Making sense of your Customer Experience (CX) landscape and prioritising projects is best achieved through analysing the customer journey.
The changing expectations of customers poses a considerable challenge to IT. Agility and efficiency is difficult to achieve in an enterprise environment, where there may be a dozen CX technologies to manage in your CX stack. You need to prioritise the right projects, at the right time, to utilise your resources to best effect.
One prioritisation approach is to create a business case for each project. A business case defines the underlining objectives of a project, it's deliverables, estimated cost and the work that is required. This is an effective way to plan your activities, but what business cases fail to analyse is what actually needs to be done to improve the CX, i.e. identifying customer pain points.
This is achieved through examining the customer journey. By looking at every touchpoint over every channel, across the entire customer lifecycle, you can begin to understand customer needs, motivations and pain points.
Customer journey mapping, i.e. visualising every moment across a customer experience, is the exercise to use to assess your CX. With a detailed, data-driven map, you can start to make sense of how the technologies you use – your enterprise content management, marketing automation, information workplace systems, etc. – fit, or maybe fail to fit in to your CX strategy.
After identifying your main CX pain points, you can begin to diagnose each problem with a suitable technological remedy and thus prioritise your projects.
This is a much more efficient approach to prioritisation than purely creating business cases, as it is reactive to customers, rather than reactive to the opinion of perhaps one powerful person within the organisation. Customer journey mapping illuminates your CX problems, meaning you do not waste time and resources on fixing problems that do not exist or are not critical.
The powerful thing about user journey mapping is that it isn’t simply a process to identify technology gaps. It generates projects, whether they be activities for organisational change, business process change or technology change. Customer journey mapping drives quantifiable outcomes to produce better CX.
