Intro

Customer expectations are at an all time high across industries. Customers expect it to be easy to work with your brand. They expect their experience to be frictionless, simple, clear, and personalized. Businesses that have a painful, friction-filled experience will lose their hard-earned customers to competitors who are differentiating themselves with a better experience.

This week I’ve created a video with proven and actionable methods to help you identify the biggest problems in your customer journey, then design solutions that can be rapidly tested and launched to create long-term, engaged customers. If you’d rather read, I’ve also included a summary below 😊 

1. The foundation — understand your customer.

Many businesses claim customer-centricity, but don’t truly consider the human experience at the center of their product or service. Exceptional businesses start by understanding their customers before diving into solutions. They seek to deeply understand:

• Who is the customer?

• What do they care about?

• What do they need and want?

• What are their struggles? Where are their frustrations?

To gather this information, look at sales and marketing data. Analyze web analytics. Conduct surveys, interviews, and host focus groups. Do time and motion studies for physical locations to understand foot traffic. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Experience your product or service as a customer would. Explore, experiment, and ensure everything works as expected. Whether it’s navigating your website or using your product, understanding the customer’s perspective is crucial.

Many businesses view their customers as a monolithic group, but this approach overlooks the diversity within your customer base. Instead, think in terms of personas—different types of customers with unique needs. Clarifying your customer personas helps your organization stay aligned on who your customer really is, what they care about, and what their challenges are. Here are a few ways you can approach designing customer personas:

1. New vs. returning customers — Current and prospective customers often have different needs and goals. Returning customers might be segmented by purchase behavior—how much, how often, and in what quantity they buy. Prospective customers might be classified based on a specific goal or attribute.

2. Varying goals between roles & responsibilities — Within new and returning customers, there are different individuals with different roles and responsibilities each with different goals. For example, if you’re a B2B manufacturing business — consider the administrator who schedules meetings. The executive buyer who is selecting the product/service. The supply chain manager who handles logistics. The procurement team who handles contract negotiation and purchase orders. If you’re a B2C business — consider who’s making the buying decision and who the other influencers are in that decision.

3. The customer’s “job-to-be-done” — Instead of focusing solely on what customers are buying or doing, consider what they are ultimately trying to achieve/accomplish (i.e. their “job-to-be-done”). Here’s a quick example. A packaging company might think customers are simply buying packaging to ship products. However, the real job is getting their products safely to their own customers. By understanding this, you can design solutions that address their ultimate needs and goals.

2. Visualize the customer experience & identify pain points.

Once you’ve gathered insights about your customers, it’s helpful to visualize their journey end-to-end so that you can identify key problem areas. There are a lot of ways to do this but the most common are:

1. Customer Journey Map — Outlines every touchpoint with your customer, from the moment they consider your business to when they complete a purchase or service. Here are the basic steps to create a journey map:

   • Map out the journey from start to finish. Identify every customer touchpoint.

   • Identify and categorize challenges across every way that you interact with customers — sales, marketing, service, operations, technology, etc.

2. Service Blueprint — A service blueprint is a detailed map of your customer’s experience, that shows both the front stage (what the customer sees) and the backstage (what happens behind the scenes). It identifies the people, processes, technology/systems/tools, and data that are needed at every step of the experience and highlights gaps/issues throughout. An easy way to understand this is to think about the hotel experience:

   • Front Stage: Customer searches online for a hotel, checks in, enjoys their stay, and checks out.

   • Back Stage: All the processes, technology, and people working behind the scenes to make the experience seamless.

3. Problem identification is critical. Make sure you’re focused on the right problem.

Many businesses rush to solve problems without fully understanding them. It’s crucial to identify the right problem before creating solutions. Some questions to ask yourself as you seek to uncover the right problem(s) to focus on:

• Where is the friction?

• What’s unclear or needlessly complex?

• Where are customers not buying, churning, or bouncing?

• Use the “five whys” technique to drill down to the root cause by repeatedly asking “Why?” until you uncover the core issues and uncover unmet/unspoken needs. For example, “Why is this a problem? Why is that?” Keep asking why until you’re at the root.

Once you have a set of potential problems, take time to quantify the potential impact if you solved them and prioritize based on impact. Think about what creates the most value for your customer and the business. What would the outcome be if you solved the problem? Once you’ve identified the most impactful problem to solve, frame it as a clear problem statement to drive focus and clarity.

4. Generate & prioritize solutions.

Ideation is best done with others. I recommend bringing key stakeholders together in a workshop and using design thinking tools like the “How Might We” exercise to generate a wide range of ideas. For example, “How might we solve this problem?” Once you’ve generated a bunch of potential solutions, group related ones together and prioritize based on what will drive the highest impact with the lowest effort. Also, consider which solution is at the intersection of:

• Desirability: Do customers really need and want it?

• Feasibility: Can you actually build it?

• Viability: Will it drive business results?

Before finalizing a solution, zoom out and consider your business at a macro level to ensure this is driving towards your overarching business goals and priorities. Here is a set of prompts I like to ask. “Imagine it’s a year from now. You’ve had your most successful year ever — what will you have accomplished? How will you know if you’re successful? What might cause you to fail?” Asking these questions will ensure the problem and solution you’ve selected aligns with the vision for your business/team/organization, crystallizes success metrics, and highlights potential risks, issues, and dependencies.

5. Prototype & test your solution with a pilot group.

Design a prototype. This can be both digital and physical. Start with a pilot, proof of concept, or minimum viable product (MVP). Testing doesn’t have to be complex—sometimes, a simple change can reveal valuable insights.

Feedback is key. Create a feedback loop to capture customer responses. Whether through surveys, interviews, or direct observation, gather feedback to refine your solution.

6. The final step — launch, gather insights, & continually improve.

Once tested and validated, roll out the solution to your target audience. But remember, just because you build it, doesn’t mean customers will come. Use effective marketing and communication to create a pull, not a push.

After launching, continually measure the impact, gather insights, and refine your solution. This ongoing process is essential for driving customer loyalty, retention, and acquisition.

Wrapping up

To recap, the key steps in this process are:

1. Understand your customers: Empathize with their needs and challenges.

2. Visualize their journey: Identify every touchpoint and challenge.

3. Identify the right problem: Focus on the most impactful issues.

4. Ideate and prioritize solutions: Consider desirability, feasibility, and viability.

5. Prototype and test: Start with a pilot, gather feedback, and iterate.

6. Launch: Rollout to all customers or a specific segment. Continually measure results, and refine.

Creating an exceptional customer experience is a journey that requires deep understanding, careful planning, and continuous improvement. By empathizing with your customers, you can gain valuable insights into their needs, challenges, and desires. Mapping out their journey allows you to identify critical touch points and pain points, which in turn helps you pinpoint the most impactful problems to solve. Ideation and prioritization are crucial steps, where you balance desirability, feasibility, and viability to design solutions that truly resonate with your customers and drive business success.

Testing and launching these solutions is not the end but the beginning of a cycle of continuous improvement. By gathering feedback, refining your approach, and iterating on your solutions, you ensure that your customer experience evolves to meet changing expectations and stays ahead of the competition. This roadmap—empathize, map, identify, ideate, test, and launch—will guide you in creating experiences that not only satisfy your customers but turn them into loyal advocates.

I hope these tips and tricks give you actionable steps toward enhancing your customer experience 😊 

Onward & upward,

Drew

P.s. If we haven’t met yet, hello! I’m Drew Burdick, a leader in Customer Experience (CX). For over 15 years I’ve worked with organizations of all sizes to enhance their CX and design solutions that drive business results. Have a question? Send me an email or reach out on LinkedIn.