Articles
Interview with Joyce Hostyn
6 April 2010
Destry Wion
Web Manager
STC France
Our fourth interview in the 2010 speaker interview series is with Joyce Hostyn, Director Customer Experience at Open Text. Joyce does a lot of work in holistic customer experience (HCE). Content strategy, naturally, plays a significant role in this process. Holistic customer experience is, oversimplifying it, a process to assess all the contact points (or touchpoints) a business has with it’s customers and ensures content and communication at each one is harmonious with the others. During her presentation on April 16th, Joyce will specifically cover the different elements of a HCE, the role of content strategy in the design of HCE, and how to integrate content strategy into a HCE initiative. This interview elicits some of these ideas, and a few more.
Hi Joyce. Your name—and perhaps Deborah Bosley’s from the Plain Language Group, who is also speaking at Content Strategy Forum 2010—is not one that typically comes up in a Google search using “content strategy” as key words. However, the work you are doing seems inextricably linked with content strategy, and this is probably the case for a lot of working professionals who might be hearing about it for the first time and wondering how it relates with the kinds of things they already do.
Hostyn: Anyone passionate about delivering great customer experiences needs to start thinking about content strategy. For too long, content has taken a back door to other elements of the experience. I think one reason it’s been so neglected has been the product or technology focus of many companies. As companies shift their focus towards people, engaging with them through education and conversation rather than advertising, and seek to build relationships that span all phases of the customer lifecycle, then content becomes much more central to the overall experience.
STCF: Let’s begin with Open Text. Can you tell us a bit about Open Text, what it is, what it does, and the kinds of things you do there as Director of Customer Experience?
Hostyn: Open Text is an enterprise content management company (ECM). What does that mean? As anyone in the field of content strategy knows, unstructured content is incredibly complex. And the explosion of social networking means human to human interaction is generating far more content than we’ve ever seen before. What Open Text does is help customers develop strategies for managing and realizing value from this unstructured content. Not just the visible customer facing content found on the web, but also the even more massive amount of content secured within private and public organizations such as employee records, financial information, government information, and so on. Open Text helps manage, deploy, access, archive, and control this content across its entire lifecycle.
As Director of Customer Experience, I have several facets to my job. One facet is thought leadership. As a thought leader, I’m a change agent and champion for the customer experience. I explore questions like how do we understand the current customer experience? What does it mean to deliver a holistic customer experience? Are there new services we need to support it? How do we visualize it? How do we measure it?
Another major facet is related to content. Traditionally the content we’ve produced has been very technical (on the product side) or promotional (on the marketing side). Yet once you start thinking about what it means to deliver holistic customer experiences you realize you need a much different type of content experience. We need useful, usable, engaging content to stimulate conversations, build relationships, and help our customers succeed in achieving their objectives. We need content for each phase of the customer lifecycle. And we need content that engages a much wider range of roles. What does this new type of content look like? What type of framework do we need in place to deliver this new type of content experience? How can customers participate? These are the types of questions we’re exploring.
STCF: We see the expression “holistic customer experience” used on the web a lot these days. What is holistic customer experience? On the same token, is it just another (arguably more accurate) way of saying ‘user experience’? Is there difference?
Hostyn: I personally really dislike the word “user.” People aren’t users. People aren’t passive. People don’t live or work in isolation. Technology doesn’t control them. People are emotional beings with incredibly complex social relationships. People need to be persuaded and seduced.
Another problems is how do you define user? There are many different people in an organization that incorporate a product or technology into their day-to-day work to get their job done. Then there are the people responsible for defining the strategy underlying how that technology can be deployed to solve business problems, those responsible for understanding requirements, designing solutions, training, communicating, deploying, managing, administering, providing support, and so on. Finally there are those responsible for deciding what to buy. So user is too simple of a term to cover this complex ecosystem of people who may touch on how technology is integrated into an organization.
So holistic customer experience means recognizing the need to both understand and design for this complexity – explicitly envisioning the overall experience you want to deliver, then mapping and designing the interactions across touchpoints and across the different phases of a customer relationship in order to deliver on that vision.
STCF: You might be familiar with the fable about the six blind men and the elephant, where each man touches a different part of the elephant and concludes something different from the experience. This does not seem unlike the experiences different customers may have of a company or product despite any “holistic customer experience” that might be in place. Isn’t getting a holistic experience of a mammoth company unrealistic? Won’t touchpoints, thus experiences, be different as customers approach companies and/or products from different directions, different paths?
Hostyn: Agree. Since we can’t actually control the experience a customer has, we can’t truly deliver a holistic experience. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be a goal. We need a vision, an overarching story, that defines what experience we are looking to evoke. Delivery on that vision (and emergence of the details around it) is a continual learning, living, breathing, evolving process. It’s adaptive.
