Dave Seaton: 0:00

The worst thing anyone can do is show up out of nowhere and say, here's a journey map. What are we going to do about it?

Rick Denton: 0:08

Customer Experience, wisdom, a dash of travel talk. We've been cleared for takeoff. The best meals are served outside and require passport. Welcome back to this week's episode of CX passport. Today, my guest is Dave Seaton, a CX strategist who knows that journey maps aren't just, you know, pretty pictures, they should drive real business impact. Amen and Amen. As CEO of Seaton CX, he built the Dharma method to do just that, help companies turn customer insights into growth. Dave's career spans healthcare, cybersecurity and telecom always focused on fixing the disconnect between what businesses think customers need and what actually matters to a customer. He's an award winning consultant, a co author of the customer experience book of knowledge and a speaker at some of the biggest CX conferences out there. You may have even seen Dave recently on Gary Mara's excellent podcast, your customer, your success, if not yet, be sure and check that episode and Gary's podcast in general out. I first knew Dave when he lived in my neck of the woods here in North Texas. Now he's off to much, much prettier locales in Colorado that should help him with his ambition to visit all of the national parks, 13 down 50 to go. Oh, and we might just talk about chicken dinner. What's that you say? Stay tuned. Dave, welcome to CX passport.

Dave Seaton: 1:37

Thanks, Rick, it is great to be here. I've been a big fan of this show for many years and looking forward to

Rick Denton: 1:43

it. Well, you're very, very kind to say that I appreciate that. I've certainly been a big fan of you, and I remember that you it was one of those cases that we lived in the same neck of the woods, and yet it took us a while to finally meet in person, but we finally got that chance to do that at that event there grapevine. Let's get into that journey mapping aspect of this. You know, some leaders dismiss journey mapping as just consulting fluff. What's your response to that? And how do you prove its value? Well, I

Dave Seaton: 2:10

would say to that leader, imagine yourself walking in to your CFOs office and saying, for every $1 you invest in CX, I'll give you nine back. And what would it feel like to have that kind of conversation with your executive team rather than reading off the verbatim from the latest NPS report? That's the power of journey mapping is showing companies where to invest their limited resources to have the biggest impact on, yes, the customer experience, but also the company's business results as well. And that nine, nine times. ROI figure is from a project I did with a B to B SAS company, where we looked at from a specific journey, they were leaking $1.5 million a year, and after acting on the insights from the journey map, after taking action, they were able To reduce that churn by about 66% so that's another million dollars of annual recurring revenue hitting the top line

Rick Denton: 3:28

the I love. If this were a written text, you know, you'd see that bold and you'd see emphasis added, right? And that, that choice of the word act, certainly, I think it's an important part, what is it about journey maps that frequently there is that disconnect between the creation of journey map and then the actual acting of it. There's a lot of effort to create a journey map. Why would it just sit on a wall?

Dave Seaton: 3:53

Yeah, journey map means different things to different people. And in fact, you can go out on YouTube and you can watch a video of how to make a customer journey map in one hour. Whoa, oh, yeah. 50, yeah, yeah, somebody's put that content out there. And and so journey map means a lot of different things to different people, and that's the reason why, if you look at research from cxpa in 2016 Gartner in 2019 Tsia and 2022, about half of journey mapping projects fail to drive any value for the business. Yeah, don't get acted upon. The number one reason I see for for that failure is that the journey maps are created from internal knowledge and internal thinking, and they don't actually research the customer experience. And that's what our YouTube video will tell you, is just get all your executives into a room and. And you can map out the customer journey. Okay? And there is some value in that, because there is, there's always friction between handoffs, from sales to onboarding, from onboarding to support, and so there's some value understanding that from the company's perspective. But the real value, the deep insight comes from the customer research. Yeah,

Rick Denton: 5:25

Dave, tell me a little bit about that, like the customer research aspect. Because the reason I was chuckling is I imagine there's been all sorts of phenomenal experiences that have been designed in a boardroom, in a conference room, by gathering executives together who clearly knew what the customer's experiencing, but from all sorts of categories, could not actually identify with the actual customer and the actual customer's experience being so far removed from it. How are you recommending that companies go about getting that actual research insight, understanding, or just reality of what a customer's true experience is,

Dave Seaton: 6:04

yeah, by qualitative and then sometimes quantitative research. So if we take a step back, we look at the Dharma journey mapping methodology that I created. It's an acronym, D, A, R, M, a, it's not the Hindu word. There's no h in Dharma.

