Where can a Customer Experience Roadmap take you?

Imagine deciding to take the family on vacation to Florida.  You pack up the car, load everyone in and reverse out of the driveway.

Now the first question I would have for my husband (he likes to drive) is “which route are we taking?” – the response would likely be “we’ll just head down I-75” – from there the conversation moves to me asking “did you check the route online for construction? Have you thought about where we might stay overnight?” … you get the idea.

Like vacations – unless you think through and plan for your customer experience, you will likely fall short or miss some very important considerations. Many organizations are now using the “roadmap” terminology when referring to technology and customer experience planning.

When you think of a customer experience roadmap, all sorts of things probably come to mind.  For example – where do you want your customer’s journey to begin with your organization?  In my mind, the customer experience roadmap is like a highway, with many onramps and multiple exit points.

In addition, there are many points of interest along the way with new products and services you may want to position with customers.  There are even some rest stops where you may want to suggest a customer pull over so you can have concentrated discussions with them on how you can bring them value and therefore increase your share of wallet.  Similar to the highway, you have service centres along the way to accommodate breakdowns with the goal of getting your customers back up and running as quickly as possible.

Having a well planned customer experience roadmap means providing updates on what’s up ahead  – not just the fun theme parks, but also warnings about construction and delays.  The reality is that most of us don’t expect perfection in most forms of execution (ok, maybe I do when surgery is involved!).

How you communicate ‘bumps in the road’ to your customers impacts the level of trust they have with you.  Something as simple as communicating how long you expect to keep them on hold can be seen as a value add and respectful of their time.

When you call an organization and get their IVR (interactive voice response system), do you quickly jot down the numbers you are pressing in order to get to the information you need? By doing that, you are essentially creating your own roadmap to make access easier for the next time you call.

I dealt with an organization years ago that went as far as to print a small wallet card with all their IVR (interactive voice response) options on it – I loved it, as it provided me a roadmap to follow.

My challenge to you this week is to stand outside your organization and look in from your customer’s perspective.  Would they feel you have designed a customer experience roadmap from their point of view?  Or would they feel like they have been dropped in London, UK  where few streets run straight and many just end up nowhere (the good news is that there is usually a pub where the street runs out!)