What is your process for defining and scoping customer experience innovation projects?
Customer experience innovation is the process of creating and delivering new or improved value propositions that meet or exceed the needs and expectations of your customers. It can help you differentiate your brand, increase customer loyalty, and drive business growth. But how do you define and scope customer experience innovation projects? Here are some steps you can follow to ensure your projects are aligned with your goals, customers, and resources.
The first step is to identify the problem or opportunity that you want to address with your customer experience innovation project. This can be based on customer feedback, market trends, competitive analysis, or internal gaps. You should define your innovation challenge as a clear and specific question that guides your project. For example, how can we improve the online checkout process for our customers? Or, how can we create a more engaging and personalized experience for our loyal customers?
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You can think of two types of solutions and problems: 1) fixing issues and 2) differentiating yourself from the competition. Both can be based on customer feedback. When fixing issues, you address feedback directly. Something is broken, and you fix it. When differentiating, you don't address feedback directly. You either address the underlying messages of the customer feedback or change the bigger picture. Or you reshape parts of the journey in such a way that you create a new experience or category. In the long run, you must do both to set yourself apart by Customer Experience.
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Fixing issues are always going to be a important part of Customer Experience, what's an even more valuable area is predicting future needs of customers. If you can find not just pain points but flows that improve ease of use and delight customers organically, that's how you build loyalty. You can find a lot of these ideas in Customer Support tickets.. One of the best places that feedback and feature requests live.
The next step is to conduct customer research to understand your target customers, their needs, pain points, preferences, and behaviors. You can use various methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation, or data analysis to collect and analyze customer insights. You should also segment your customers based on relevant criteria such as demographics, psychographics, or behaviors. This will help you identify the most valuable and attractive segments for your customer experience innovation project.
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By delving deep into your target customers' needs, behaviors, and preferences, you're not only gaining insights but also building empathy. This empathy-driven approach ensures that your innovation resonates authentically and addresses genuine pain points, leading to a customer experience that truly stands out. Segmenting customers based on meaningful criteria further refines your strategy, allowing you to tailor solutions that cater to specific groups, maximizing the impact of your innovation efforts.
The third step is to generate and prioritize ideas for your customer experience innovation project. You can use various techniques such as brainstorming, mind mapping, or ideation workshops to generate as many ideas as possible. You should also involve different stakeholders such as customers, employees, partners, or experts to get diverse perspectives and feedback. You should then prioritize your ideas based on their feasibility, desirability, and viability. You can use tools such as scoring matrices, voting, or ranking to evaluate and select the most promising ideas.
The fourth step is to define the scope and objectives of your customer experience innovation project. You should specify the scope by defining the boundaries, assumptions, constraints, and deliverables of your project. You should also set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives that align with your business goals and customer needs. You should also define the success metrics and indicators that will help you measure and evaluate the outcomes of your project.
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Scope: Specify project boundaries and involved areas. Objectives: Set measurable, customer-focused goals. Innovation: Highlight unique aspects enhancing experience. Stakeholders: Define roles of involved parties. Resources: Assess available resources and constraints. Timelines: Set realistic project milestones. Measurement: Choose relevant KPIs for success evaluation. Alignment: Ensure alignment with overall strategy. A clear scope and objectives guide impactful customer experience innovations.
The fifth step is to create a project plan that outlines the activities, resources, roles, and timelines of your customer experience innovation project. You should use a project management methodology such as agile, waterfall, or hybrid to organize and manage your project. You should also use tools such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or calendars to visualize and track your project progress. You should also communicate and collaborate with your project team and stakeholders regularly and effectively.
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Set objectives, form team. Define scope, SMART goals. Identify uniqueness. Stakeholder roles. Assess resources, constraints. Set timeline, milestones. Measure CX impact. Align with strategy. Communicate updates. Identify and manage risks. Implement, monitor. Evaluate outcomes. Present results, insights. Plan for CX success.
The sixth step is to test and iterate your customer experience innovation project. You should use methods such as prototyping, piloting, or experimenting to test your ideas and solutions with real or potential customers. You should also collect and analyze customer feedback and data to validate and refine your assumptions and hypotheses. You should also use methods such as A/B testing, usability testing, or customer satisfaction surveys to measure and improve your customer experience innovation project. You should also be ready to pivot or scale your project based on the results and learnings.
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Continuous optimisation! Customer experience is based on the customers and what we know about them. And, as we know, what we know or learn about customer’s expectations and behaviour changes very often. There is no perfect formula, so not only test different variants but always be ready to make changes and adapt.
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It should begin with a deep understanding of customer needs, preferences and pain points, and it should involve customers in the co-creation process. By placing the customer at the center of any innovation process and involving them in co-creation, you'd aim to create solutions that truly resonate with their needs and deliver meaningful improvements to the customer experience. This approach would help stay agile, customer-focused, and responsive.
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