Rick Denton: 6:25

It's not an allusion to a 90s TV show. What was that? Darman? Greg So, yes,

Dave Seaton: 6:32

it's an acronym for the five steps of journey mapping. Step 1d define the opportunity. What is the opportunity for the company for doing this work? I talked to another CX leader yesterday who used journey mapping to identify problems in customer onboarding for a freemium product, they sign up, but they never pay, and using journey mapping, they were able to identify the customer experience there and triple the conversion rate and onboarding.

Rick Denton: 7:08

You mean real results, like we talked about in the intro. It's amazing, right? Exactly,

Dave Seaton: 7:13

but it starts with defining the opportunity, yeah, and that's where you've got to look into the business performance, the metrics, the financial metrics that matter to the business. Then we move into step two, a analyzing the current state. Let's gather all the information we have about how the business is currently performing, including what executives think, identify the handoffs and the opinions and the knowledge that they have, but we don't have a journey map there, right. Then we go into the research phase, and that is recruiting customers to participate in research. Qualitative in depth interviews, is what my company specializes in. So after we conduct the research then, then, and only then do we move into M, which is to map the customer journey. Got it, and we will use the research to develop the personas, and then map those different personas journeys. And then that leads us to the last stage, which is action, my magic word right now, we've got all the insights. Now let's identify what are the opportunities. We'll ideate on solutions. We'll prioritize those, develop business cases as we need, and we go and act. I worked with a company earlier this year, because we were just doing a micro journey, we were able to map the entire journey from defining the problem to creating the map in about six weeks. In the 30 days following those six weeks, they implemented a new service channel for that journey. It was previously only handled over email. But what they learned is these these customers, which are their dealers, they're on a job site, or they're in their car between job sites. Email is not convenient, right? So they created a phone channel. So I'm on a job site, I'm right there in front of my customer. I can call the company and get the issue resolved then and there.

Rick Denton: 9:25

Hey there, CX Passport travelers. I want to let you know about CX Passport Live. CX Passport Live helps brands amplify their event's impact with the power of live in-person, podcasting. Brands partner with CX Passport Live at their on-site event to help excite attendees, reward high value customers and convert potential customers. Bring a new level of energy and excitement to your event and amplify your brand's impact with CX Passport Live. Learn more at cxpassportlive.com Now back to the show. What I like about that Dave, it reminds me of something I had another guest A while ago, and he was focused on that B to B world. And it was similar in that their customers were, well, they were the buyers and sellers of yellow iron. Well, that's primarily out of big construction sites. Nobody's sitting in front of a laptop. And so exactly that that human channel, that phone channel, that discovery of that when all the trends might be going another direction, the reality, if your customer through the journey mapping you're describing needs, this particular channel, will then act and deliver upon that channel. You said a couple things in there that I want to pull out a little bit okay. And one is that act, and some of them just do it, and others may be simpler, but there's things that are more complex, and there's going to be actions that are required of groups that are beyond that journey, mapping exercise. They may not have participated. They not might not be interested. They have their own goals and objectives. How do you get the groups that are needed but weren't necessarily involved initially.

Dave Seaton: 11:05

Well, to the best of my ability, I get them involved at the very beginning, and what I find most effective is it's not me talking. It's not like Dave Seaton, some expert in their business, right? I play back the customer interview video clips and highlight reels, and the customers do the convincing. And when these executives, these stakeholders and other silos, are watching their own customers, they're seeing the facial expressions right, hearing the emotions, that does all the convincing that needs to happen.

Rick Denton: 11:43

I like that. What you're describing to me in my what I'm hearing my ears is the emotion behind it. The data and charts do a lot of heavy lifting. Emotions tend to push that over the finish line that someone's like, Man, I don't want to be the one responsible for causing that. You mentioned something else. You mentioned personas. And when you and I had talked earlier, you had a different approach to personas than what a lot of folks do you know. A lot of times, personas are just simply demographic profiles, age, job title, family details, that sort of thing, right? Your approach ties it directly to business results. Can you explain that to me?

