A roadmap is a plan that defines company intentions covering all aspects of business operations into the future. It includes goals, milestones, and strategies to ensure the company is aligning itself with a customer-centric approach. Here, I explain why you should create a customer-centric roadmap, how to do it, how to follow it, and how to know it’s effective.
Why Create a Customer-Centric Roadmap?
An experience renaissance is afoot — one phone number list that is galvanizing companies to push beyond the CX philosophy and organize the whole business around the delivery of exceptional experiences. This movement is based on customer needs and demands. If a company wants to remain competitive, it must acknowledge this critical trend.
Without a clear strategy, a company may miss the mark, displease customers, and watch helplessly as they defect to a competitor. Losing customers means losing credibility, revenue, and the free social media marketing that comes from highly satisfied customers, otherwise known as raving fans.
Steps for Creating Your Roadmap
Use these steps as a starting point to create your roadmap:
- Understand your customers. Through data and direct customer feedback, gain a thorough understanding of what customers want and need. You might have to do some inferring about what their actions are telling you. For example, numerous complaints about lost packages may lead you to realize you need a different shipping company.
- Create customer journeys. The roadmap social media agencies in bucaramanga should take you through each touchpoint a customer is likely to have with your company, including discovery, consideration, purchase, and customer care. Examine all of these components separately to determine how you can do better at each one.
- Develop improvement goals. When you have understood your customers and examined how you can better meet their needs, set goals to do so. Make each goal measurable and manageable. For instance, do you need more team members? A new customer relationship management (CRM) system? A change in R&D processes?
- Assign timelines and milestones. Determine which goals are most pressing and put them at the top of your list. Develop timelines for each one, including a likely completion date. Then capture milestones — that is, interim steps to help you reach your goal, such as exploring possible CRM systems.
- Revisit your roadmap. No business plan can be written in stone. You must account for changes in the market, technology, innovation, and customer needs over time. Revisit your roadmap at least once per year to ensure every part of it is aligned with customer needs and customer-centric company values.
Best Practices
The following best practices may be part of your roadmap, or simply actions you can take to support it:
Hire customer-centric employees. Customers’ interactions with employees can make or break the entirety of their experience. You can chile business directory always teach team members about your products or services but it’s much harder to teach true empathy and a willingness to do what it takes to make things right. Look for those qualities in potential workers.
Build company culture around customer care. Implement incentives that encourage employees to continue to outshine themselves. For example, hold a contest for the most innovative way of helping a customer. Give the team member that wins something of value such as a gift card or time off.