Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / The Touchpoint Where Customer Journey Maps Ignore Employee Onboarding
Transcript
- Lucas: So here's a question that came up in a workshop I ran last month. A marketing director for a mid-sized SaaS company — about 400 employees — she showed me their customer journey map. It was beautiful. Color-coded stickies, empathy columns, the whole thing. And I asked her, 'When did your newest customer success rep start?' She said, 'Tuesday.' I said, 'And when does that person's journey start on this map?' Luna: Ooh. And the answer was… nowhere? Lucas: Exactly nowhere. The map started with the prospect landing on the website. It never asked, 'Who is the human on the other end of that live chat?' or 'How long has that person been trained?' We map the customer's journey but we ignore the employee's journey to competence. And that gap is costing companies real money. Luna: I think I've seen this. When I was at a retail analytics firm a few years back, we had a new support hire who was put on the phones after three days of shadowing. First contact resolution dropped by something like 12 percent that month. Nobody connected it to onboarding. Lucas: Right. And 12 percent is a lot. But the interesting thing is, most journey maps treat the employee as a frictionless black box. The assumption is, if you hire someone competent, they just perform. But onboarding is a touchpoint. It's a transition moment — just like checkout or password reset. And like any touchpoint, if it's broken, it bleeds into the customer experience downstream. Luna: So you're saying the employee's first interaction with the company — their onboarding — is a customer touchpoint? For whom? Lucas: For the customer they'll serve three weeks later. The customer doesn't know they're talking to someone who's been there 14 days. But they feel it. Longer handle times, more transfers, inconsistent answers. That's the employee onboarding gap showing up on the customer's map. So I think we need to expand what we map. Instead of just the customer journey, we need a parallel track: the employee journey to readiness. Luna: So practically, how would you map that? Because onboarding is usually owned by HR, not marketing or CX. Lucas: That's the barrier. Journey mapping tends to sit in the marketing or product org. HR does onboarding. They don't talk. So the map never connects the dots. But if you sit down with HR and say, 'Show me the step-by-step process a new hire goes through from offer letter to their first solo customer interaction,' you'll find gaps that map perfectly to customer friction points. Luna: Give me a concrete example from that workshop. Lucas: The SaaS company I mentioned — they had a 10-day onboarding. Day one through three: HR paperwork and culture videos. Day four through six: product training, but it was self-paced videos. Day seven: shadowing a tenured rep. Day eight: taking calls with a mentor listening in. Day nine: solo calls but with a 'buddy' on Slack. Day ten: go live. That sounds reasonable. But if you look at their customer journey map, there's a spike in call transfers on day 10 and 11 of every month. It correlates with new hire go-live dates. Luna: Because the new hires were transferring calls they didn't know how to handle. And the customer had no idea they were the third person that day to ask the same question. Lucas: Exactly. The customer's journey had a friction point — repeat transfers — that was caused by an employee journey gap. And nobody had mapped it because nobody looked at the calendar overlays. So here's the simple fix: when you build your customer journey map, overlay your employee onboarding timeline. Look for clusters of negative sentiment — longer handle times, lower CSAT, more escalations — that line up with when new hires go live. Luna: That's smart. And it makes me think about the opposite too. Are there positive moments that you could amplify? Like, if you know a new hire is particularly strong in a certain area, maybe you route them to handle those calls first. Lucas: Absolutely. A telecom company I consulted with did exactly that. They had a new hire who came from a competitor and knew their billing system inside out. They fast-tracked her billing support training. Her CSAT scores were 20 percent higher than the cohort average. That's an employee journey win that shows up on the customer map. Luna: So the employee onboarding touchpoint — it's not just about preventing bad experiences. It's about creating great ones deliberately. Lucas: Right. And if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used — like, maybe you've started looking at your own onboarding overlap — we'd love for you to consider supporting the show. It's listener-supported, no ads, and it keeps us independent. If that's something you want to do, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure at all. Luna: Yeah, we really appreciate everyone who's made that possible. It helps us keep digging into these hidden touchpoints. Lucas: So back to the map. Once you overlay the employee journey, you can start redesigning both. For the SaaS company, we moved the go-live date from day ten to day fifteen, but we added structured call reviews on days 11 through 14. Not just more shadowing, but specific coaching on the top five reasons customers called that week. Luna: Did that fix the transfer spike? Lucas: It cut it by about 40 percent in two months. And first contact resolution went up. The customer journey map showed the improvement, but the root cause was an employee journey fix. Now the interesting thing is, once you see this, you start seeing it everywhere. Luna: Give me another example. Maybe from a different industry. Lucas: Sure. A regional bank — they had a journey map for mortgage applications. The map showed a bottleneck at the 'document review' stage. Customers were waiting an average of three extra days. The team assumed it was a process issue, maybe a software limit. But when they mapped the employee journey, they found that the document review team had a rotating training schedule. Every third week, a senior reviewer was pulled off to train new hires. That cut review capacity by 30 percent. The customer waited. The map didn't show the training rotation. Luna: So the training rotation was a hidden touchpoint. And the customer felt it as a delay. Lucas: Exactly. And the fix wasn't a new software tool. It was staggering the training schedule so that not all senior reviewers were pulled at the same time. That's a classic example of where journey mapping without internal data gives you a misleading picture. You see the symptom on the customer side, but the cause is on the employee side. Luna: I wonder how many journey maps have 'employee friction' as a root cause that's never identified. I bet it's a lot. Lucas: Most, I'd guess. And it's not just onboarding. Think about turnover. If you have high turnover in a customer-facing role, you're constantly cycling new people through the same learning curve. The customer journey map will show a persistent dip in satisfaction, but the team might blame the product or the pricing. Meanwhile, the real culprit is the employee journey churn. Luna: So you're saying the employee journey map should be a living document, just like the customer journey map. Lucas: Yes. And they should be linked. Not just a one-time overlay, but a continuous feedback loop. When the customer journey shows a new pain point, ask: is there a change in the employee journey that could explain it? New hire class? New software rollout? Policy change? And vice versa: when you change the employee journey — new training, new tools, new processes — track the customer journey for ripple effects. Luna: That sounds like a lot of data. How do you sell that to a leadership team that's already stretched? Lucas: You don't need to start big. Pick one customer-facing role — say, customer support. Map the employee journey for new hires in that role over their first 90 days. Then overlay it on the customer journey for the same period. Look for correlations. In my experience, you find at least one strong signal within a month. And that signal — a 10 percent drop in CSAT tied to a training gap — that's your business case. You don't need to map the whole company. Luna: So the message is: the customer journey doesn't start when the customer shows up. It starts when the employee shows up. Lucas: That's the headline. If you want to fix the customer experience, look at the employee's first day. That's where the map begins.