Empowering Our Services Part 2: Delivering brilliant experiences
When we understand our end-to-end customer journeys and their true health, we can start to see where the gaps are and where we need to invest. The experiences we create are based on the services and processes that deliver them.
Our PROJECTS deliver prioritised and valued EXPERIENCES for our customers creating valued outcomes for them
When we understand our end to end customer journeys and their true health, we can start to see where the gaps are and where we need to invest. The experiences we create are based on the services and processes that deliver them. We decide to create new experiences or improve the experiences that we already offer. And sometimes our strategy will do both. Even if we are designing new experiences, we may still need to leverage the existing technology that many of our organisations are based on.
Where we invest are our projects, as our projects are what change the experience. However, they are often disconnected and, over time, move away from the experiences that we are trying to create for our customers. We get so caught in the day to day of projects that we lose sight of what they are trying to deliver–the experiences we need and want.
Even if we are upgrading our technology assets or infrastructure, we are doing so because it is improving the customer experience that we are investing in. When we are talking about data projects, we are helping to present one customer view. As such, we are organising the information and changing our processes so that we can present a better customer experience.
With our corporate projects, our ERP systems are now enabling us to again improve our customer experience and helping us to refine our resources. We can start to cost out our services, become more efficient, and see where we are spending our money so that we can provide better overall customer service.
So what are our quick tips for keeping your initiatives aligned to your strategy and delivering brilliant experiences?
1. Before you start doing anything, understand your current landscape. Where are you now and where do you want to be in the future? What are the experiences that you want to create and what are the areas that need investment?
2. When thinking about those investment areas, create your challenge statement – why are you doing this? How is it going to benefit the customer or your employee? What is the reason? How does it align with your strategy? This is your anchor that you need to keep coming back to. It is so important that we recommend making it visible so you can see it every day.
3. Whether you are running an agile project or a waterfall-based project, it is incredibly important to revisit your challenge statement at least on a fortnightly basis and ask yourself if the activities that you are performing will help you reach your goal. Often we are doing great work, but we slowly start to drift. Keep yourself focused.
4. Measure your progress not only against time, budget and resources, but how your project is moving you closer to your desired customer outcome. Whilst this may seem simple, these small steps are often missed and our customers end up with an outcome less than what was originally planned
Every project that we do, needs to be understood and then prioritised based on how they improve the customer experience. It should be clear, it should be able to be tracked, and it should be measured through your services.
How do YOU ensure that your projects align to delivering a better customer experience…?