Customer Ecosystem Strategy and Interaction Field Design

Customer ecosystem strategy consulting is the work of deciding which interactions a company should build around its products, who besides the customer takes part in them, what each interaction leaves behind for the next one, and how the resulting system is judged in financial terms. It is the layer above journey mapping and service design, and it is what makes both of those answerable. Vivaldi has designed customer ecosystems and interaction fields since 1999, for companies including Takeda, Schindler and PPG.

• Since 1999brand, innovation and experience strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• The Interaction Fieldwritten by our founder

When companies bring us in

The trigger is rarely a bad experience. It is usually a good one that has stopped paying.

• The journey has been mapped, the worst friction has been removed, satisfaction scores went up, and the economics did not follow.
• A growing share of the customer relationship now runs through parties the company does not own: marketplaces, platform partners, resellers, installers, communities, and increasingly agents acting on the customer’s behalf.
• A platform or ecosystem play has been announced and nobody can say what the participants are supposed to exchange with each other, only what each one gets from the company.
• The organization collects enormous volumes of interaction data and none of it changes what the next interaction looks like.
• Two or more business units each design their own customer experience, and the customer meets the seam rather than the strategy.

Why journey mapping stops short of the system you are competing in

A journey map describes how one customer moves through what already exists. It is a useful artifact and a poor strategy, for three reasons that compound.

It designs for one relationship. The map has a customer on one side and the company on the other. In most categories the value a customer receives is assembled from several parties at once, and the company contributes a part of it. A design that models only the two ends is describing a smaller system than the one it competes in.

It treats friction removal as the strategy. Every competitor is running the same exercise against the same friction. The improvements are real, they are finite, and they do not accumulate. When the backlog is finished, the advantage is finished with it.

It omits the return path. Most experience work specifies what happens to the customer in a moment and says nothing about what that moment produces for the next one. A company can then run a million interactions and learn from none of them, which is the difference between an expense and an asset.

The alternative is the interaction field: a system in which customers, employees, partners, suppliers, communities and now machine agents create value for one another, not only for the company in the middle. Our founder set the idea out at book length in The Interaction Field, and the practical consequence is a different design question. Not which moments to smooth, but which interactions to increase in quantity and quality, and between whom.

What our customer ecosystem strategy consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Which of them you need depends on whether the constraint is knowing what to design, or having a system that improves once it is running.

1. Defining the ecosystem: who takes part and what they exchange

Before anything is designed, the participants have to be named and the exchanges between them written down.

• The activities customers are actually trying to complete, described in their terms rather than in the operating model’s
• Every participant who already shapes the outcome, including partners, intermediaries, communities, employees, and agents acting for the customer
• What each participant gives and gets today, and the specific points where value is leaking out of the system to somebody who did not build it
• The exchanges that do not exist yet and would be worth engineering

2. Interaction field design: which interactions to increase, and which to stop funding

An ecosystem map with no choices in it is a diagram. The strategy is the shortlist and the exclusions.

• The interactions that carry the business outcome, separated from the ones that are merely present
• Where an interaction between two participants can be made to benefit a third, which is where network effects actually begin
• What the company stops investing in, written down, because an experience budget with no exclusions is a wish list

3. The feedback path that makes interactions compound

This is the part that turns an experience into an asset rather than an operating cost.

• What each interaction generates that the next one can use, and the precise place where that signal currently stops
• A learning loop with a named owner, so results change the design rather than the reporting pack
• The data and consent model underneath it, decided before the build rather than discovered during it

4. Governance for partners, third parties and agents in the field

An interaction field includes participants the company does not employ and cannot instruct. That has to be governed rather than hoped for.

• What partners and platforms are allowed to do with the customer relationship, and what the company holds
• What has to be legible to an agent acting on a customer’s behalf, and what must stay negotiable with a person
• What the system is permitted to decide on its own and what escalates, set deliberately rather than inherited from a vendor default

5. Operating model, measurement and sequence

• Ownership across functions, because an interaction field crosses the org chart and the org chart wins by default
• Measurement against the business outcome the strategy named: retention quality, price realization, acquisition cost, or the rate at which participants bring in other participants
• A build sequence that says what comes first, what the second wave depends on, and what is deliberately not being done yet

How a customer ecosystem engagement works

1. Diagnose. Customer research in the language of the activities people are trying to complete, a review of the existing journey and CX work, and an audit of every participant who already touches the outcome, including the ones nobody has a contract with.
2. Decide. The interactions worth building, the ones to stop funding, the exchanges to engineer between participants, and the exclusions. The output is a set of choices, each with a reason that survives a CFO reading it.
3. Build. The feedback path and the signal model behind it, the governance for partners and agents, the measurement that ties the field to retention quality, price realization and acquisition cost, and the design briefs for the interactions themselves.
4. Embed. Decision rights, cross-functional ownership and the leading indicators, so your organization runs and extends the field without us.

