Prioritizing customer journey improvement: CX Mini Masterclass – E54

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, Certified Customer Experience Professional, Business Advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday, and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts, and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

If you’re keen to do some more intensive online training in the field of customer experience, stay tuned at the end of this episode for an exclusive listener discount code from CX University. This is episode 54. Last week’s Mini Masterclass was about KPIs, and this week, I’m sticking with a theme of organizational alignment and accountability. A big piece of organizational accountability is defining responsibility for customer experience improvements.

But before we go around assigning customer journey fixes to different leaders within the business, we need to make sure that we’ve chosen the right things to fix. When I help teams map and evaluate their customer journey, it often results in a massive laundry list of things to fix. To say that reviewing this can be overwhelming would be a massive understatement. It can seem like a huge undertaking.

And since it’s just not feasible to fix everything all at once, teams need to assess the journey, understand what’s wrong, and pick their battles. In this episode, I’m going to take you through my formula for prioritization and give you some tips on where to start. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward answer on how to cut through the noise and help your organization pick the most impactful journey improvements, then stay tuned. And as always, if you’re out and about while listening to this episode and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I often say that in life, people want simple answers. And sometimes, the more complex and frustrating the problem, the more we seek a silver bullet. 99% of the time, complex problems just don’t have simple answers.

But this is not one of those times. This is one of the exceptions to the rule. When you’re being confronted with a massive list of issues with a customer journey, it’s a tough place to be. For teams that are just starting their customer-centric evolution, picking the right place to start can make or break the momentum of your customer experience change movement.

So, what’s a customer experience professional to do? The good news is that there’s a really straightforward answer. Customer experience leaders need to start by prioritizing journey fixes, figuring out what needs to get fixed first. Like, how do we eat the elephant?

Bite by bite. When we do this, oftentimes, the inclination is to go immediately into cost benefit analysis mode, or to start looking at the cost and expense of potential fixes. But I think there’s a step that should happen before teams get into that. I recommend that teams do an initial prioritization of journey improvements based on their impact on the customer.

Surprise, surprise, as customer experience professionals, we are once again helping the organization look at things from the outside in rather than the inside out. To do this, I suggest evaluating all of your journey fixes based on two parameters. The first is the number of customers or prospective customers that are impacted. The second is the degree to which the current broken experience goes against the organization’s customer promise, the experience principles or just the general definition of what good looks like.

By evaluating the fixes against these two different parameters, teams can begin to see which experiences are the most broken, and then the factor by which this impacts your customer base or prospective customer base. To take stock of how broken experiences are, the degree to which they’re broken, try defining them on a scale from one to 10, with one being the rating for experiences that are just sort of mildly off the desired mark, and 10 being assigned to experiences that are beyond cringe-worthy, those that could even present a reputational risk. Multiply the rating by the number of customers or prospective customers that are impacted to get your experience improvement prioritization score. To demonstrate how this works, let’s take a couple of examples and compare them.

Let’s say that your company’s a retailer, and your online shopping portal has a bug that creates a one-time error for new customer online registrations. The error results in making customers go through an extra step that takes about 30 seconds. It’s an annoyance, it’s not an ideal first impression, it’s not in keeping with the experience the business would like to provide, but it’s also not earth-shattering. So in this case, let’s give that one a two.

Let’s also say that each month, there are about 100,000 customers who register. So the total impact score in this case would be 200,000, or a level two multiplied by 100,000 customers. For our next example, let’s take another experience that’s been identified as an issue. Let’s say this one is with the e-commerce site.

And the problem is that a small proportion of customers are getting charged an extra shipping fee on their orders. Now that’s a much more serious issue because customers are being charged something they shouldn’t. And it’s one that would definitely erode the brand’s reputation in the marketplace. So in this case, we’ll give that one a nine.

Let’s also say that there are 40,000 customers that are impacted each month. So the total impact score here would be 360,000 or 40,000 customers multiplied by the level nine. Even though the e-commerce issue impacts a smaller number of customers, the severity of the issue puts a new perspective on the prioritization. This approach also sheds light on the importance of prioritizing issues that might seem minor, but could impact a huge number of customers or potential customers.

So let’s say, for example, it was a level one issue, but it was something that was impacting a million customers a month. That would be something quite big. So this approach is just the first lens to which teams should evaluate customer journey improvements. Teams should also look at the cost and level of complexity of journey improvements.

If you want to get technical, you could even build your own scorecard with multipliers for those factors as well. As any CX professional will tell you, it’s important to balance quick wins with long term change. As you refine your prioritization, keep this in mind. Doing this assessment upfront also paves the way for you to track progress.

Once you know how many customers are affected by particular pain points along the journey, you can then track what happens when those issues are fixed. And if you can tie that back to retention or repeat purchases or something like that, you’re well on your way to crafting your ROI story as well. All of these are critical components as customer experience leaders look to plan journey improvement, foster leadership alignment, and drive accountability for owning a living, evolving customer journey. Thanks so much for listening today.

If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in or subscribe to the show for updates when new episodes go live.

Are you keen to do some more intensive online training in the field of customer experience? If so, I’d encourage you to check out CX University. They offer a broad array of e-learning options that you can access anywhere and anytime. Their offering includes practice tests for the CCXP exam, and their customer experience professional association, accredited resource and training provider.

Meaning their materials have been reviewed and vetted by the association for alignment with the six core competencies that are in the exam. What’s better is that all of this is available on a flexible monthly subscription plan, meaning that you don’t have to fork over hundreds of dollars to get started. As of the time of publishing this episode, plans including CX courses and practice exam questions start at just $75 per month. Listeners of the podcast can use the discount code Podcast10 to get 10% off the first month subscription and help support the show.

I’ll be back next Thursday. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.