Before you can begin mapping your path forward, you first need to understand where you’re starting from. This first step in this process is therefore about discovery – about developing a baseline understanding of the current state of the customer experience environment within your organization. This includes both an outside-in perspective, such as customers’ perceptions of their experiences or common journeys they undertake with your business, as well as an inside-out perspective, such as which listening posts exist across the organization, which teams and individuals are using customer insights, and what types of brand messages you are broadcasting to the market. Your focus in this step should be simply auditing and documenting the existing state of customer experiences, not judging whether the information you’re uncovering is right or wrong, good or bad.

Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Inventory existing listening posts. In all likelihood, different groups across your organization are already capturing customer feedback and insights in some form. The goal of this activity is to take stock of the customer data and listening posts that already exist across your organization and understand how that information is currently being used. This may include documenting current surveys and feedback channels, the key metrics being tracked, and which teams are responsible for owning and acting on that data. In addition to these more structured forms of customer listening, you may also want to index unstructured feedback from sources like social media posts, contact center transcripts, or user community comments as well as from existing qualitative or quantitative research and operational data.
• Develop an internal stakeholder map. To successfully execute your eventual roadmap, you will need stakeholders across the organization to influence key CX initiatives and lead CX projects. The goal of creating a stakeholder map is to assess the importance and influence of key individuals who will affect your CX program. A stakeholder map provides direction on when and how to engage with the individuals or groups who are vital to the long-term success of your CX program, allowing you to craft more effective communication plans and engagement strategies that will keep these stakeholders aligned with your CX efforts over the long term. Use XM Institute’s Stakeholder Map to guide you.
• Learn from front-line employees and partners. Talk to the employees who support customers along their journey, from sales to service, along with any partners who help you serve your customers. These groups have a lot of important insights about the state of CX – both about the experiences themselves and the operations. You can either do individual interviews or run workshops where you gain insights across three dimensions: 1) What areas of CX are working really well, 2) What areas of CX really need to be improved?, and 3) What opportunities are there to build new differentiation with CX in the future? The goal here is to understand, from the people closest to the customer, where there are pain points and opportunities for experience improvement as well as surface any broken or inefficient processes getting in the way of good CX.
• Identify CX brand promises. Every organization makes a set of implicit and explicit brand promises to customers, including its marketing messages, stated company mission and values, and customer service guidelines. The goal of this step is to identify and catalog these messages so you understand how the organization is setting people’s expectations – either purposefully or inadvertently – around the types of experiences they should expect to have with your organization. Cataloging these promises can be valuable in later steps when you are generating and prioritizing potential CX projects.
• Build understanding of key customer journeys. At the end of the day, fixing individual, isolated touchpoints will only get you so far. Ultimately, to deliver great experiences, you will need to consider customers’ interactions within the context of their broader objectives and activities. The goal here is to first identify the most important journeys customers take with your organization and then understand the current state of those journeys, including how customers feel along those journeys as well as how effectively your internal processes support those journeys. Journey maps are an excellent tool you can use here to not only develop this holistic perspective but also bridge organizational silos and unite CX activities and understanding across the business.

Once you understand where your CX program is starting from, you then need to define where you want it to go. This includes both describing what you want customers’ experiences with your organization to look like in the future as well as how your CX program will need to operate in order to consistently deliver those types of interactions. You should articulate this ideal end state in the form of a CX vision – an aspirational description of how your organization chooses to serve customers. This CX vision will set a standard that employees and leaders can strive for and look to when making decisions that impact experiences. It should act as your North Star, helping to align behaviors and activities as you work to enact customer-centric changes over multiple years and projects. To be effective, this vision must be grounded in the organization’s business and brand objectives and should help it strategically differentiate itself from competitors.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Identify potential levers of CX differentiation. Before you can write a compelling CX vision, you may want to first highlight where there are CX challenges or opportunities your organization could leverage to set it apart from competitors. The goal of this step is to develop a list of potential CX differentiation areas you can take to your executive team to weigh in on. For example, levers of potential differentiation might be, “we want to be the easiest company to buy from,” “we want to be cost leaders,” “we want to produce the highest quality products,” or “we want to have the best delivery process.” Keep in mind that if you are going to gain traction across the organization, you will need to select lever(s) that directly support your organization’s business strategy.