Customer ecosystem work in practice

Takeda: modeling the patient ecosystem rather than the patient journey

Takeda brought Vivaldi on as a growth partner to position the company as an innovation leader and build out in-market solutions across parts of its brand portfolio. The work began the way most experience programs do, with an analysis of the current patient journey, looking at the industry and the culture through several lenses with a single view on patient experience and expectations.

It did not stop there, and that is the part relevant to this page. What Vivaldi delivered was a model of how Takeda needed to reimagine the development of its patient ecosystem, alongside a category playbook and an aspirational narrative tied to a broader purpose of enabling patients to live their fullest, healthiest lives. The unit of design was the system around the patient, including caregivers and the wider health landscape, rather than a sequence of company-owned touchpoints. That is the difference between journey work and ecosystem work, in a category where the company is rarely the only party in the room.

Read the full case: Pioneering patient-centric healthcare solutions with Takeda.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for customer ecosystem strategy

The concept is ours and it is specified, not borrowed. The interaction field is Vivaldi’s own framework, set out at book length by our founder and applied in client work since well before ecosystem became a procurement category. You get a method with definitions, not a vocabulary.

We model the participants you do not control. Most experience firms design what happens inside your channels, because that is what a statement of work can specify. The value in a customer ecosystem sits in the exchanges between participants, several of whom do not work for you, and a design that avoids them is avoiding the problem.

The work lands against a business number. We settle at the start which financial measure the field is accountable for. Satisfaction and recommendation scores are useful leading indicators. On their own they keep rising while the returns fall, which is the condition most companies are in when they call us.

How to evaluate a customer ecosystem strategy consultant

Including us. These are the five questions worth asking everyone on a shortlist.

• Ask which business number the ecosystem is accountable for. If the answer is satisfaction or a recommendation score alone, you are buying a measurement program rather than a strategy.
• Ask who else is in the design. A firm that models only your company and your customer will give you a better version of what you already have.
• Ask what happens to what the system learns. With no named feedback path and no owner, the program improves once and then holds steady while the cost of running it rises.
• Ask how it survives the org chart. Interaction fields cross functions and budgets do not. A firm that has not named who owns the cross-functional decision has designed something your organization cannot run.
• Ask what they would not fix. Not every friction point is worth removing and some are load bearing. A firm that treats the backlog as the strategy has skipped the strategy.

Customer ecosystem strategy consultancy, CX agency or digital platform integrator?

Related work

This capability sits inside our experience strategy group, within the Brand, Innovation and Experience practice at Vivaldi. Four neighboring capabilities, depending on where the constraint sits.

• Experience strategy if the question is broader than the customer ecosystem and covers the whole experience portfolio.
• Direct-to-consumer and adaptive e-commerce strategy if the interactions you need are ones a retail intermediary currently owns.
• Marketplace ecosystem growth strategy if the question is how third-party sellers and marketplace participants are recruited and grown, rather than how your customers’ experience is designed.
• User experience (UX) design if the decisions are settled and the constraint is the interface.

One boundary worth stating plainly, because the names are close. Interaction field modelling is the business-model work: formally modeling a company as an interaction field, with the participants, the exchanges and the economics of the model itself. This page is the customer-facing half, designing the ecosystem and the interactions your customers live inside. Companies often need both, in that order, and they are separate engagements.

Customer ecosystem strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

We work with US headquartered companies and with global organizations from ten offices on four continents. Ecosystem work travels badly when it is designed once and translated, because the participants differ by market: the intermediaries, the platforms, the regulators and the communities are not the same in Chicago, Munich and Singapore. We design the field so the logic holds globally and the participant model is set locally, and we staff engagements with people in the markets where the interactions happen.