I blogged this week on the topic of holistic customer experience, which immediately prompted a comment from an agile proponent as to whether it’s possible to layer holistic on top of an agile approach. That made me think about whether emergent holism is possible. And I think the answer is yes. First, everyone in an organization needs to have a deep understanding of the customer. Second, they need a strong understanding the desired customer experience (not in detail, but the essence of what’s desired). Third, they need to be empowered to act on it (because it’s impossible to script). Fourth, they need a storytelling culture that continually circulates stories of the customer and examples of employee interactions with customers that illustrate and reflect the desired customer experience.
To relate back to the elephant – what’s the vision of the elephant (can it be described through words, images, touch, sound) in a compelling enough way that a holistic understanding emerges? Do the blind men have a clue as to why they’re interacting with the elephant? Are the blind men collaborating, sharing stories, of their discoveries and interactions with the elephant?
STCF: The content strategists out there might immediately recognize how their profession plays a role in holistic customer experience, but for those of us on the fringe, how is content strategy implemented at a holistic customer experience level? Or if you prefer, what are a the key milestones of integration?
Hostyn: If the content strategists role is to focus on the overall story told by the content in order to support meaningful, interactive experiences then content strategy needs to be at the table in the strategy and design phases. What story do we want to tell with the overall customer experience? What role does content play in telling that story? What conversations do we want to engage in with our customers as part of that experience? Content strategists, if they’re involved up front, can help answer these questions. But because of the increasing complexity of interactions, channels, and relationships strategy can no longer just happen up front.
I think organizations need to map out the customer journey using a technique like customer experience journey mapping. Then content strategy needs to look closely at each phase of this experience cycle to see how content can drive the behaviors and help deliver the experiences envisioned at each phase.
Content strategy can also be at the forefront of evolving the notion of what a marketing campaign is. Forrester is saying that “The era will see marketers create more holistic, consumer-focused strategies, while abandoning push marketing. Companies will also seek to create consumer ‘experiences’ instead of campaigns and change their strategies to reach individuals instead of segmented audiences.” A campaign becomes a thread in the overall story being communicated by customer experience. Content strategists have the right skill set to weave these threads into the story of the overall experience.
STCF: You originally wanted to do a workshop at the Forum too on the topic of customer experience mapping. It was a very attractive workshop proposal, and made us wish we could do five workshops. In a nutshell, what is customer experience mapping?
Hostyn: A customer experience journey map is a visual illustration of a customer’s experience over time, mapping interactions from the customer’s perspective. Experience maps aren’t just about what the customer does, but also reveal emotional insights about why they do it. Experiences maps tell a story by walking in the customer’s shoes. By visualizing the experience from the customer’s perspective, experience maps become a strategic tool we can use to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.
STCF: How does one create a customer experience map? Is it conceptual? Are there tools? What is the typical walkthrough process?
Hostyn: In It’s All About Your Customer’s Journey, Bruce Temkin from Forrester has a nice image of a 5-step process to creating customer journey maps. Arne van Oosterom has a bit more detail in his article, 10 steps to customer journey mapping. In my post, Visualizing the Customer Experience Using Customer Experience Journey Maps, I link to a few examples of experience journey maps.
Some of the steps will be familiar to content strategists, including things like personas, scenarios, and customer insight techniques like ethnography. What experience journey maps do is provide a structure to visualize this information across multiple touchpoints, over all phases of a customer lifecycle.
I haven’t yet found a template that works perfectly for experience journey mapping, but here’s the current iteration of a template I’m experimenting with.
STCF: How does customer experience mapping relate (if that’s the right word to you) with content strategy? Is customer experience mapping something a content strategist is suited for or is it better achieved in collaboration with a “customer experience mapper”?
Hostyn: Anyone with really good facilitation, customer insight, and design thinking skills can create customer experience journey maps.
Here’s a great post by Valeria Maltoni on Writing Content for the Buyer’s Decision Journey where she shows how different types of content map to different parts of the buyer’s journey.
I think customer experience journey mapping is a tool well worth adding to the content strategists toolkit. When doing our customer experience journey map for an upgrade, many of the gaps and opportunities it revealed centered around content. In terms of getting buy-in for content strategy proposals, a journey map would be invaluable.
STCF: As a last question, and perhaps as additional measure of content strategy’s growth, does Open Text employ consultants having Content Strategist titles?
Hostyn: Open Text is on its own journey towards becoming a customer-centric organization. As part of this journey, recognizing the challenges our customers have in understanding how different parts of their organization use content and identifying ways they can more effectively leverage it to meet business objectives, we’ve begun working more closely with customers to help them craft enterprise wide content strategies. As a result, our services organization has introduced Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Strategy workshops and new consulting services around enterprise content strategy.
STCF: Thank you so much for your time and participation with the interview. We look forward to seeing you soon in Paris!
Hostyn: I’m really looking forward to some great conversations around the topic of content strategy. And you can’t beat the venue – Paris in spring!