• Align key stakeholders. Regardless of how ambitious or achievable your CX ambitions are, you will need executive commitment to reach them. Their support is essential for aligning investments and activities across the organization and ensuring that the people responsible for executing your roadmap are incentivized to do so. While there is no “right” way to attain this buy-in, one effective method is to hold a workshop for executives (or their direct reports) and the key stakeholders who will need to play a significant role in bringing your roadmap to life. The goal of this session is to develop a unified perspective on the direction and objectives of your CX program and then secure the commitment necessary to achieve those aspirations.
• Write a CX Vision Statement. Once you have aligned your leadership team – plus any other relevant stakeholders – around the overall goals of your CX program, we recommend writing a short and simple vision statement. The goal here is to capture, in about two to three sentences, how your organization aspires to treat its customers. This statement should be heavy on inspiration and emotion and should reflect your organization’s unique value proposition to customers. Taking the time to define your CX vision will not only help codify a North Star within your CX program, but also acts as an elevator pitch you can share with people across your organization to build understanding, alignment, and commitment.
• Identify barriers blocking the CX vision. After you’ve defined a clear CX vision, it’s a good idea to share it with key stakeholders to get their feedback and support. Meet with individual business owners and ask them to flag any potential obstacles they anticipate getting in the way of their group’s ability to deliver on this CX aspiration. The goal here is twofold. First, it allows you to surface potential barriers so you can proactively plan ways to address them. Second, it helps you start connecting each group’s individual goals and activities to the broader CX vision. This not only reinforces the link between their work and the customer experience your organization delivers, but it also demonstrates your team’s willingness to understand their constraints and support their specific objectives.

Organizations don’t achieve their CX vision overnight. It often takes years and requires leaders and employees across the organization to develop new skills and change their mindsets and behaviors. So once you know where your CX program is starting from and where it’s headed, you then need to assess your organization’s ability to execute your customer experience vision and future roadmap. This includes understanding what CX competencies and skills are already in place across the business as well as which ones you will need to build in order to reach your CX goals. It also includes evaluating organizational factors that may help or hinder your customer experience efforts, such as your company culture and technological capabilities. These assessments will help you inform stakeholders about the breadth of efforts required to achieve your CX vision and realistically plan and scope the projects in your roadmap.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Complete a CX Maturity Assessment. The XM Operating Framework provides a blueprint for building your organization’s customer XM capabilities. As you master the framework’s six XM Competencies, you will progress through five stages of maturity. Use the CX Maturity Assessment to evaluate how you are currently performing in each of these Competencies and Skills and determine where your CX program currently falls across the five maturity stages. The goal here is to identify your existing CX strengths and weaknesses, helping you surface gaps between your baseline capabilities and where you ultimately need to be to reach your CX vision. This assessment will also help you uncover where there are already strengths and skillsets that you could capitalize on to accelerate your roadmap to completion.
• Socialize Maturity Model and results. A maturity assessment not only provides a structured approach for identifying and quantifying your organization’s existing CX strengths and weaknesses, but it is also a valuable communication tool. It will help you create internal alignment around common customer experience terminology and the essential capabilities required to derive value from your CX efforts. It will also help you convey the range of activities required to do CX well. The goal here is to use the maturity model as a means of setting and aligning expectations with key stakeholders across the business, so everyone understands what is required in order to achieve your stated CX vision.
• Identify cultural headwinds and tailwinds. An organization’s culture shapes how people think, believe, and act. Achieving your CX vision will almost certainly require a number of individuals and groups across your organization to adjust how they perform their everyday roles. How supportive or unsupportive your culture is of these changes will therefore significantly impact the speed and success of your roadmap’s implementation. The goal here is to identify existing cultural tailwinds you could tap into to accelerate your CX projects and initiatives as well as potential headwinds you are likely to encounter, allowing you to proactively plan for overcoming those challenges.
• Uncover key technology gaps. Technology is an essential component of any successful CX program as it enables the organization to collect, understand, and take action on customer experience and operational data. The goal here is to identify technology investments your organization will need to make to bring its CX vision to life. This could include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer data analytics platforms, contact center software, or a more comprehensive experience management operating system. To uncover these technology gaps, we recommend partnering with your IT department and the groups you spoke to in Step 1 who are already collecting CX data in some form.

