Tie Customer Needs to Business Impact, and Get More Project Buy-In
Episode 205, now on our YouTube channel, was a live webinar about tying customer needs to business impact. You can show the business why fixing or creating something for customers is important (for both customers and the business). Demonstrate how a missed customer opportunity or something broken we haven’t prioritized fixed costs the company money, time, customer satisfaction, or loyalty. This will help you get buy-in to prioritize the project.
Key Problems with Current Impact Maps and Solutions Trees:
- Traditional impact maps often start with a business goal, not customer needs. Risks include treating customers as pawns we manipulate, inventing solutions in search of problems, and ignoring the impacts of our work and decisions on our customers.
- “Opportunities” should detail unmet user needs, not features teams want to build.
- We don’t have to design multiple solutions and have “the team” compare them. Design isn’t a team sport. It’s a specialized role that should have the power and autonomy to do its own work without everybody trying to sketch or make decisions. Consider making one refined “best” solution that solves customer and business problems.
The Delta CX Impact Map:
- Starts with a key customer problem or need from the user’s perspective.
- Maps root causes creating or aggravating the problem. We would know these root causes from internal and external research.
- Map real business impacts from poor customer experiences. Use real data and metrics (versus estimates or guesses) as much as possible. Find out what the business lost because of a new or ongoing customer problem.
- Estimates realistic gains if the problem were fixed.
- Focuses on customers’ needs and problems before solutions are considered.
The Delta CX Impact Map creates a compelling narrative to demonstrate urgency to leaders and executives. It will help you prioritize what to work on. It can align teams around where real customer problems create waste and loss for the business.
Remain solution-agnostic. The map is not for brainstorming features. Focus on the customer experience, not developer release velocity. Be a detective; dig into metrics and run fresh research to prove and quantify risks.
Connect with us or learn more:
- CustomerCentricity.com — our website
- youtube.com/@cx-cc — YouTube channel
- patreon.com/cxcc — online community and free mailing list
