Partner journey mapping

Introduction

Managed Service Provider (MSP) partner journey mapping was the biggest journey mapping project we did when I was working as Lead Service Designer in F-Secure B2B together with one service designer in my team. The work was relatively slow because we did it among other duties. Getting the first full version of the current partner journey map done took approximately one year, from end of 2018 to beginning of 2020. After that the optimal journey creation was continued in selected parts of the journey. Partner journey is really large and complex, and we were able to include there the partner and F-Secure levels, but the end-customer part we had to scope out from the initial work. 

Note: Confidential information is left out and there fore this example description is kept in high level

Why the mapping was done?

As explained in  Personas for Cyber Security page the focus customer for the company was and is the service providing partner, and there fore the offering and operations should be optimized for them. However, before we started the journey mapping work, there was no understanding what was the end to end co-operation with the focus customer (partner), bits and pieces of some processes were documented but not everything and especially not the full journey. To be able to improve the operations, to get new (ideal) partners, keep them and make the experience great, we needed to have visibility to the current customer journey. When there is clarity of the current situation, what is good or bad, both from the company and the customer point of view, it is possible to start creating something optimal. Otherwise it is not possible to know what needs to be changed to be able to achieve the optimal goal.

 

How it was done?

Similarly as with the personas work, for the partner journey mapping,to enrich the information we used the materials from other research for certain level, but the biggest, initial part of current journey understanding was done via internal interviews. We interviewed stakeholders from different functions to get all parts of the chain in the communication, processes, touch points and operations clarified and documented. Partner understanding was also filled in by interviewing the customer facing roles, account managers and sales engineers. At the same time we were also doing the partner interviews for personas work, which helped to fill in some gaps.

I did the project planning for both internal and external research and designing the map, and also planned the internal interviews, conducted and analyzed them together with one (and only) service designer in my team.

We were able to build a draft map with the touch points (digital and physical). After we had the skeleton draft, there was also one bigger partner survey conducted by a vendor (Funnel) to get more understanding about the partner needs, operations and service models. From that survey we were not able to learn much new, but we were able to get support and more details and data to our hypothetical journey. That all information was feed in to the map, and combined with the personas information, about which of the internal and external persona were included in which part of the journey, when and why. We gathered also information about the identified pain points, needs and opportunities.

First we had everything in one huge excel file, which contained all the information. We had to choose a tool for better visualization and communication. At that point there was no company wide tool which we could have used for sharing, so we decided to have it done in Adobe Illustrator and then convert to pdf.

Image: Example of the partner journey map. (NOTE: the image is deliberately with small resolution, for confidentiality, so that the details are not visible.)

What were the next steps and benefits of the work?

After getting the high level current journey map, we were able to start creating the optimal journey. We had  identified the current pain points and the target was to start improving them (from the low hanging fruits to more complex problems). The first project was the optimal partner onboarding journey creation. I lead the work together with the Channel Operations team, but the actual work was a wide collaboration with several functions, basically all functions which were involved with the onboarding journey (marketing, sales, customer care, product management and so on). Via the onboarding journey we were able to create a partner management framework to improve the channel operations.

Journey mapping work also continued in the Partner Portal vision, making the UI adaptable to the different personas in different stages of the journey. The other important thing was to create the user persona journeys for the product usage which helped in the Product UX vision creation. (More about the vision work in another story).