Not every customer or experience is equally important to your business. If you try to make every person happy during every interaction, you’re going to end up diluting your CX efforts and wasting precious human and financial resources on improvements that don’t lead to tangible business results. Therefore, in this step, you are identifying – out of the universe of potential experiences you could improve – which ones are most vital to realizing your CX vision and, by extension, your organization’s broader business and brand objectives. Determining which experiences warrant the most attention will not only help ensure you allocate your resources effectively, but because they are explicitly tied to wider business aims, it will also drive strategic alignment around your CX efforts.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Examine business-critical challenges. One way to identify experience gaps is to start with the most acute business challenges your organization is facing. For example, is there a recurring issue with a specific product or process? Is high agent turnover in the contact center resulting in higher costs and lower customer satisfaction? Are renewals down with a certain segment of customers? The goal here is to surface problems and bugs that are disproportionately affecting customer loyalty and your organization’s financial results. There are a number of different sources you can tap into to find these critical issues, including your listening post inventory from Step 1, areas of weakness on your maturity assessment in Step 3, moments of truth on existing journey maps, priority focus areas for the executive team, or even just conversations with influential business owners across the organization.
• Highlight opportunities for competitive differentiation. In addition to challenges that must be addressed to keep experiences on par with expectations, in this step, you may also want to identify where there are untapped opportunities to deliver standout experiences that will set you apart from your competitors. For instance, you could build a sophisticated digital chat strategy that reduces customer effort and diverts calls from your contact center. You could invest in developing a cutting-edge new product feature that delights customers or automates a repetitive task to free up frontline employees’ time and energy to better engage customers. The goal here is to pinpoint a few specific areas where meaningful improvements will set you apart from competitors. Which opportunities you choose should flow directly from your CX vision and the levers of differentiation you identified in Step 2.
• Uncover key drivers of customer loyalty. If your organization already has some customer experience and operational metrics in place, you can use driver analysis to identify which potential moments or variables most impact customer attitudes and behaviors. The goal here is to determine, in a quantitative way, which factors disproportionately affect key CX and business outcomes so you know where to focus your improvement efforts. For example, if you are a hotel chain, you might find that the factors which most influence guest satisfaction or likelihood to return are room cleanliness and staff friendliness, so you should focus on improving those specific areas.
• Create customer journey maps. While you hopefully looked at customer journeys in Step 1, you’ll want to do more detailed journey mapping at this point to identify specific areas where the organization should drive change. Because journey maps help illustrate how customers view their experiences with an organization by putting individual interactions within the context of customers’ broader objectives, motivations, and activities, they are a particularly valuable tool for both diagnosing pain points along a customer’s journey and identifying unmet – and often unexpressed – customer needs that could be translated into new or improved products, services, or interactions. They also help pinpoint key “moments of truth” that disproportionately impact customer perceptions and loyalty. The goal here is to use these journey maps to identify critical experience gaps or opportunities you could address through CX projects in your roadmap.

At this point in the process, you should have a general idea of which areas you will need to focus on in order to achieve your CX vision. In this step, you are taking all the information you’ve amassed in previous steps – your levers for CX differentiation, the results of your CX maturity assessment, your catalog of key experience gaps – and you’re translating those general opportunities into a set of defined CX activities, ranked in the order you plan on tackling them. This requires you to first create an expansive list of potential projects that could address those opportunities. Then, using a set of criteria derived from your CX vision and business objectives, prioritize that list to determine which CX projects to include in your roadmap and in what order.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Define strategic CX initiatives. Before you begin creating a list of potential CX projects, it might be valuable to identify a few strategic customer experience initiatives. These initiatives should describe – at a high-level – your plan for achieving some aspect of your CX vision. For example, if your vision is to be the easiest company to buy from, your CX initiatives might be to increase digital self-service, improve inefficient processes, and build a CX training program for all frontline employees. CX initiatives are usually broad enough to span multiple departments, quarters, and projects, and they should reflect, not just your CX vision, but the experience and capabilities gaps you’ve identified in previous steps. The goal of defining these strategic initiatives is twofold. First, concentrating on a select few initiatives that tie directly into your CX vision will make it easier for you to demonstrate business results. Second, these initiatives will help you bridge the gap between your big-picture CX vision and the smaller, more specific tasks that will eventually populate your roadmap.
