Knowing what to prioritize in your customer experience projects is hard. There are so many things you could work on, and while they’re all important, it can be difficult to know where to begin. In this post, we’ll look at different ways you can prioritize your customer experience projects to cut through the noise and get started quickly. If you’ve read our other blog posts about prioritization or process improvement initiatives before, you may have been afraid that we were going to recommend an arcane VOC Monster Tree or a Waterfall-with-checkboxes process. But we won’t do that to you!
What is Customer Experience Prioritization?
Prioritization is the process of setting a hierarchy of goals that will direct your organization, teams, and individuals on what activities to focus on. When setting project priorities, attention is typically focused on multiple KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that have been identified as crucial for a business’s success. There are many ways to approach prioritization - whether you are working with customers or within an organization, setting the right priorities is essential to meeting business objectives and improving the customer experience.
Step 1: Define your current state
The first step in prioritizing your customer experience projects is to define your current state. What are your current metrics? What feedback are you receiving from customers? What are your current pain points and challenges? Your current state will help you identify areas where you need to improve and identify potential customer experience projects. When defining your current state, you should do an analysis of your most important metrics. For example, you might look at customer retention, acquisition, and engagement metrics to help inform your prioritization process. If you don’t have metrics already in place, now would be a good time to start collecting them.
Step 2: Identify the most important problems and opportunities
Now that you’ve defined your current state, it’s time to dig into the problems and opportunities that should be a top priority for your organization. You may have already identified these through your initial analysis, but now you can take them one step further and prioritize them. There are a few ways to approach this step. You could create a table with problems and opportunities listed down the columns and your prioritization criteria down the rows. Or you could use a method like SMART Goal Setting to create more specific goals that are tied to both problems and opportunities.
Step 3: Determine which projects will have the biggest impact
Now that you know the problems and opportunities that need to be addressed, it’s time to determine which projects will have the biggest impact. In this step, you’ll want to consider the cost, timeline, and resources needed to implement each project. To determine which projects will have the biggest impact, you can use a table or a visual. Your table will have three columns: Problems, Opportunities, and Projects. In the Problems and Opportunities columns, you’ll use the same information as in the first step. In the Projects column, you’ll list all of the projects that you identified in step 3. Place a check mark in the table for each project that is related to that problem or opportunity. The projects with the most check marks are the ones that will have the biggest impact.
Step 4: Set your objectives and success metrics
In this step, you will want to pull everything together and decide what the objectives and success metrics for each project should be. You could either create brand new objectives or update the existing ones that you’ve already identified. You’ll want to make sure that the objectives tie back to your business goals and that they’re SMART goals. You should also set success metrics in line with your objectives. For example, if you have an objective of increasing user retention by 5%, your success metric would be the average number of users that return to your platform per month.
Takeaway
Now that you’ve completed the prioritization process, you’ll have a good idea of which customer experience projects to start with. It’s important to remember that you’ll likely have to revisit your prioritization process regularly as your business evolves and new challenges and opportunities arise. That’s not to say that you should wait to get started on your projects. The best way to improve your customer experience is to get started with the projects that will have the biggest impact. Now that you know how to prioritize your customer experience projects, get started on the ones that will take your business to the next level!
