Adding trust to your customer journey map

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Trust has emerged as one of the critical skills in our future of work survey. Many respondents volunteered trust as a critical skill for their own future and in their ability to collaborate with others. We have written about trust as a critical skill, and asked whether it can be thought of as a skill at all. Here we want to explore a different question. How do we build trust with each other, with systems and with the data that informs these decisions. Should trust be something we design for?

Please contribute to our survey on skills for the future of work.

Trust is not a simple thing. It is something that is earned, and given, not something that can be demanded or enforced. There are five levels of trust that we are concerned with in the design of skill and competency management systems.

Ibbaka’s mission is to help people, teams and organizations understand and realize their potential. To move from potential to growth. Trust plays a critical role in this. We think about trust in the following ways:

Personal

• Self trust - how can we give people confidence so that they trust themselves and their abilities

• Team trust - this may be the most important aspect of trust, as it is teams that connect the individual to the organization

  Organizational

• Trust in organizations - how can Ibbaka make the organizations of that use its software platforms more worth of trust

  Vendor

• Trust in Ibbaka - what does Ibbaka have to do to earn and be worthy of people’s trust, so that they will use it and share data

• Trust in the Ibbaka platform - our platform has to be well design and engineered so that it conveys and implements our intentions and provides the affordances needed to build the higher levels of trust (individual, team, organization)

• Trust in the data - is the data accurate, is it a fair representation of the people, teams, organizations and communities; will the data be used in the way intended and in the interests of the individuals and organizations; where there are contradictions between individuals and organizations, how will these be resolved?

Trust is a complex problem and we need better tools to think about it. It is not static. Trust evolves over time. As they say, it can take a long time to earn trust, but it can be lost in a moment.

In user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) work, one of the most useful frameworks for organizing data and looking for critical touchpoints is the journey map. A journey map is organized as a series of touchpoints over time. A touchpoint is a significant interaction between an individual, often characterized as a persona, and a system. Journey maps take many forms and can include many different things. Typically, they are organized using swimlanes along a backbone of touchpoints. Each swim lane follows the changes or sequence of actions for a persona. Typically swim lanes include aspects of the system design, like the actions taken by a persona, the actions taken by the service provider, the actions taken by the system, data collected. Onto this is layered the emotional state of the persona, changes in understanding of what is happening, aspirations for the future and other cognitive and emotional components of the experience.

Journey maps range from the simple. (This example is from the Evergreen Data blog.)

To the complex. (This example is from Customer Journey Maps The Top Ten Requirements.)

In designing skill and competency management systems, and roll out and support plans for such systems, Ibbaka is advocating that trust be part of the journey map. At each touchpoint ask the following questions.

• What is the level of trust? Does the individual trust that what is happening is being done in their interests (if it is not, why should they be willing participants)?

• What is being communicated to the individual in order to earn their trust?

• What could happen that would cause the individual to lose trust?

Skill management systems depend on trust and need to be trustworthy. Part of this comes from the design of the system. At Ibbaka we have tried to be worthy of trust through our privacy and data ownership policy, by the design rules that an individual controls what information is shown on their profile and who it is shown to, and by encouraging people to suggest skills to each other (trust is based on exchanges).

Skills are can also be an important part of the customer journey map. At each touchpoint people from the vendor and the users will need to have certain skills and both sides should see skills develop across the journey. See Add skills to your customer journey map.

Interested in the role that trust plays in business? See how trust is critical to critical business functions like value-based pricing.