Step 1 is to formulate the organisation’s customer experience strategy. It is separate but part of the organisation’s overall market strategy. It should link brand and internal values and include a description of the target customer groups derived from segmentation analysis. For each customer group define the target experience, how we want the customer to think feel and do after each interaction. To ensure a consistent approach enterprise wide, define a set of design principles that will ensure the brand pervades any design work. Use the 6 Pillars of Customer Experience to refine and sequence the strategy. Finally define the road map for developing key capabilities to support the delivery and improvement of the target experience.

Requires communicating the organisation’s customer experience strategy in a compelling narrative. Leadership must own and be able to fully articulate the strategy. The strategy should link brand and internal values and include a description of the target customer groups derived from segmentation analysis. For each customer group articulate the target experience, how we want the customer to think feel, think and do after each interaction. To ensure a consistent approach enterprise wide, articulate a set of design principles that will ensure the brand pervades any design work. Finally communicate the road map for developing key capabilities to support the delivery and improvement of the target experience.

Implementing the organisation’s customer experience strategy. Individual teams and functions should convert the organisation’s strategy into a series of planned actions that they can take to improve the customer experience. Local CX champions should act as the focal point for challenging plans and ensuring consistency of delivery. Cross functional prioritisation of initiatives should be undertaken against the overall capability roadmap. Leaders should be demonstrating a commitment to the plan and be taking a high profile approach to inspecting its delivery.

Local plans systematically being implemented – results monitored through customer and employee feedback dashboards. Strategy being refined based on experience. AB testing, champion challenger approach to experience refinement. Results linked into governance and decision making processes. Detailed experience strategies should be defined for each target customer group.

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Ask the question “will our culture accelerate or inhibit the delivery of the strategy”. If the answer is “inhibit”, use a cultural assessment instrument to understand the “unwritten rules of culture” to identify and articulate the cultural inhibitors. Begin to consider the employee experience ask the question “does the current employee experience generate the customer oriented behaviour required by the strategy?” consider how the levers of culture can be used to orientate the organisation towards a new culture.

Based on the insight achieved on organisation culture and employee experience assessment from step 1 use the levers of culture to orientate the organisation towards a new cultural state. Align performance management, reward and recognition and leadership behaviours towards delivering the target customer experience. Consider the need for empowerment –where do employees need to be flexible in their response to the customer. Define a “What you can do, what you cannot do” framework to ensure empowerment management and consistency. Identify the “soft” human areas that are critical for customer engagement and roll out appropriate training.

Systematically harness the voice of the employee in driving and refining customer experience initiatives. Check for employee enablement. Ensure employees have the wherewithal to deliver the target experience. Monitor the impact of the cultural initiatives defined in the preceding stages. Check engagement with the overall customer experience strategy and the level of desire and motivation for its delivery. Consider “re-recruiting” middle managers onto a new psychological contract with the customer, not the organisation, at its centre.

Formalise and align the 5 engines of change. Culture, employee experience and employee behaviour should all be aligned to deliver the required customer experience and the required customer behaviour. Ensure that all employees are customer centred, place the customer first in their considerations and decision making. Consider totemic or symbolic actions to galvanise the focus on customers. Consider the language used in the organisation redefine terms to get employees to think about how they do things. Refine and align the organisation design to enable the successful management of customer journeys.

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Customer journey mapping is a critical organisational competence. Begin to define the design principles that will shape designs across the enterprise. Teach a critical mass of individuals how to design journeys and experiences. Identify and implement a journey design toolkit to ensure journey design consistency. Define the overall atlas of journeys the organisation manages. Prioritise journeys for redesign based on importance to the customer, current organisational performance in delivering that journey and the volume of customers that experience it. Use ROI analysis to prioritise the investment needed.

