Building a Customer Experience Framework

Mar 5, 2015

At last week’s High Five Conference, Kate Williamson, John Lane, Steven Keith and I led a customer experience (CX) workshop that sparked fantastic conversation with marketing and creative professionals from across the country.

The purpose of our workshop was to share the CX tools and methodologies that we use with our clients to help them optimize how customers interact with their brand. We know these interactions aren’t a singular occurrence: they happen multiple times, across various channels, in a variety of contexts, at different moments in time.

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With all of this complexity, it’s challenging to think through the details of individual customer interactions and identify how to best optimize them for deeper engagement and continued loyalty. That’s why we created a Customer Experience Framework—a simple set of foundational tools for building customer journey maps.

Throughout the workshop, attendees practiced applying the CX Framework via a business scenario. We also talked through how to measure (with actual numbers, not fluffy unicorns) the overall value of customer experience to an organization of any size.

Here are some of the great questions from the workshop that sparked significant conversation. I wanted to mention them again here to keep the conversation going and the thinking fresh:

  • How detailed should you segment your audience before mapping their customer journey?
  • Do customer journey phases truly vary depending on audience, or can those journey phases be standardized across a business?
  • How do you decide which scenario to map first?
  • What’s the best way to use Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) calculations to win additional marketing budget?

Be on the lookout for answers to these questions in future blog posts. But in the meantime, please add your thoughts and comments below, and check out the full workshop presentation (it includes some exercise worksheets).

And a big “thank you” to all the folks who participated in our workshop!

How to Build a Customer Experience Framework from Centerline Digital