How to Turn Your Journey Map into an Eco-System Map

Add bookmark

Moira Dorsey, Vice-President, Research Director at Forrester, joins Customer Management
Exchange Network to discuss how to turn your Journey Map into an Eco-System Map.

Customer Management Exchange: Moira, welcome to the show. You're a speaker at the
Executive Customer Contact Exchange and you'll also be speaking at the US Customer
Experience Exchange in North America, so you're a key figurehead of this industry. I'd like to
do a quickfire round with you today, asking you five questions about developments within this
industry, starting with the question, what tools can customer experience professionals use to
understand their brands' ecosystems?

M Dorsey: That's an excellent question. There are a couple. The first one that people need is
a customer journey map, or several customer journey maps. Customer journey maps typically
come out of the research that companies do to develop customer personas, which represent
their customers and their behaviours. They detail all the steps that customers take across all
the different touch points in their interactions with companies in the course of trying to
accomplish a particular goal. For example, if they want to log into a financial services account
and transfer money between accounts.
Once you have a journey map, or many journey maps of all the critical journeys that
customers take, then you can use that journey map to create an ecosystem map. That's the
second tool that's very critical to understanding a brand's ecosystems. The ecosystem map is
the flip side or the mirror image of the customer journey map in that it represents the
company's side of the conversation or the interaction tha's going on between the customer
and the company. When you do an ecosystem map, it tells you not only the touch points that
customers are interacting with, such as the IVR system or the call centre agent or the person
at the end of an email or the website, it also tells you what's happening at each of those
interaction points and it enables you to highlight places where the customer experience is
either going well and supporting the customer's goals, or where things are breaking down and
there are problems.
So the journey maps and the ecosystem maps are two critical tools to understand what's
going on in your customer experience ecosystem.

Customer Management Exchange: That's very interesting. Leading on from that, what types
of ecosystem issues lead to breakdowns in customer experience?

M Dorsey: Well, this is a fascinating one and we could probably sit here and make almost an
infinite list of problems. The reason for that is that most companies, big companies, have very
complex ecosystems that are serving their customers that are made up of third parties,
people in back offices. It's not just the front end customer service reps in the store or on the
phone that represent the ecosystem that's serving your customers; it's complex and it's made
up of a lot of different types of parties
Let's take one example: let's go back to our example of a customer trying to log into their
account and transfer money between accounts. One example of a breakdown that we've
seen in the customer experience ecosystem is when the person picks up the phone and tries
to log in to their account via the automated phone system. We have an interesting example
from one company where that login process was broken and that breakdown was causing people to have to call into car centre agents in order to be able to get into their accounts. And, of course, as we all know, when people are trying to get something done in one touch point, such as an automated phone system, and they're forced to transfer to an agent, that leads to dissatisfaction and it also drives up costs for the company.
So having an automated phone system where the login capability for customers is broken is just one of many examples of the kinds of breakdown that we see in companies' customer experience ecosystems.

Customer Management Exchange: And on the flip side of that, what benefits should companies expect to get out of ecosystem mapping?

M Dorsey: Again, once you identify the root cause of some of these problems like the problems that prevent people from logging into their accounts via an automated IVR system, you can see the benefits. There are lots of business benefits associated with increased customer satisfaction. We know happier customers are typically more loyal customers. So, over time, that translates into likelihood to repurchase from the same company or likelihood to recommend to a friend, if you make the experience more satisfying for the customers.
So that's potential revenue benefit, and on the flip side, if you're cutting down calls to the call centre by fixing problems in the automated systems and enabling people to complete their goals in the automated systems, then you're cutting costs as well. So, in short, the benefits that companies should expect to see by fixing the problems identified with ecosystem mapping are, simply put, higher profits.

Customer Management Exchange: How can those responsible for their customers' experience align their organisations to create the ecosystems they desire?

M Dorsey: The first step is really by going through this ecosystem mapping exercise and involving people from multiple parts of the organisation to participate in the ecosystem mapping exercise. For example, if you have somebody in the legal department who's been writing a policy that is getting in the way of customers completing their goals, then it's clear to them that that policy is getting in the way of customers' goals and blocking profits in some regard. Sometimes it's easier if that problem is right in front of people's face, especially if they're not the person who's facing the customer and seeing this day to day, what this is causing. If you involve people, all the different parties who are involved in the ecosystem in the mapping exercise, it helps everybody develop a shared point of view about why it's important to fix the ecosystem and improve the experience.
So that's a short to mid-term fix to get people aligned. And in the longer term, what we see is that companies really need to make an effort to transform their organisation to be more mature in the six customer experience disciplines. That obviously takes much longer than fixing individual problems in the experience, but it also has longer lasting benefits.

Customer Management Exchange: Perfect. Lastly I'd like to ask you just to gauge your figure of inspiration, who is your all-time hero and why. And this can be work-related or non-work-related.

M Dorsey: This is a tough one to pick. I have a few to pick from. But it came down to my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. In the 20s she went to college, and she also went on to law school to become a lawyer. In the 1920s, of course, that was rather unusual for women to go to college and very unusual for them to go law school. And so I think she was a very courageous woman and someone who knew herself very well and had the courage and the confidence to follow through on something that she was very interested in. So she's my pick.

Customer Management Exchange: That's a great example. People often pick a parent and, so, yes, I can see that picking a role model like that is a great example. Thank you very much for your time today, Moira. It's been great to speak to you and we look forward to hearing more at the two exchanges at which you'll be presenting.


RECOMMENDED