Dave Seaton: 12:20

Yeah. So with our personas, we're focused on customer goals. What is the customer trying to accomplish their needs? What are their specific needs to accomplish that goal, and then their values? What do they value in this experience. Is it a purely functional value, like this product or service saves me money, saves me time, makes me money. Is it more of an emotional Is it the badge value of, you know, pulling into my driveway and that expensive car and what the neighbors think luxury? How does it make me feel? Is it a more aspirational value? You know, am I buying this thing because it motivates me to make a positive change in my in my life? So we try and understand customers based on goals, needs and values, because those influence how the customer perceives the journey. I'll give you an example. I was working with a residential internet company, and one of their personas was the work from Homer. This person uses their residential internet much like I do to work from home. It's their livelihood. If that internet goes down or is glitchy, they're missing important meetings. They are their work performance is impacted. So this work from home persona, we called her remote work Rachel encompassed one customer who was a director of marketing at one of the 10 biggest companies in the world using this internet service to work from home, and also a customer who had just gotten her first apartment and her first job, and she was a remote contact center operator, and if her internet went down, she was logged out of the phone system, wasn't making money, wasn't taking calls and facing disciplinary action, right? Yeah, now here you've got director of marketing right at one of the biggest companies in the world, and first job. But they're the same persona because they have the same goal to earn a living through my internet connection, they have the same needs. They need it to be up reliable, not glitchy. That's what the the product gives them. Is that that remote work lifestyle.

Rick Denton: 14:59

Dave do. I really appreciate that person, because a lot of times those would be two different personas, and yet, in this case, now it's this, it's the same persona because they have that same objective. There. You and I have a same objective right now, and we need to stop down and take a little break. We're going to stop down here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly, have a little bit of fun here. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Dave Seaton: 15:24

From my past? Kuala Lumpur, okay, I can see why I kind of got obsessed with it. And in the 90s, that movie entrapment. Oh, and I finally got to visit in 2011 but I was coming from China, and I caught bird flu in China. Oh, no. So my two days in Kuala Lumpur, I was I spent it hallucinating in the hotel room. Now, Kuala Lumpur has some of the cheapest five star hotel rooms in the world. So we had this two bedroom apartment on the 18th story of some high rise downtown. It was incredible. And I spent most of the trip very, very sick in that hotel room. I did get to see the Petronas Towers. I did not get to go up, so I want to go back. My gosh, it's an interesting choice

Rick Denton: 16:16

for Dream travel location for your past. It's almost like it's a dream travel location because you were having fever dreams in your past. Are you sure you were there? Do we need to check that passport? Maybe that's going to be one. That's a for the future. But I'll ask, what is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Dave Seaton: 16:33

Italy. My wife and I have been wanting to go to Italy for a very long time. It's my dream to rent a Lambo and drive the Amalfi Coast. Nice. Yeah, it's both of us want to go to Piedmont and do the wine tour. We love the Barolos and the barberas and so, yeah, someday we will make it to Northern

Rick Denton: 16:54

Well, you know what goes really well with a good wine is some good food. So what is a favorite thing of yours to eat

Dave Seaton: 17:03

this, this has been difficult for me to nail down in my life, but I have settled on the cheeseburger as pedestrian

Rick Denton: 17:11

as that is, no, no, don't, don't you disclaim, don't you disclaim that cheeseburger. That is a fantastic choice

Dave Seaton: 17:18

I even had, because Dallas is the land of cheeseburgers. Yes, I had developed a burger matrix where I ranked different cheeseburgers based on whether they were traditional or artisan, and then the quality.

Rick Denton: 17:35

No, is that a publicly available matrix?

