Want to create the maximum value possible for your customer and business from your customer experience initiatives? Of course you do, and the key is something nobody is writing about: prioritization.

You’ve got limited means and you’re in a race against time. You can’t do everything so how do you decide where to focus? Here’s how we do it:

Level 1: The business goal
Pretty simple: Start by understanding the commercial challenges and opportunities you are facing and make sure any initiative directly supports them.

Level 2: The customer
Different customers have different needs, and not all customers are of equal importance. Yes we love them all but we love some more than others — those who can most readily help us achieve our business goals, typically. (See level one).

Level 3: The scenario
Customers find themselves in a variety of scenarios. These can be prioritized by “stake” — how important they are to the customer, frequency of occurrence, or volume of customers affected — or some combination. Once we know the scenarios we can model how these play out as customer journeys.

Level 4: The journey stage or interaction
Not all interactions or pain points along a customer journey are equally important because not all of them affect the customer’s perception of the experience equally. Fixing bad is more important than making good better, for example, and the peak-end rule comes into play when it comes to memorability.

Level 5: Cost:benefit of implementation
Once we’ve got all our potential opportunities in a backlog we prioritize them based on their cost benefit (desirability, penalty, cost, effort, whatever) and double check them against levels 1–4 to make sure we’ve kept on track.

Work through these five levels and you’ll make improvements that change the customer’s perception of value and meaningfully contribute to your business performance. Do it another way and, well...I don’t know what will happen, because we don’t do it that way.

#customerexperience #cxstrategy #cx

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