Prioritizing customer journey improvement: CX Mini Masterclass – E54

Decoding the Customer

This CX Mini Masterclass provides a simple and straightforward approach to prioritizing customer journey improvements. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains why this is an important step for fostering organizational alignment. Julia then takes you through her prioritization methodology and discusses some key considerations. If you are looking to make sense of your laundry list of journey fixes, then this episode is for you.

Starting customer journey improvement wisely

When teams map the customer journey, they often end up with a long list of customer journey improvement opportunities. Being confronted with a massive list of issues is 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 CX change movement. The good news is that there is a straightforward answer.

The first task at hand is to prioritize the journey improvements, based on the customer impact, then evaluate the cost/benefit as a secondary step. Organizations normally jump straight into advocating for the business’s needs, but as with all things CX, we should anchor our decisions in the customer’s needs.

A winning formula

I suggest an initial assessment of customer journey improvement opportunities based on two criteria:

1. Number of customer (or potential customers) affected. Figure out how many consumers interface with the broken aspect of the journey.
2. The degree to which the current broken experience goes against the organizations customer promise, experience principles or the definition of what good looks like. Establish a rating scale to “score” the experience. I suggest a scale of 1-10, but you could use a different scale, as long as the largest number rating is assigned to the worst experience.

Once you’ve quantified these parameters for each of your identified customer experience issues, multiply the number of affected customers, by the experience rating to get your customer journey improvement prioritization score. The higher the score, the more urgent the journey improvement.

# affected X experience rating = prioritization score

This methodology highlights issues that might seem minor, but could impact a huge number of customers or potential customers, as well as those that might impact a small number of customers, but with potentially brand damaging results.

Once your team has evaluated potential journey journey fixes from a customer impact perspective, they can further refine the list based on cost, level of complexity, etc. Journeys are constantly evolving, and there will be multiple factors to consider, but the point here is that CX teams should take the outside-in view first.

Want to keep learning about CX?

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

And if you are looking to super-charge your CX skills and continue learning, be sure to check out CX University. They have a great array of CXPA accredited training resources available on a flexible monthly subscription plan. Use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off your first month’s subscription and support this podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including B2B CX strategy) or get in touch via email.