The key to customer experience success is the consistent design of experiences within journeys that reflect the brand and values of the organisation. Having identified a toolkit for design consider how the toolkit will be supported from a software perspective. The need is to ensure consistent design capture, a database of capabilities and processes linked to each touchpoint. Create an online centre of excellence for design that can be accessed across the organisation. This should ensure that designs are version controlled and managed.

The organisational approach to journey design and journey management should now become a way of life “how we do things around here”. Journeys should be the basic building blocks of organisation design and increasingly how teams are organised cross functionally. Customers should be co-creating improvements to the experiences. The organisation should be moving from the definition and improvement of the “as is” journey to the implementation of competitively differentiating “to be” journeys harnessing new capabilities and delivering the 6 Pillars of Customer Experience.

Customer journey analytics provides the bedrock of improvement. Journeys are continually reviewed at the touchpoint level. New approaches and technologies are being systematically tested in a journey context the focus on moving the journey onto the next stage of its evolution. Organisationally the business talks the language of customer service design, a wide number of employees are skilled at service design and journey improvement. Innovation is the critical watchword – the organisation is focused on solving customer life problems.

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Customer feedback is collected on an ad hoc basis. The organisation is looking to establish a core metric such as NPS or CSAT as a focus point. At this stage the organisation should be ensuring widespread availability of customer feedback and the metric performance. Dashboards and customer recovery should be increasingly in use. The emphasis should now be on establishing a measurement framework that links transaction based feedback with relationship quantification.

The measurement framework for customer feedback should be evolving. The link between customer feedback at the relationship level (e.g. NPS) should be linked to the organisations commercial objectives. Line of sight should be developed between the transaction measurement, the relationship measure and the organisations commercial objectives. The 6 Pillars of Customer Experience should be used to ensure a comprehensive set of measurement attributes are being utilised. The concept of inner and outer loop dissemination of metrics should be developed. Inner loop being the closed loop usage of customer feedback to drive local culture change and improvement, outer loop being the link between feedback and the organisation’s decision making processes.

The measurement framework should be expanded to include all forms of customer feedback structured and unstructured the inner and outer loops of feedback management should be fully implemented and functional. The framework should be fully supported by technology with advanced text analytics and individuals able to define the views they see on their dashboards. The centre point of the metrics should now be customer journeys. Monitoring each touchpoint’s experience delivery and the resulting link to customer behaviour. Journey measurement, analytics, experience design software should be increasingly integrated.

Customer journey measurement systems, CRM and experience design software should now be integrated. The complete eco system of customer and employee feedback linked into a single view. Data should be imported from operational systems, web analytics and social media, interpreted against the measurement framework. Action management technologies should be used locally for monitoring progress and utilising best practice. Real time data should drive immediate action and be linked into the organisations’ governance and decision making processes. The organisation should be completely “sensitised” to managing and acting on customer insight.

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Processes, systems and technologies are inherited from a product focused past. Digital is a separate unit charged with automating critical transactional processes and supporting self-serve. Focus on cost saving and efficiency. Beginning to see that there will be a mismatch between customer journeys and the systems that support processes that feed those journeys. Overall the systems estate and enterprise process architecture will not be fit for purpose in a customer needs based journey delivery world. Process of reviewing the technology estate should be underway.

Organisation is designing for digital first. Focus on simplicity and ease for customers. Omni-channel bridges being built across systems and customer;’ able to choose how, where and when they interact. Cross channel journeys now achievable. Systems and processes being aligned to support customer journeys and need states.

Systems are still an inhibitor but digital is enabling change and technology is no longer a complete showstopper. Innovative solutions being found to overcome systems restrictions. Outside of the box thinking means a competitively superior experience can be delivered.

Enterprise technology architecture evolving into a customer journey based infrastructure. Digital is integrated into the business. Developments defined by customer needs rather than problems. Digital has moved for being a transactional enabler to solving customer life problems. Redundancy, inefficiencies and duplication associated with systems that support a functional product world being removed. The resultant cost savings are funding development. Emphasis on customer centric thinking and modular, reconfigurable, reusable system components.

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