This edition of Julia’s CX Mini Masterclass series explores best practices for evaluating customer impact when making major business decisions. Building on the concept of customer journey on-ramps/off-ramps, show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt explains how you can leverage your knowledge of the customer journey to prioritize business initiatives, create a CX roadmap, and guide your organization towards making customer-centric decisions which will ultimately drive profitability.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

CX professionals are often the guardians of the customer journey within their organization. This comes with the responsibility of ensuring that the organization continually evolves towards customer-centricity, which is no small task. CX professionals may be able to influence changes that are deliberately made with the customer experience in mind. But businesses are constantly evolving and changing, launching new products and implementing revised systems, and most of these of these changes fall outside of the remit of a centralized CX team. This business evolution has an impact on resulting customer experiences, so it is equally important, though more challenging, to ensure that decisions made by other teams within the organization are done with the customer in mind. Without this, CX professionals, will constantly find themselves "fixing" a broken customer journey. It is much more effective to foster awareness about customer experience impact to help the business proactively and deliberately evolve towards customer-centricity than to be in a constant mode of fire-fighting.

The good news is that CX professionals can leverage their understanding of the customer journey, Customer Lifetime Value, and the financial ramifications of on-ramps and off-ramps to help businesses understand customer experience impact and make the right choices.

Build your CX roadmap to demonstrate value

In episode 21 I spoke with Marnitz Van Heerden of Hollard insurance who described how his organization has evolved from one with a centralized CX team, to a federated model, whereby responsibility for customer experience is distributed across the business teams. The federated model is the ultimate goal for many businesses, but the reality on the ground is that most CX practitioners still operate in an environment where CX is managed centrally. In this case, CX practitioners have to plan and prioritize their efforts.

If you’ve ever mapped the customer journey, you know that it can be daunting to tackle a long laundry list of pain points within the customer journey. I suggest starting by evaluating your journey in terms of the on-ramps and off-ramps. Look at where you have your busiest off-ramp, or where you are losing the most customers. You should consider this as your starting point for affecting CX change, because it’s where you’ll be able to demonstrate business value. So if for example, if your customer journey research indicates that customers are off-ramping at sign-up or after their first month of usage of your product, look into which one of these represents the bigger impact in terms of opportunity cost or lost customer assets, and tackle that one first if you can. As you improve the experience and are able to impact on the flow of the off-ramp,