Customer Experience (CX) is one of the most important business driver. To be in the driver seat you need the right methodology and strategy. But what is a methodology and a strategy? How can we map this with #CX?

“Methodology is the systematic, theoretical analysis of the methods applied to a field of study” ¹⁾https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodology

A #CX methodology is a process which results in a strategy

“Strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.” ²⁾https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy

A #CX strategy needs to differentiate brand experience while customer insights will be used to measure performance and business outcomes.

Methodology and strategy will often be mixed and for sure there is an overlap. Before we think about a methodology and a strategy we need to be clear which vision everything should follow. Building a vision sounds easy, but this is something “for ever” or at least many years. All projects needs to be aligned on the vision. The vision is always the first question to be asked in each project (do we follow with this project the vision?)

Example of a vision: “We want to deliver the best experience, the best emotions and being any time at any place the #1 contact for our customer through offering the best all-in-one service”

For more, please read: Digital Transformation: Road Work Next 5 Miles

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CX Methodology

No practice without some theoretical steps before. This is essential for having success, but the success takes place by bringing it to the road. The methodology prepares what we need for the strategy and the roadmap.

Here’s what a CX Methodology should contain:

Business Objectives

• Engagement
• Loyalty
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Conversion
• Revenue
• First Contact Resolution
• Contact Time (talk, mail, etc.)
• Problem Resolution Time

Segmentation

We need clarity about our target group. So here are three question we should ask ourself:

• Which people do we want to address and which not?
• Do we have enough information to segment the people we want to have?
• Which people that we want do we have and which not?

Buyer Personas & Customer Journey Mapping

1. Define buyer personas
   1. Who is using my products and/or services
   2. Age of person
   3. Life circumstances
   4. Family, job, hobbies?
   5. Personal values someone is following
2. How does a persona perceive my products / services?
   1. Define the steps
   2. Define the touch points
3. Build a story board
4. Build a swim lane
   1. What is the online (digital) perception?
   2. What is the offline perception?
5. Assess the emotional line
   1. Which positive emotion has the step?
   2. Which negative impact has the step?
   3. Is the impact neutral or has a neutral part in it?
6. Assess the impact of a step
   1. Which impact has an experience for a person?
   2. How important is an experience for a person?

Quick wins

Within the previous listed steps 1-6 new ideas and improvements will come up which can be tested and implemented quickly. This should be given a chance.

Insights & Analytics

Analytics is the key element within #CX. Historical analytics is the backwards view. With the growing amount of data we are now able to do predictive analytics. Here are the most important analytics areas to think about:

• Data Mining (to find patterns in huge data)
• Predictive Analytics (to understand the next step / need of a customer)
• Key Driver Analysis (People and topics)

There are much more topics if we talk about analytics. We can talk about BI and much more…. but this is stuff for an own blog post.

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CX Strategy

A CX strategy gives you the framework for the ideal customer experience and helps to align different departments focus and employee activities as well as allocating budgets.

A CX strategy has 3 main parts…. Measurement the experience, setup a roadmap and build objectives and key results. So it looks where you are today, where you want to be and what are the steps to get there.

Measure Happiness

What are the KPIs within CX? We need to differentiate for “Customer Attraction”, “Customer Engagement” and “Customer Retention”.

Customer Attraction is about marketing campaign effectiveness (ROI), direct traffic and page visits for example.
Customer Engagement is about customer acquisition rate, conversion rate and card abandonment rate for example.
Customer Retention is about net promoter score, customer satisfaction and overall satisfaction for example.

Customer Attraction and Customer Engagement are basics these days within each webanalytics solution, while Customer Retention is coming more from the non-digital area. Important for each CX strategy is to bring these three parts together. I would like to focus on the Customer Retention for now, because this is the customer happiness while the other two parts focus on the success of the marketing departments (their campaigns, their website, etc.).

As mentioned at the beginning we  also need to differentiate brand experience and measure performance and business outcomes through customer insights. Therefore we have different metrics to measure happiness:

	Customer Experience Index (#CXIndex)	Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Key Question	What is your experience regarding xyz with [brand name]?	How likely are you to recommend [brand name] to a friend or colleague?
Primary Goal	Measuring the long-term happiness through ratings of the experience in multiple areas. Journeys, touch points and interaction space… there are several parts within CX. The CX Index has, compared with NPS) this broader approach .	Measuring the long- to mid-term happiness with focusing on on the “recommend question” Discover brand engagement and measures loyalty through customer experience to predicts business growth

	Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)	Overall Satisfaction (OSAT)
Key Question	How would you rate your experience with your recent order / support issue …?	How satisfied were you with your experience at this [brand name] location?
Primary Goal	Focussing on the current situation / experience and the short-term happiness.   It’s a simple way with one question to measure rational understanding and see how customers are satisfied with product or service.	Measuring the short-term happiness. Measuring a transactional experience (in a multi-location business).

You missed one like CES (Customer Effort Score)? Right, this table is just to show you how such scores are working.

Such scores are maybe an add-on, but can never be used to measure CX. There are 2 main directions why CX measurement is important. First of all to understand the customer. This we need to align our acting an his interest / need / pain. Second we need CX measurement to see how well we are performing. Therefore such scores like NPS are coming up always.

Today we have so much user / customer data that we are able to understand the moment of time. Measuring CX with data gives us a much better view than such scores which are from a time where we haven’t had such an amount of data.

So we have now attitudinal, behavioral, operational and financial measures. This 4 are each much more than a score and combined they give us the right picture every time.

What’s a strategy without a clear roadmap, objectives & key-result? This is the way we work on the metrics.

Roadmap

A roadmap typically reflects a time window of 3 month up to 2 years. It shows your path to where you want to be and what’s needed for this. Everyone understand where his part takes place and why his part is need on the journey

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

At the beginning of this article it was about the business objectives in the context of the methodology. The objectives are also important within the strategy and be part of every project within the roadmap. Let’s see what objectives and key-results are.

Objective	Key Result 1	Key Result 2
Revenue	Grow revenue from existing customer	Grow revenue from new customer

Now you may build two different roadmap, one for existing and one for new customers. Within each of them you have different projects and therefor different results.

Objective	Key Result 1	Key Result 2
Grow revenue from existing customer	Raise contact frequency	Group them in milestone and see what’s working to raise them to the next milestone
Grow revenue from new customer	Raise market presence and being more visible	Solve issues customers  have currently with competitors and target them

This is the way OKRs are working. An objective has different key results and later on a key result becomes an object with his own key results. This method allows you that everyone understands what is needed from him. This waterfall method makes sure every action is aligned to your strategy.

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Let’s close with this great statement:

Steve Jobs: “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology” ³⁾https://esser.me/steve-jobs-you-have-to-start-with-the-customer-experience-and-work-backwards-to-the-technology/