We help organisations bridge the gap between designing better customer experiences and delivering better customer experiences.
Most organisations who map their customer journeys want to quickly realise the benefits it identifies. However, many struggle to manage the required change to ensure they reap those benefits.
Of course, there are moments when it is important to map customer journeys without a change programme in place. It allows you to identify and quantify the opportunities CX improvement can generate and inform future planning and resource priorities.
However, if your organisation is one of those that wants to leverage customer journey mapping to rapidly generate business improvement, careful planning is required.
We help organisations move from customer experience design through to delivering successful customer experience change. We provide a number of services to do this. Some are free and are baked into the way we deliver; others are bespoke services.
Set realistic expectations
This is perhaps the most important step to delivering change. Senior leaders and those tasked with delivering the change must have a shared, realistic view of what can be achieved, with what effort, to ensure they are in the best position to establish a plan that will succeed.
We work hard to set these expectations from our very first contact. We work with potential Clients to develop and cost project plans that have the best chance of success.
Frequently we will also spend time with the senior leadership team at the outset of a project. We can take them through the type and scale of change that customer journey mapping typically throws up. We then help them identify the strategic value of CX improvement and to align their ambition and the scope of the project with the organisation’s capacity and capability for change.
Develop a strategy and roadmap
Most of our projects include the development of a CX strategy and change roadmap. This draws together the findings from Journey mapping, customer research and other strands, crystalises the opportunity and plans the steps the business can make to realise it. Read more about our strategy and roadmap.
CX Maturity audit
Some organisations want to understand not only what changes it should to make to improve its customer journeys, but also to understand how it can change to become more customer centric.
We provide a CX Maturity Audit that looks at the five pillars of Customer Experience capability:
- CX Purpose and strategy
- People and Culture
- Measurement and governance
- Capability and capacity for CX change
- Current CX Delivery
This will typically enhance and be an important feed into the CX strategy and roadmap. Read more here about our CX Maturity Audit.
Project management
Most customer journeys are delivered by multiple functions. Changing those journeys requires each of these departments to be aligned and for the delivery of their individual tasks to be monitored and managed.
This management role requires experience, delegated authority and ideally, independence (so it is not felt that one function is forcing change upon others).
We provide experienced project managers or mentor internal teams.
Specialist skills to support delivery teams
Change is far more effective when it comes from and is owned by the teams who must deliver the experience. However, a contact centre or sales team for example are unlikely to have experience of all the skills needed to design, test, implement and monitor change.
Providing centrally funded specialist support helps build momentum and overcome hesitance. We identify and fill skills gaps either through secondment or from our own team. The most common gaps are things like process mapping, web usability (UX), journey mapping, qualitative insight, mystery shopping and so on.
Customer champion and critical friend
The development process requires compromise as barriers are encountered. The customer can easily get lost in the drive to deliver.
There is an important role to keep the customer in focus. Referring to past research or conducting iterative testing are just two ways teams can ensure that what is being built will deliver the benefit originally identified in the early design stages.
Customer experience measurement and service tracking
To justify continued investment a change program must demonstrate it is delivering the required business benefits. Sometimes the relevant data is in place but more often it is not.
We help Clients find the most cost-effective way to measure changing customer experiences and to report those so the leadership team can be confident the programme is on track.
Governance
In some instances, there is no governance structure to give senior management oversight of the direction and pace of change and to allow them to intervene as blocks arise.
We help organisations establish a CX governance that is right for them using our experience of what works and what doesn’t in a wide variety of situations.
See our case histories for NHS Property Services and for digital transformation at ASRA Housing Association
