Example of an “Aha” moment during journey mapping

Episode Transcript

Moderator:  Hi, welcome to One Question with UpTop Health. The title of the article we’re covering today is “How to Make Confident Healthcare Business Decisions with Journey Mapping.” We talk a lot about journey mapping and what I find fascinating about it is it seems like such a simplistic exercise, but diamonds can get generated out of this exercise. What I was curious about is in your experience with an “AHA” moment that happened when you were working with a client on journey mapping. And Deborah, if you could start first, that would be awesome.

Deborah: Absolutely. Thank you, John. So during a recent UX Strategy Sprint, we were working with a leading insurance company and they were having us evaluate their internal workflow processes and tools. During intake and discovery, we held user interviews with the main users of the tool to watch them walk through their current process while we documented that ahead of our workshop for this large journey map. I think it was over like 70 micro steps. Then we consolidated that into a condensed version for the workshop where we met with key stakeholders. This included the decision makers, project owners, people from tech, and the main users of the tool.

During the workshop we walked through this 21-step journey map, but before we did, we showed them this huge 70-step process. That, in itself, was eye-opening, because it really showed just how many processes and steps they are going through to create what we were looking at, which was them creating an insurance proposal, and so that in itself was helpful. Then, as we dug into it, we walked through each step and we had the experts share about each step in the process. The decision maker was able to hear that and that’s something that’s a really big takeaway because sometimes the decision makers are a step removed from the nitty-gritty and the day-to-day processes.

At one point, as we were going through it, they asked if we could get rid of steps 9-13, “are these really important, are they necessary,” and then we got to hear from the actual users why they were actually important and why they are important to keep. But it helped to highlight that there was a lot of back and forth in this process. There were three main users involved with creating this proposal and a lot of back and forth that was happening between them. And so, even though it ended up being important to keep that part of the process, we ended up focusing on how we could streamline the back-and-forth and automate more. After the whole workshop and the Strategy Sprint, we heard feedback from that stakeholder that they had a lot more understanding of the workflow and it made their following discussions and initiatives a lot more fruitful. Michael what are your thoughts?

Michael: I worked on that same project with Deborah so I totally agree with her on that. I was thinking about this question and there is AHA moment that came to my mind and it would be great to share but it wouldn’t put the client in a very good light so I won’t share that particular one. I’m going to reframe the question to “what is the most common problem that I’ve seen,” and on two recent large projects that we worked on; one also in the insurance space and another in the legal industry there was a common friction point at the beginning of the users’ journey and in both cases, it required information to be collected upfront to either initiate a quote or a case and it was really collecting the basic information from the potential customer or client.

One method used email to capture inputs from the user while the other used a dynamic PDF to collect the information. In both cases information was needed to get transcribed by another employee within the organization, so you can already start to imagine the potential problems that could occur. This included incomplete inputs from the actual client themselves — the customers on their original form as well as transcription issues and the time and resources it takes to do the transcriptions was also a thing. So, in one of these cases the organization knew that it was a problem and they were already working on a solution to automate that process.

But in the other case, they realized it was a problem, but they stated that it would be practically a non-starter to change that process because there was a lot of behavioral change that would need to happen. This occurred in a space where their service was already a commodity so they felt that adding any more time for the client to be able to go through this automated process by filling out a form was a non-starter because they would just go elsewhere for business. We thought that was really interesting, although it was a huge touch point that we identified as being a problem, we did our best to work around that and try to accommodate both the prospective client and and the business.

I thought it was really interesting in terms of being able to attempt to change behaviors to bring innovation but understanding that it is really hard. It is hard for average people to go through change because typically people don’t like change unless it’s hugely beneficial to them. But in this case, sending an email is really simple for folks; just throwing things in there, hitting send as opposed to maybe going through a very methodical form. I thought those observations were really unique.

Moderator: Okay. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

Michael: Thank you.

Deborah: Thanks.