You often ask Joana de Quintanilha and me about the customer journeys on which you should focus. We get it: It’s an important first step in improving customer experience (CX). At the same time, the stakes are high: Pick the right journeys, and build a killer success story, nurturing buy-in and gaining momentum — pick the wrong journeys, and breed stakeholder skepticism about journey transformation instead.

prioritizing journeys is the first step in a longer process of using design to improve CX

Use A Prioritization Tool To Build A Portfolio Of Journeys

In our new report, How To Prioritize Customer Journeys, we lay out our recommendations for how to best prioritize journeys and share our Customer Journey Prioritization Tool for doing the prioritization work:

  • Aim for a portfolio of journeys. Aim to develop a portfolio of journeys at various levels of impact and feasibility so that you don’t get stuck in “quick-win land.” Overfocusing on quick wins (high impact and feasibility) can be dangerous. These fixes may be easy, but CX leaders should also work on some long-term investments and strategic bets.
  • Rate impact and feasibility across 10 dimensions. Prioritize journeys to work on by evaluating their impact (in terms of customers, employees or partners, business goals, cross-journey impact, brand differentiation, and strategy) and their feasibility (in terms of internal awareness and support, required investment and measurability, complexity, access to organizational gesources, and CX team resources and skills).
  • Use a common tool. With our Customer Journey Prioritization Tool, you can rate journeys on 43 criteria across the aforementioned 10 dimensions. We let you select criteria for each dimension based on your organization’s level of journey-centricity. Below, you can see a sample output from the tool, a journey scorecard.
  • Secure buy-in. Bring in selected stakeholders early to improve prioritization and get buy-in, then consider resources and rating output to determine an initial portfolio of journeys.

Prioritize journeys to work on by evaluating their impact and feasibility on 10 dimensions. Impact: Customers, Employees or Partners, Busienss Goals, Cross-Journey Impact, Brand Differentiation And Strategy; Feasibility: Internal Awareness and Support, Required Investment and Measurability, Complexity, Access To Organizational Resources, CX Team Resources And Skills

We thank Lorenzo Introna, Susan McNulty, and Judy Weader for their contributions in developing the report and the tool.

For a demonstration of the Customer Journey Prioritization Tool live, join me at CX EMEA in London on May 10–11! Learn more and register here.