Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / The One Touchpoint Journey Maps Almost Always Ignore, the Employee
Transcript
- Lucas: Let me ask you something. You are mapping a customer's journey — awareness, consideration, purchase, support, loyalty. You have every click, every email, every chat bubble accounted for. But did you map the employee who picks up the phone on the third ring? Luna: Oof. That's a good point. I think most maps treat employees as invisible. They just assume the interaction goes smoothly. Lucas: Exactly. And that assumption is dangerous. Because the single highest-leverage moment in most journeys is the one where a human being representing your brand interacts with a human being who is your customer. And if that moment goes wrong, no amount of pre-click optimization saves you. Luna: It reminds me of the CrowdStrike outage last year. Not a customer-service call, but the same principle—one bad interaction with a system, and the entire journey collapses. Lucas: Perfect example. July 2024, CrowdStrike pushes a faulty update. Eight and a half million Windows devices crash. Airlines, banks, hospitals—grounded. But the story people remember isn't the technical root cause. It's the wait on hold for hours. It's the agent who has no answers. It's the employee who is just as confused as the customer. Luna: Right. So the journey map for those customers included a blocked screen, a hold queue, and then a conversation. But the map probably didn't specify what training the agent had, what data they could access, or how empowered they were to resolve the issue. Lucas: That's the blind spot. Most journey maps are drawn from the customer's perspective only. They show touchpoints — call center, live chat, email — as black boxes. But inside that black box is a human being with a script, a system, and a mood. And that human being is a touchpoint. Luna: So how do you map the employee touchpoint? I mean, it's not like you add a sticky note that says 'employee feels stressed.' Lucas: You can, actually. Or at least you should. Companies like Apple and Zappos have been doing this for years. They don't just map what the customer does; they map what the employee does at each stage. What systems do they see? What authority do they have? What information do they lack? That's the employee journey embedded within the customer journey. Luna: So instead of a single box that says 'customer service call,' you expand it into multiple steps: agent receives call, agent pulls up account, agent diagnoses issue, agent escalates—each with its own emotional arc. Lucas: Exactly. And when you do that, you start seeing friction points the customer never sees but definitely feels. Like when the agent has to transfer you and you have to repeat your story. That's not a customer touchpoint failure—it's an employee tool failure. And it shows up in your journey map as a broken internal handoff. Luna: I think a lot of marketers resist this because they think employee experience is HR's problem. But if the employee's interaction with the customer is part of the journey, it's a marketing problem too. Lucas: Absolutely. And the data backs it up. There's a well-known correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Gallup has been tracking it for decades. Companies in the top quartile of employee engagement see ten percent higher customer ratings. That's a journey-map lever you cannot ignore. Luna: Let's get concrete. Can you give me an example of a company that does this well? Besides Apple and Zappos. Lucas: Sure. Southwest Airlines. Their entire culture is built around employee empowerment. The joke is that their flight attendants can make jokes on the PA because they're trusted. But seriously, when a flight is delayed, the gate agent has the authority to rebook passengers, issue vouchers, even apologize personally. That's not in most airline journey maps — the agent's discretion is a feature, not a bug. Luna: Versus a legacy carrier where the agent can only read from a script and has to escalate everything. Same journey map, completely different experience. Lucas: Right. So the fix isn't complicated. Step one: when you build a journey map, add a parallel lane for the employee. For every touchpoint, ask: who is the employee, what do they need, and what can they do? Step two: audit for handoffs. Every time the customer is transferred or handed off, that's a risk point. Step three: measure employee satisfaction at those specific touchpoints, not just overall. Luna: And this ties directly to the post-purchase experience we've talked about in earlier episodes. If a customer calls to return something, the employee's ability to process that return quickly and politely determines whether that customer comes back. Lucas: Exactly. And if you've mapped the return process as a smooth flow but the employee is fighting with a clunky system, your map is lying to you. So the practical takeaway: next time you update your journey map, shadow an employee for a day. Listen to calls. Watch them navigate the CRM. You will find at least three friction points you never saw. Luna: That's such a simple, powerful exercise. And it costs almost nothing. Just time and curiosity. Lucas: Honestly, if this episode made you think about your own journey map in a new way, and if it was worth the price of a coffee to you, we do have a little link where you can toss a few dollars our way. It's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Keeps the show ad-free and lets us keep digging into these blind spots. Luna: Yeah, we really appreciate that. It's a small gesture that goes a long way for a podcast like ours. Lucas: Alright, back to it. So let's talk about a specific industry where the employee touchpoint is often catastrophic when ignored: healthcare. Luna: Oh, that's a great one. Patient journey maps are huge in healthcare marketing, but they usually focus on appointment booking, wait times, and follow-up calls. The actual interaction with the nurse or doctor is treated as a given. Lucas: Right. And yet, studies show that the quality of the clinician-patient interaction is the strongest predictor of patient satisfaction. Even more than wait time. And that interaction is shaped by the clinician's training, workload, and tools. If your journey map doesn't account for whether the doctor has five minutes or fifteen minutes per patient, you're missing the core driver. Luna: So a hospital might spend millions on a marketing campaign to attract patients, but if the front-desk staff is rude or the doctor is rushed, the journey fails at the most critical touchpoint. Lucas: Exactly. And it's not just healthcare. Retail, banking, tech support—any industry with a human service component. The employee is the last mile of your brand promise. If the last mile is broken, the whole journey is broken. Luna: I think the reason this blind spot persists is that employee experience is harder to measure. You can track clicks and conversions easily. Tracking whether an agent smiled or felt empowered is qualitative. Lucas: But you can proxy it. Abandon rate on calls, first-call resolution rate, employee turnover in the contact center. If your journey map shows a high drop-off at the support stage, don't just look at the IVR menu—look at the agents. Are they staying? Are they trained? Are they happy? Because unhappy employees create unhappy customers. Luna: That's a great lens. And it also flips the usual ROI calculation. Instead of asking 'how much does it cost to train employees,' you ask 'how much does it cost to lose a customer because of an untrained employee.' Lucas: Exactly. And that number is usually much higher. So let me leave you with a challenge. Next time you review your customer journey map, add a sticky note for every human interaction. Then go talk to those humans. Ask them what they need. You might find that the biggest gap in your map isn't a missing channel—it's a missing conversation with your own team. Luna: Great advice. And a great place to leave it. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. Talk to you next time.