Customer expectations are evolving faster than ever, meaning that your customer experience needs to be able to match their demands. If your team has just introduced a new product, undergone a shift in brand identity, or is experiencing major stagnation in your customer satisfaction and retention, it may be time to introduce CX transformation. Here’s everything you need to know about creating a roadmap to success.
What is a CX roadmap?
Your CX roadmap is a plan that outlines your team’s strategy for creating, implementing, measuring, and optimizing your customer experience. Whether you’re building a customer journey from scratch or performing a massive overhaul of your existing experience, a roadmap is crucial to address both short-term and long-term goals.
While your business objectives will define your CX goals, it’s also important to remember that your roadmap should be based on customer insights and data. Ultimately, your roadmap should be unique to your customer and product or services.
Benefits of Creating a CX Roadmap
While teams often know when their customer experience is no longer working, discovering the source of the problem can quickly become a huge undertaking. Creating a CX roadmap enables you to strategically define, target, and optimize your CX initiatives and goals. Your CX strategy will be a mix of goals. Maintaining a roadmap will help you and your team stay organized and committed.
How to Create a Roadmap for CX Transformation
1. Implement Customer Feedback/Research Strategy
The first step to creating your roadmap for CX transformation is to understand your customer by building a feedback or research strategy. This can involve several effective tactics, including surveys, focus groups, social listening, and paying close attention to your NPS. The goal is to deeply understand your customer’s expectations, behaviors, and motivations as they interact with your brand. Working with a skilled customer service team can help you gather and prioritize data.
2. Map Out the Customer Journey
Building a customer journey map allows you to visualize the touchpoints your customer has with your brand from start to finish. This should be a collaborative process that integrates information from your customer service, sales, and marketing teams. This exercise aims to document every touchpoint and interaction so that you can identify challenges and opportunities. As you build out your customer journey, consider these questions:
- What channels does our customer use most when interacting with our brand?
- Do those channels change as they progress through the purchase process?
- Where does our team experience the most friction? The most success?
- Where are our assumptions correct? Where are they disconnected with our findings?
3. Identify and Organize Priorities
Once you have mapped out the customer journey, the next step is to identify pain points and opportunities. Using your map, list aspects of the journey with the most friction and elements where your team is seeing the most success. This step is about prioritizing your efforts and laying the foundation for a strategic game plan.
4. Build Measurable Goals and KPIs
After identifying your priorities, it’s time to apply SMART goals to help you guide and measure your success. Your team should set a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goal for each priority. For example, if you discover that customers are especially frustrated when handling issues over the phone, you may resolve to focus on reducing your average handling time. Establishing goals and benchmarks is vital to ensuring that your efforts are working!
5. Get Everyone Involved in the Change
CX transformation is anything but a one-person job. Successful transformation is a holistic process that requires buy-in and participation of everyone in the organization, from leadership to sales to your frontline team.
To get everyone involved, establish a customer-centric mindset across your organization. Circle back to milestones as indicators of implementation. Provide training and resources to support the transformation. Finally, remember to celebrate successes along the way. Successful CX transformation does not occur overnight.
6. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!
It’s important to note that CX transformation is an ongoing process rather than a one-time solution. As digital tools evolve and your industry’s landscape changes, so will your customer’s needs and expectations. Your customer service team should continually gather and apply customer insights to your CX strategy. As your products and services change, you’ll even find that your KPIs and goals will also need to shift! By utilizing each interaction as a valuable way to learn about your customers, you’ll find that CX transformation isn’t always a massive overhaul. Sometimes, it can involve a targeted approach focusing on a narrower part of the customer journey.
Build a Roadmap for CX Success
A CX roadmap encompasses CX analytics, strategy, customer feedback, and training… which can be a massive project for even the most seasoned companies. Our team of experts is here to provide strategic insights to help you build a customer experience that drives loyalty, retention, and ROI. Contact us today to get started!
