How scoping can save your CX initiative

I caught up with Andreas Noe, head of our CX practice, to have him elaborate on one item from his popular tip sheet: Five mistakes that kill CX projects.

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Download tip sheet: "Five Mistakes that Kill CX Projects"

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Steve: So what's the big deal with scoping?

Andreas: It's all about not boiling the ocean.

Steve: What ocean is that?

Andreas: The ocean of your business: its operations, its systems, its personality and messaging. The beauty of a CX approach, an outside-in approach, is that it can help you see your business in an entirely different light. You see the business as your customer sees it -- in a much larger and very different context. But that beauty can also be frightening if you decide that EVERYTHING about your business needs to change.

So when we start a CX project with a client, we try to work with the executive sponsor upfront to make decisions about scope. What's on the table for change and what's off limits, at least within the current project. It may sound counterintuitive, but its that scope limitation that enables project success.

For example earlier this year we were working with a large organization that had serious issues with how they communicated with customers and handed them off from one part of the business to the other. Fortunately, they also had a very realistic executive sponsor. She said from day one that the scope was the web and digital experience.

Steve: Web + digital experience sounds pretty big to me!

Andreas: Exactly! In fact, revamping your web and digital experience is daunting for any company. But it's a well-balanced, ambitious-but-prudent scope to put on your CX project. Aspire to too little and you'll accomplish nothing. CX definitely requires thinking big. But if you aspire to too much, the end result will be that nothing gets done.

Steve: What are some examples of appropriate scope, then?

Andreas: In my team's experience, there are three that are most common:

1. First is the web and digital experience scope I just mentioned. In this situation you're looking at how to make that feel like a unified experience to the customer. Whether it's email or online video or blog content, the customer feels like your business engages within the context of his or her own customer journey, with appropriate frequency, offers, and calls to action. Too often, because of the way we structure our businesses, this experience is disjointed. You've got the website team, and the newsletter team, and the webinar team -- and they don't talk to each other. The result is that the customer doesn't feel engaged or guided or assisted in their journey.
2. Another ambitious-but-doable scope is to rethink CRM and business systems. If you understand the customer view, and how they want to be engaged, it will often have profound implications for the kind of CRM you have, maybe for customer service systems that connect seamlessly to sales systems, for example.
3. The other major CX-inspired change is business processes and hand-offs. Too often, businesses get dazzled by their own customer acquisition funnels. Instead of seeing the stages of customer acquisition as an incomplete and imperfect model of reality, they start to believe that their customers see the world the same way. I have literally heard clients talking about their "customer segmentation" into "prospect, qualified lead, sales accepted lead" etc. If the CX scope is business processes and hand-offs, the executive leader prepares the client for organizational change. It's quite likely that structures will change and people will need to move around in order to deliver what the customer wants.

I like to use the on-stage/backstage metaphor in CX. A good CX research initiative will help you understand what your customers want and expect to happen on-stage. The role of scoping is in deciding what part of the business you're going to work on backstage to bring you closer to what the customers want.