Dave Seaton: 17:38

No, it is probably on my hard drive somewhere

Rick Denton: 17:42

that needs to be your next like newsletter, lead magnet. Hey, sign up for my newsletter and get Dave's DFW burger matrix. There's a little free tip for you. Try that one. I hope you haven't built a matrix for this. What is that thing that you were forced to eat growing up but you hated as

Dave Seaton: 18:00

a kid, Brussels sprouts, amen, yeah, and

Rick Denton: 18:03

you're not a new convert like the trendy folks will say, No, Dave, you and I are going to be best friends. You love cheeseburgers and you hate brussels sprouts. That's all I need to hear time sadly for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without

Dave Seaton: 18:22

my sleep mask. I have an incredible memory foam sleep mask. Doesn't matter what the condition is of the drapes or the little light on the smoke detector. I always sleep great with my sleep mask.

Rick Denton: 18:48

Dave, the sleep mask can be vital. Just did an international trip and absolutely on a plane or something like that. There's way too much going on. You got to block all that world out. And I'm glad you found one that you like. You've been in a lot of companies, both, you know, certainly employee and consultant and all of that. You've seen attitudes towards journey mapping that would skew more towards the that's that there is no value there. You've talked about how there is value. What's a story where you took a company from this doesn't have value to wow, this is

Dave Seaton: 19:20

awesome. So when I when I come in as a consultant, there's at least a part of the company that has bought into the idea of journey map, but there are frequently skeptics. And I remember a particular company we're doing stakeholder interviews, and this guy just comes in guns blazing. I don't know why we're doing this. We've got three other initiatives in this company that are mapping processes. This is duplicative. It's a waste of effort, and we did our best to explain how journey mapping and process mapping are different, but complement. Entry and the goals we're supporting and everything. He still wasn't convinced they never are on the first call. And then I remember the next interaction, we were presenting our plan to the senior leadership team, and he took aim at qualitative research. He said, we're interviewing 30 customers. We have 70,000 customers. How is that even statistically significant? Are you telling me we're going to take action on what one guy complains about here or there in an interview? And we had buy in from the President, and the President said, Look, we're going to do this, we're going to interview 30 customers. If that's not enough, we'll interview 60. If that's not enough, we'll interview 90. Until we're all convinced that we understand what this journey is like. It's great to have the support. Thank you guys. Great support. There's a lot

Rick Denton: 20:58

of people listening to going well, that'd be great. Dave, nice job.

Dave Seaton: 21:03

But part of the the Dharma journey, mapping process, sometimes I call it step five and a half. Sometimes I call it the hidden step, but it's not really a step. It's woven into the five steps because it begins at defining and it ends at acting, and that's change management, and that's engineering their participation all along the way. The worst thing anyone can do is show up out of nowhere and say, here's a journey map. What are we going to do about it? Right? People don't know what it is. They don't know why it's important and they don't care, but when they're involved in defining the problem and making sure that this initiative is going to support their own personal and professional goals, and then they feel like they have a voice in analyzing the current state When they're observing customer interviews, either live or the playback, when they're hearing that with their own ears and then talking about it with their own mouths, and then they're seeing the journey map. Then they're not sitting there skeptical of what they're seeing. They're leaning in, saying, Oh yeah, yeah. That's what I heard when I observed those customer interviews, that's what I learned. This guy by the end, was one of our biggest supporters, nice and had completely changed his his tune and his tone and and he got it. He got it. The light bulb came on.

Rick Denton: 22:40

What a great way to get that person with the light bulb. And just like we talked about in service recovery inside of the customer experience world, I imagine someone who was an antagonist that became your protagonist is stronger than those that were kind of bought in from the beginning and certainly has a louder case to make inside the company. Of I was a doubter, and now I'm believer, and so you should be too. Yeah, Dave, Dave, I want to ask you chicken dinner. I mentioned it in the intro. I don't even fully know what chicken dinner is all about. I'm so curious. Tell me about it. What inspired you to create it, and how is it going?

