Prioritising Customer Experience in The New Year

That “new year, new you” mantra is difficult enough to achieve on a personal level, let alone an organisational one. As companies return from the holidays, many of them will begin assessing which milestones they want to pass in the new decade. This is especially true (and challenging) for CX practitioners as the business intelligence landscape will no doubt continue to rapidly change.

Figuring these organisation-wide New Years resolutions out is never a small task, but it’s not insurmountable, either. Practitioners who want to tackle the new decade with gusto and prioritise projects in 2020 can do so by following a few simple steps.

Step 1: Review and Evolve Your CX Charter

A CX charter is a set of statements about a company’s aspirations and its customer journey. If you’re looking to shake things up in 2020, checking this living document is a great first step for seeing where your organisation has been and where it could go from here.

Don’t have a CX charter? Crafting one is another great way to sort out CX prioritisation in the new year. A CX charter is there to clarify your own priorities, and is not intended for public use. As previously mentioned, the most effective CX charters contain a set of aspirational, implicit statements meant to guide a company’s experience vision, as well as a description of a brand’s high-level customer journey. Whether you’re looking to revamp a current charter or make a new one, this document is a great place for practitioners to start.

Step 2: Audit Your Customer Journey

The next step that practitioners should take when reviewing CX prioritisation in the new year is taking another glance at their customer journey. Customer journeys typically consist of both high- and low-level descriptions. The former consists of sales funnel-esque steps like “buy” while the latter includes more detailed steps, such as “I forgot to pay.”

While mapping customer journeys is useful for understanding how they interact with a brand, there’s another layer to this process: touchpoints. Auditing customer journeys allows practitioners to assess customer journey touchpoints, decide which ones are most important, and which ones might need a bit of polish; this all factors directly into creating CX initiatives.

Step 3: Creating Initiatives

Once practitioners have identified problems to solve and intelligence gaps to close, what’s the best way to get started? It’s never a bad idea to begin with an abstract, high-level problem statement. That may sound like the stuff of unproductive meetings, but practitioners can follow this statement up by breaking it down into smaller, more specific problems to solve.

This process, when executed in an agile way, enables practitioners and their teams to both establish an overarching vision of their organisation’s priorities and derive actual projects and initiatives from that vision. This parallel dynamic also enables CX practitioners to stay connected to their brand’s mission and justify CX’s importance to seeing that mission through.  

Step 4: Fit Those Initiatives Into Your Roadmap

While on the subject of seeing a CX mission through (and justifying ROI in the boardroom), putting your initiatives on a roadmap is a great way to track projects, evaluate changes, and demonstrate to the C-Suite that CX prioritisation can yield tangible results and performance markers.

If all of these tools prove anything, it’s that a little structure can go a long way. Establishing a charter, identifying customer journeys, creating initiatives, and charting those projects on a roadmap can inexorably tie CX to a brand journey, and thus stand a far greater chance of being a boon to that journey. CX practitioners who rely on these prioritisation tools will have an easier time establishing CX’s worth and reaping transformative success for their organisations.

Want to learn more about these steps? Read the full PDF here or visit our Resource Center for more info on CX how-to’s, hot topics, and more!