Creating CX Impact Using Artifacts

Our CX agency, like many, taps customer personas and journey maps for transformative insights. The value of these artifacts isn’t always obvious to partners and clients, who — understandably so — ask things like:

• “How does a persona connect to what my brand actually needs to do?”
• “How do we get stakeholders to see the importance of these artifacts?”
• “Can I show their impact on our bottom line in a measurable way?”

Simple questions with gigantic implications, to say the least.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing between these foundational tools and the marketing plans making their way to customers.

And that missing something was really, really important — the illusive arrow connecting customer needs with tangible recommendations. We know such a connection is key to transforming a brand’s Customer Experience. What we’re talking about is impact in its purest, most exciting form.

In part three of our Customer Core Series, we show you how to create impact using artifacts discussed in part one (personas) and part two (journey maps). Ready to get started? Here we go!

The Root of Inspiration

It wasn’t until we discovered Gojko Adzic’s book Impact Mapping: Making a Significant Impact with Software Products and Projects that things started to click in a big way.

Originally created to help developers and product managers prioritize features, Adzic’s methodology draws a straight line — metaphorically, of course — from a proposed feature to the project objective it’s meant to support. This helps with prioritization as sprints progress and ensures that the features slated to have the biggest impact make their way to release first.

Adzic’s structure considered the Why, Who, What and How of a project. He artfully laid it out in a way that’s readable and easy-to-follow (much like a map).

The end result shares a likeness with “Mind Maps” if you’re familiar with that term (a diagram used to visually organize information). Not only is it visually similar, but it boasts a similar creation process.

Yet, what really caught our eye was how Adzic described the underlying purpose of his impact map:

It prevents organizations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions.

Starting to see where we’re going with this?

We built upon Adzic’s core premise by modifying, re-factoring and tweaking until we found a way to support prioritized decision-making across the entirety of a Customer Experience.

The Sum of all Parts

While we appreciated the design and thought behind Adzic’s impact map, it only solved for internal teams, goals and priorities. We needed to focus the opportunities and recommendations into something that not only affected the customer, but was driven by them.

To understand how these pieces connect, visualize a tree…

• The trunk is the customer, the most important part of the tree.
• Customer wants are the limbs extending from the trunk.
• Brand connections are the branches supported by the limbs.
• And brand opportunities? Consider those individual leaves.

The point is that without the customer, brand objectives and opportunities don’t have anything to support them. The customer is the crucial part of the equation, and the whole purpose of the exercise when creating personas and journey maps. So, why do we shy away from creating recommendations that come directly from them? It makes more sense to use them to inform other initiatives.

Contributors to CX Impact

After extensive analysis and healthy rounds of debate, we zeroed in on four factors that are critical when attempting to span the Impact Gap.

1. REAL GUARDRAILS

A concise, clearly articulated definition of what success authentically looks like in the mid- to long-term should inform every decision you make from here on out. This vision of success should be propagated to all levels of the business with potential to influence the Customer Experience. Equally important, if not more so, is an honest lens through which to problem solve.

Think about success in these terms:

• Desired brand awareness growth in the next 12–18 months
• Target % change in regional sales
• Improvement in NPS scores
• Maximum budgets and their realistic distribution
• Internal operational or decision-maker quirks

Believe it or not, putting parameters in place (ex. budget, timing, internal KPIs) make problem-solving a lot easier — and often more innovative. Going further, every solution put in place MUST be possible within these guardrails to have a tangible impact.

2. CUSTOMER WANTS & NEEDS

Effective personas and journey maps will directly and indirectly uncover customers’ base motivations. These are the How and Why behind their decisions. Motivations cover a lot of ground, and don’t necessarily stem directly from the brand at this stage. The most valuable motivators will be specific to the customer, but broad enough to fuel dozens of downstream initiatives.

For example:

• A customer of an active lifestyle brand wants “permission” to treat himself. Simple on the surface, yes, but rooted in a compelling juxtaposition: a frugal, need-driven shopper who has premium taste when it comes to gear.

3. AUTHENTIC BRAND CONNECTIONS

As customers become more discerning, it’s critical that brands honestly consider where they have permission to serendipitously fulfill customer wants and authentically meet needs. These connections should live as close to the intersection of your core values, and those of your customer, as possible to reduce friction and facilitate efficacy.

Continuing our previous example:

• The active lifestyle brand can meet the customer’s want to treat himself, by creating self-contained “reasons to believe” that give him every reason to say “yes” on the spot. Not because he’s pressured to, but because his proclivity toward fact-checking and constant comparison is met in one affirming package.

4. TANGIBLE BRAND OPPORTUNITIES

If understanding Brand Connections points to the What, Brand Opportunities give the brand its marching orders. This should be a tangible directive with potential for application across multiple touchpoints. It should be specific and directly address a friction point or opportunity within your Customer Journey.

Extending the active lifestyle example:

• How can our active lifestyle brand build an authentic connection with the customer through self-contained reasons to believe? The hangtag on their apparel is the perfect place to start. It offers a place to tell a compelling, self-contained story that inspires the customer in the moment, while also appeasing their rational default setting.

Our Take on Impact Charts

Our chart uses the branching structure of Adzic’s impact map, but instead of considering internal teams we refocused it outward. Note the four contributors from the previous section at work here. When taking the brand’s Real Guardrails into account, we’re solving strictly and primarily for the consumer — a level of prioritization that many fail to acknowledge.

Oracle states that 86% of buyers will pay more for a better experience, but only 1% of those buyers feel that brands consistently meet said expectations. This is a gap that we must work to fill. If we, as marketers, aren’t deriving recommendations from personas and journey map findings, then we’re doing a disservice to both our clients and ourselves.

This brings us back to where we started, with questions on how to actually use personas and journey maps to effectively impact the bottom line. Mindstream’s impact chart is designed to answer those difficult questions. By creating this final deliverable, we’re able to empower organizations with recommendations that come directly from their customers’ wants and needs.

THE CUSTOMER CORE SERIES IS COMPLETE — WHAT’S NEXT?

This article is the final article in a three-part series centered around Mindstream’s Customer Core offering. Exclusive to Mindstream, this workshop creates actionable artifacts for your business to improve its customer experience. We will work with you to tailor Customer Core to your organization’s needs. The exercise can be done in as little as 6–8 weeks depending on the research path we pursue.

Contact us for more information on how we can help your company decode its customers, and the untapped opportunities with them.

Originally published at www.mindstreaminteractive.com.