Dave Seaton: 23:18

So I had a 21 year corporate career, and coming out of the pandemic, I quit my job to do this crazy independent consulting

Rick Denton: 23:29

thing. Yeah,

Dave Seaton: 23:31

I know, I know you've been there too, and what I've learned about being an independent consultant is you have to be just as good at winning the work as you are at doing the work. And so for all the independent consultants out there who have this 20 year corporate career, and they're subject matter experts, and they just need a little help finding more clients, I've created chicken dinner club. Chicken dinner club is an online private community for independent consultants, where we focus on how to put ourselves out there to win the

Rick Denton: 24:12

work. Okay, all right. Why chicken dinner

Dave Seaton: 24:17

winner? Winner, chicken dinner

Rick Denton: 24:20

Okay, there we go. Now that is somebody who I know is from my neck of the woods. Okay, I love it. There's

Dave Seaton: 24:28

a guy from the Savannah, bananas. Yes, there's a book called Find your yellow tux. And life's too short for for boring brands. So instead of the independent consultants sale in some marketing community, why not call it the chicken dinner club?

Rick Denton: 24:46

I feel like we could end here. We totally could, because that's so true, and I'm a huge fan of the quirky and certainly the savannah banana style of things. When it's sincere, when it's manufactured, folks see straight through it. But when it's sincere, it is. Absolutely delightful. I'd end Except there's one more thing that I really want to ask you about. Journey mapping has been around for a while. It's an established practice. It's known, even if there's the doubters in general, it's understood and can be appreciated. Where's it going now? What's next in the customer journey mapping evolution?

Dave Seaton: 25:21

Yeah, that's exciting. Traditionally, journey mapping has had some problems. It's hard to update the maps, it's hard to show forks in the road where one customer goes this way and one goes another way. And so the future of journey mapping is not two dimensional maps, but multi dimensional journey models. Okay, so think about a map of the world turning into a globe that you can then slice open and peer inside or zoom out and see its place in the solar system. So we're now building these multi dimensional journey models in software where we can have linked journey maps. We can look at an end to end journey and then dive in. We can tie these into our business metrics and dashboards. So the journey maps update in real time, and then the latest thing is, I'm pioneering using artificial intelligence in journey mapping. Now we have to be very careful here. Thank you. We cannot use chat GPT to generate our journey, map what we're doing with artificial intelligence and using it as a another analyst. So we do all the customer interviews. I pull them into my platform, we tag them and analyze them and talk, I talk with my researcher, and we, you know, come up with our personas and our themes and what we think the journey, steps and moments of truth and emotions and all this sort of stuff is. But I can also take those transcripts and put them into a not generic chat, GPT. We can't share the company proprietary information into a large language model. But we do have a large language model where that stuff is is segmented and protected, and and and all of that, we're able to put those transcripts into the AI and have it do as a stage of analysis. And that either validates what our humans have identified, it may identify where we've missed something because of our own biases.

Rick Denton: 27:54

Dave, I like that, and you already had me at the model, right? I'm imagining, you know, well, gosh, you're gonna need a really big 3d printer for that conference room. And of course, I understand it's technology and that. Dave, this has been a good kind of all over their conversation around journey mapping, which is exactly what I wanted. So David, folks want to get to know a little bit more about you, about your approach to journey mapping, dharma chicken dinner. In fact, what's the best way for them to get to know you.

Dave Seaton: 28:22

Well, I'll say three things. One, LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. Five, five days a week, Monday through Friday. I don't LinkedIn on the weekends. So you can look me up on LinkedIn. Dave Seaton, you can go to my company website. Seaton, S, E, A, T O N, Seton, cx.com, and what I if, if somebody is interested in journey mapping, and maybe they haven't started or they've gotten stuck, offer something called a pathfinder session. And this is a complimentary, confidential one on one meeting, where we'll take a look at your journey map, and I'll help you identify, based on dharma, that next best action for driving business value from customer journey mapping.

Rick Denton: 29:13

I'm going to get all of that into the show notes, and if I'm able to negotiate with you off camera here getting your burger matrix. We'll get that uploaded and a link to that as well, Dave, because we certainly do not want to leave that one

Dave Seaton: 29:25

behind. And I forgot chicken dinner club is just chicken dinner club.com

Rick Denton: 29:32

we'll get all of that into the show notes. A chicken dinner sounds particularly I would have loved to have had some chicken dinner when, uh, when I was starting my independent consultant before I left it to focus on podcasting exclusively, Dave, I really did enjoy this conversation. It was an absolute delight. Thank you for being on CX passport.

Dave Seaton: 29:49

Thanks, Rick, it's it's been a pleasure.

Rick Denton: 29:57

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.