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Play 2 - Build a Strategy

Putting the customer at the core of your strategy leads to a positive experience for both employees and customers, builds trust in your brand, and results in long lasting relationships.

Build a Strategy

Build A Strategy Based On Your Understanding

It is important to create a clear mission statement with a customer-first narrative and to incorporate a customer-centric mindset within your business operations. This includes building a customer-friendly environment, setting up measuring processes to reflect goals and feedback systems, opening channels of communication between employees and customers, and adjusting processes for continuous improvement based on the feedback. Below are elements to consider when building a strategic plan:

Define the Goals and Objectives

Specifying your goals and objectives helps keep your process grounded in success criteria. This is important for keeping your design process focused and allowing you to articulate the value you provide.

  • What outcomes do you want to achieve?
  • What outcomes are your customers expecting?
  • Are there current issues that need to be resolved?
  • Are there consequences if these issues are not resolved in a specific timeframe?

Be as clear and specific as possible.

Identify Metrics for Success

A strong customer experience (CX) metrics methodology enables an organization to objectively assess the quality of the customer experience it offers. It also offers insights that support businesses in identifying areas for improvement, prioritizing investments, monitoring CX advancements, and aligning the organization around a single objective. 

Questions to Consider:

  • How are you going to measure success?  
  • What are your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
  • Do you have baseline data to use for comparison?  
  • What specific metrics will you track?  
  • How are you going to track this information and how often?  
  • Are there gaps in your data collection? 

Customer experience metrics can be divided into two major categories:

CX Metrics

As a CX practice, we strive to increase customer loyalty and success, which requires measuring loyalty. Customer loyalty can be measured in one of two ways: attitudinal assessments or behavioral measures. It is critical that we measure both to produce dependable CX results. KPIs and goals are most frequently utilized for benchmarking across the industry. 

Finally, these metrics help you increase trust in public service. In accordance with Executive Order 12862 – Setting Customer Service Standards, agencies are required to measure customer experience performance and benchmark that performance against the highest standards in the private sector. By documenting metrics and learning from them, we can improve customer experiences and garner more confidence in civil services.  

System Design

System design is the technology complement to service design, answering the questions – what do the technology solutions and architecture look like? How can we best leverage technology to create a service that meets the customers’ needs? 

System design often includes elements the customer does not directly see or interact with. This can include managing software development lifecycles, licensing timelines, the integration between data sources, and the way a suite of technical products and processes is strategically designed to support the needs of a service. System design is critical to CX because of its role in keeping the service available and operational for customers.

Gathering Product Requirements

There are other types of requirements needed to understand product requirements fully: business requirements (such as branding elements, competitors, sales and marketing, and customer service), technical requirements (such as operating systems, devices, or any technical limitations), and user requirements (who is the user and how do they use the product). While it’s tempting to jump into the specific product requirements (functionality), understanding the other requirements will help you think about the big picture. There are different methods for gathering requirements but the discussion and documentation is key. There must be an organized way to document the information and a process for capturing any changes along the way.

User Stories

In Agile methodology, a user story helps shift the requirements so it’s stated from the perspective of a user. It is written in plain language and summarizes an end goal. These requirements should be driven directly by users and defines the acceptance criteria for software development. User stories are helpful for various roles, including business analysts, developers, and designers because the information helps everyone focus on the end-user.

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