looks like, we'll put a template on the show page — nothing fancy, just a spreadsheet with an extra column. Luna: Perfect. That's a concrete takeaway. Alright, that's our episode. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.