Today’s interview is with Jochem van der Veer, the Co-Founder and CEO of TheyDo, a leading platform for journey management that helps organisations build seamless customer experiences by aligning teams around the customer journey. We discuss customer journeys, journey mapping, and data, highlighting how businesses risk exacerbating data overwhelm if they don’t rethink their approach. Additionally, we explore the finding that 41% of business leaders rarely involve other departments in data-driven decisions.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Voice still reigns in customer service – Interview with Nikola Mrkšić of PolyAI – and is number 545 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Jochem:

• Jochem is advocating for journey management as a way to get rid of bureaucracy and customer-centric misalignment across teams at the enterprise.
• There is a big gap between a company thinking they’re customer-centric and actually pulling it off at scale.
• Journey mapping often gets a bad rap and is sometimes referred to as nothing more than office art.
• However, we must remember that journey mapping was never the end game.
• There’s nothing wrong with mapping a customer journey. However, it goes wrong when it becomes an exercise in itself. And where it gets even worse is that it’s often flat and one-dimensional, based only on a bunch of customer interviews.
• Everyone is talking about journeys and journey mapping as if they’re one and the same thing. It’s far more nuanced than that.
• Some people talk about journeys, some people talk about micro journeys, some people talk about life cycles etc. The best way to think of it is when the customer feels that they’ve accomplished something.
• That’s very much aligned with the idea of the jobs to be done way of approaching things.
• About 41% of leaders rarely involve other departments in data-driven decisions.
• We’re over-relying on structured data, our metrics, and our behavioural analytics.
• There’s so much data that people are feeling slightly overwhelmed. But data overwhelm is not going away.
• The first thing that brands need to do is get a strategy for data aggregation in place.
• When you don’t have context, an insight is worth nothing.
• What LLMs are great at is understanding, labelling, tagging, grouping, clustering, and helping us see the patterns. But we still need human judgment, in the context of the business, to make a decision about what to do with those patterns.
• However, we need to be careful that the data doesn’t become a barrier because people don’t see past the data.
• We need to invest in structures to close the gap between people building for the customer, people changing policies for the customer, people implementing new campaigns for the customer, and whatever it is that the delivery teams are doing because there’s so much miscommunication and so much lost in translation the bigger the business gets.
• To do that starts with the culture, and by having leaders directly go and meet customers every day.
• I try to meet 15 to 20 customers a month. It’s a lot. But, it allows me to get a really good pulse on what our customers are thinking, how they’re feeling, and what they need next.
• You need to build that muscle or habit and you need to do it over time. Then you’ll start to listen to the things that actually matter, and you’ll pick up on those tiny variations that you want to understand versus the broad strokes.
• We have a goldmine of data, but we need to prioritize the right things.
• So the first thing the business needs to do is understand, where’s the pressing problem right now in line with our strategy? When we get the right data to make a decision, are we able to do it, and are we able to act?
• Start small and focused, and don’t focus on doing a massive transformation, because you’ll end up two years down the road with no action taken and no impact.
• Jochem’s best advice: Start with the biggest burning platform in your business, because that’s where people pay attention. Then, start to understand where, in our customer’s role, the pain they are experiencing lies and what is causing it.
• Jochem’s Punk CX brand: Vanguard.

About Jochem

Jochem van der Veer is the Co-Founder and CEO of TheyDo, a leading platform for journey management that helps organisations build seamless customer experiences by aligning teams around the customer journey. With a background in design thinking and innovation, Jochem has dedicated his career to helping businesses scale customer-centric strategies. Under his leadership, TheyDo has empowered global brands to move from siloed operations to collaborative, journey-driven workflows that drive better decision-making and growth. Passionate about design, systems thinking, and the future of work, Jochem is a frequent speaker on the intersection of customer experience and business strategy.

Check out TheyDo, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @TheyDoHQ and feel free to connect with Jochem on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash