Cliffnotes Part 1: Orchestrating Experiences
Book: Orchestrating Experiences | Collaborative Design for Complexity
By: Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum
This cliffnote consists of brief summarizations and call outs to key vocabulary. This book is a solid how-to and a must read for full context and guidance on these techniques. So, if you are interested in more practical applications and guidance, buy the book.
Introduction
This book was written to address three critical challenges organizations face today:
- How to evolve from shipping disconnected products and touchpoints quickly to crafting end-toned experiences that unfold gracefully over time
- How to break down operational silos and enable effective, efficient human-centered design collaboration
- How to bridge the gap between fuzzy-front-end strategy (“What should we do?”) to nuts-and-bolts execution (“What we did”)
The goals is to bring harmony to product and service creation when working with multi-disciplinary teams. We need to move from mapmakers to orchestrators.
A Common Foundation
You must speak the same language and have common approaches to disparate work. Four concepts are critical to this: channel, touchpoint, ecosystem, and journey.
Channel — a medium of interaction with customers or users.
Like a communication channel such as a phone line or email to physical stores, web, and mobile. All facilitate communication between the channel owners and the people they serve.
Channel thinking (vertical ownership) can deter innovation but is deeply ingrained in the way work is currently done. Channels are complex and enable customer interactions but create barriers within and across organizations. Your objective is to reframe channels to serve customer journeys (horizontal servitude). Understand that:
- Organizations are structured by channels
- Channels don’t exist in isolation.
- Channels are defined by interaction, information, and context.
- Channels should support the moment.
Companies can evolve but need leaders to do so. Be the change.
An example of departments and channel ownership.
Customers only care about channels as long as it helps them achieve their goals. They want products and services that deliver for their explicit goals and implicit needs. The switch between channels, optionally and necessarily. They navigate through available channels based on knowledge, preference, or context. Channels are unique in material, but still represent the parent as a unified entity to the customer.
Channels Reflect Interactions, Information, and Context
Every channel has different capabilities, constraints, and materiality . Channels can be defined by:
- Interaction what is the medium a customer uses to interact with you?
- Information What is the nature o the content being provided or exchanged?
- Context from environment to emotion, what is at play within the interaction?
Channels Support the Moment
“Defining channels as destinations obfuscates their supporting role of enabling and facilitating customer moments in different contexts”
Customers/users are people in moments using available tools to accomplish a goal. Channels used depends upon needs, context, and technological capabilities.
Switching from a medium focus to an experience or moment focus empowers collaboration between specialists.
Evaluate, Inventory, & Codify your Channels
Look at your world from a customer perspective to understand how they interact with your product/service.
- Start with the obvious. Identify your major channels and compare/contrast them.
- Choose the right granularity. A finer granularity will assist strategic use of specific channels and identify new ones. This can help reframe what each channel offers.
- Be specific. Identify technological affordances that are available and differ across media and context.
- Note who owns each channel. Note which groups/departments/people own each channel to understand partners and stakeholders in order to collaborate.
- Be ready to adapt. You will discover new channels and see a mixing of channels throughout the process. Set a good foundation first, then adjust as needed later.
You are building an orchestra (get it? orchestration). Use this metaphor to help you understand the actors, instruments, and composition of your product and service as a whole.
Pinning Down Touchpoints
Marketing, service design, and product design have all adopted the term touchpoint, but have varying definitions. Colleagues may use the term touchpoint to refer to a digital product, feature, channel, or even a role. Therefore, to unify and clarify, we shall define touchpoints as what facilitates an interaction within or across channels between a person and a product or service. Touchpoints have the following dimensions:
- Clear intent based on identified needs
- Create customer moments individually or in combinations
- Play varying but specific roles
- Can be evaluated and measured for appropriateness and efficacy.
What’s Your Intent?
Touchpoints manifest differently based on channel, context, and interaction. An order status conversation with a call agent could be supported via phone, online chat, video, text message or email. These touchpoints should share a common and clear intent behind their role in the end-to-end experience. They should also share a common set of principles that guide their definition, creation and measurement. Defining the underlying intent reveals the same intent across channels enabling cross-functional teams to compare, connect, and increase consistency. This can only be achieved by separating the what from the why.
Making the Moment
Each touchpoint serves its own role creating its own purpose. Touchpoints can appear in different combinations across contexts but can be rolled up to serve a moment.
An example is the moment of checking in at the airport centers. Touchpoints in this customer moment include wayfinding signage, greeting, and process conversations, mobile and print boarding passes, the baggage conveyor belt, and much more. Touchpoints can be tangible or intangible. Digital or analog. Pre-manufactured or created in the moment.
Different Moments, Different Roles
A few examples of common touchpoint types are:
- Featured. These play the role of helping create signature customer moments.
- Bridge. Helping a customer move from one moment to the next or one channel to the next bridge.
- Repair/Recovery. Rescuing customers when they have failures either system or user created.
Two helpful frameworks
- Touchpoints by moment
- Touchpoints by channel
Touchpoints by Moment
- Journeys: Customers experience products and services over time, often in context of achieving an explicit goal or meeting an implicit need.
- Stages: A journey unfolds in a series of moments that tend to cluster around specific needs or goals.
- Moments: Linear or nonlinear, moments occur throughout a journey as the customer proceeds through time. They are not all equal, but all matter.
- Touchpoints: enabling interactions within and across moments.
Touchpoints by channel
This is more of a touchpoint inventory to clarify which channels are responsible for which touchpoints.
No Detail left behind
A touchpoint inventory should be a living document for planning, creating, changing, and retiring touchpoints. Common attributes
- Channel Stage
- Moment
- Touchpoint name: Make this clear and unique
- Customer Needs
- Touchpoint roles
- Connections
- Quality
- Measurement
- Owner
- Status
Exploring Ecosystems
All organizations sit within a complicated system of relationships of people, processes, technologies, regulations and competitors. Customers also live in their own world. You can codify seen and unseen relationships that shape customer needs and behaviors.
Unpacking an Experience Ecosystem
This is like peeling an onion, but don’t cry. We can break things down to
- Actors
- Roles
- Artifacts
- Factors
- Places
- Interactions
- Relationships
- Boundaries
Actors
These are people who do or could participate in your product or service experience
- Customers and External stakeholders. This includes friends and family, professionals, or others directly or indirectly involved in the experience that affect customer needs and behaviors.
- Internal stakeholders and agents. Organizations are not people, but they are made up of them regardless of direct customer interaction.
- Organizations and government.
- Products and services.
Roles
Distinguishing actors from roles they play in an ecosystem can be helpful since an actor can play many roles.
Artifacts
Not to be confused with touchpoint. These can be touchpoints but may exist outside your product or service. If your service is healthcare, cigarettes could be an artifact affecting your system.
Factors
These trigger, constrain or shape actor behaviors and relationships. These can be tech or social trends and environmental changes.
Places
Specific places can play an important role in where, when, and how actors and artifacts interact.
Interactions
Patterns will emerge in how different actors interact with other artifacts, places, and other actors. Nature, frequency, and importance of these interactions reveal value exchanges that exist outside your product or service. This can inform new strategies.
Relationships
Boundaries
Discuss how wide and deep to go.
Mapping an ecosystem takes time. Put the customer at the center. Play with the center of gravity to understand the different perspectives.Change your level of zoom.
An example of macro-scale
An example of a stakeholder map
Orienting Around Journeys
A journey is the conceptual trip a person embarks upon to achieve a goal or satisfy one or more needs. Journeys are constructs, not mental models. These aid in the design of better experiences, not a customer mental model. They unfold over time and are made of moments. There are journeys within journeys. These illustrate touchpoints, pain points, moments of joy and delight, etc.
Journeys are Valuable to Everyone
These help define strategies, design for experience over time and modernize operations.
- Staging experiences, not selling products and services
- Customer journeys are invaluable to customer centric process.
- Using Data to build and manage customer relationships
- Journeys allow for identifiable and measurable touchpoints and interactions over time
- Measuring each touch
- As interactions become more complex and diversified, journeys allow for ownership and check-ins
- Adapting to the Mobile Customer
- Understand entry points and opportunities to leverage different channels
- Meeting Expectations for Experience Continuity
- Embracing Emotions
Journey: The Hub of Empathy and Understanding
Customer journeys can help all org actors identify with the true customer experience in a way that is co-created and manageable across teams. Customer journeys provide insights into customer needs while clarifying how different touchpoints and channels work or don’t work well as a system.
Other traditional user experience tools for connecting different parts of the experience, such as concept models, lack the elements of time and context. Scenarios communicate experiences over time, but their strength lies in individual customer stores, not a broader view of actions, emotions and needs across the customer base. User stories tactically break down touchpoints into functionality, but focus on minute tasks, not larger outcomes. This is why the customer journey is the hub of empathy and understanding.
From Journey to Microinteraction
Viewing the experience as a journey can help identify the greater flow that a product or service should create. It also provides the scaffolding.
- Identify pain points and opportunities
- Make a plan
- Organize across silos
Unpacking End-to-End Experiences
It may seem impossible, but you can identify the building blocks for these.
The Journey
It is a complete story with the following elements
- The overarching story
- Moments
- Stages
The Customer
Feeling (emotions)
- What emotions do they experience throughout?
- What moments or interactions dramatically impact this?
- How do these emotions impact decision making?
- To what extent do emotions reveal deeper motivations behind people’s actions?
- How well does the product or service identify, accept, and adapt to a customer’s emotional state?
Thinking (Perceptions)
- What do different customers expect will happen at each key moment?
- When something fails to meet expectations, how does this impact their actions, emotions, and needs?
- What other products, people, or information help shape a customer’s mental model?
- How well does the product or service experience anticipate, address, or acknowledge existing mental models?
Doing (Behaviors)
- What range of customer behaviors exists in the end-to-end experience>
- What do customers do to address specific needs during their journeys?
- How do customers’ actions deviate from their preferred or your orgs desired behaviors?
- How do touchpoints, people or places impact customers’ behavior?
The Ecosystem
Channels
- What channels do customers gravitate toward in certain moments? How well can the switch channels?
Touchpoints
- What do customers interact with and to what degree? What is the quality of these interactions? What touchpoints are missing from specific channels or completely?
People
- What role do agents of the product or service play in the journey? Are there others who impact experiences, decisions, and behaviors?
- Other Products and Services
- What other products and services make up their journey? Where do they turn to for info? What competitors are being considered, chosen or rejected?
Devices
- What types do people interact with and why?
Relationships
- How do different parts of the ecosystem relate to one another? Can you identify cause-and-effect relationships below surface behaviors and emotions?
Processes and procedures
- How do regulations, processes, and procedures dictate pathways, behaviors, and barriers for customer, as well as the employees who serve them?
The Context
Place
- Where are customers during their journeys? How do geographic locations impact their experiences?
Time
- What is the range of durations for different customers’ journeys? How long do they spend in each stage or moment? How do your customers think and feel about how they spend their time?
Sequence
- What patterns exist in customer behaviors from one moment to the next across the journey? How does one moment impact the next or future moments later in the journey?
There will be a part 2 in order to discuss the rest of the book. Again, this cliffnote consists of brief summarizations and call outs to key vocabulary. This book is a solid how-to and a must read for full context and guidance on these techniques. So, if you are interested in more practical applications and guidance, buy the book.