• Create an inventory of potential CX projects. To further connect the dots between your CX vision and the activities you include in your roadmap, we recommend creating a list of potential CX projects that could drive your CX initiatives forward. In the same way that CX initiatives break down your CX vision into smaller, more actionable streams of effort, CX projects do the same for your initiatives. Consequently, CX projects tend to be operational and contained, involving fewer teams and shorter time horizons. They are also more plentiful and diverse. The projects you identify here could address the experience gaps uncovered, the CX capabilities you need to build based on your maturity assessment results, or internal process or operations improvements. For instance, if a strategic CX initiative is around increasing digital self-service, potential CX projects might include updating content in the help center, improving in-app navigation, and building a chatbot. The goal here is to generate a fairly substantial inventory of potential CX projects, which you should then run through a prioritization exercise and use to fill in your eventual roadmap. We recommend using our CX Project Evaluation Inventory tool to capture and maintain a list of potential projects as well as our Prioritizing Improvements Across CX Skills and Actions worksheet and the “typical CX actions” in our CX Maturity Assessment to generate ideas for potential projects.
• Do a prioritization exercise to rank potential projects. Once you have an inventory of potential CX projects, you then need to determine which ones to enact and in what order. A common and effective way of doing this is through a prioritization exercise, such as XM Institute’s CX Project Prioritization Exercise. This tool will help you compare and rank your list of CX projects according to criteria that are important to your organization, usually 4-8 with a mix of customer-oriented and business-oriented factors. The goal of this exercise is to – in an objective and systematic way – order your list of potential CX projects from those that are most critical to achieving your CX and business objectives to those that are least critical to achieving those objectives. This exercise is particularly valuable when used in conjunction with the CX Project Evaluation Inventory above, and we recommend involving key stakeholders – especially senior leaders – in the prioritization process where possible.
• Socialize and validate priorities. Once you have ordered each of the proposed CX projects based on their priority rating, socialize this list across the organization. If you haven’t already, seek input from the executives and key business owners who will be involved in bringing your CX roadmap to life. The goal here is to secure organizational buy-in and to ensure that the projects you are prioritizing support broader company and line-of-business objectives. This is vital as, without the endorsement of senior stakeholders, you run the risk of your team prioritizing a CX project, only to have critical collaborators – like IT, HR, or engineering – omit it from their priority list. Commitment from the top will help ensure cross-functional alignment on these projects as well as help overcome any operational restrictions or barriers you identified in Step 2.

You have arrived at the final step of building a CX program roadmap! By the time you arrive here, you should have a CX vision statement, a completed CX Maturity Assessment with your overall maturity and competency levels, and a list of high-priority CX projects. In this step, you are sequencing your list of CX projects in a roadmap template to create a visual representation of the blueprint you expect to follow over the next two to five years to achieve your CX vision. Keep in mind this roadmap will change and evolve as projects are completed and new priorities surface, so you will need to be prepared to revisit and adapt your roadmap on an ongoing basis.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Choose a timeframe for your roadmap. The stretch of time your roadmap covers will depend on a number of different factors, including your business cadence, how ambitious your CX vision is, where you’re starting from, your level of organizational commitment, and broader industry and environmental factors. We recommend that your roadmap scopes out somewhere between two to five years of CX projects, which when taken together, should drive your CX initiatives and achieve your CX vision. You can choose to put in place time markers at annual, bi-annual, or quarterly time periods. The goal here is to choose a timeframe that is long-term enough to provide you with a clear view of what’s to come but not so long-term that the far-future projects become meaningless.
• Select a roadmap design. Pick a roadmap documentation format. While roadmap templates abound, the goal here is to choose a design that is appealing, consumable, and on-brand for your organization. We recommend connecting with other XM program teams – including employee, product, and brand experience groups – to collaborate on a consistent visual design, format, and language for the roadmap. We also advise keeping your roadmap to a single page (or creating a one-page version of the document), so you can use it as a communication tool to share plans for your CX program with the rest of your organization.
• Add CX projects into the roadmap template. Take your list of prioritized CX projects and map them into your roadmap template. You will likely need to break them down into smaller tasks, each with its own timeline, goals, owners, milestones, expected business outcomes, and metrics for success. If you completed a CX Project Evaluation Inventory in Step 5, you likely already have many of these key details for each activity. We recommend working from right (long-term) to left (short-term), with the nearer-term activities more fleshed out and defined. The goal here is to create a visual representation of your tactical plan for completing each CX project, which – when added all together – should result in your company delivering your CX vision.
• Secure stakeholder commitment and resources. Once you have a draft roadmap, take it back to your key stakeholders and the groups who will be responsible for executing specific CX tasks to secure their support of the project plan. Check with them that there is sufficient time, tools, technology, headcount, and budget to accomplish the stated business objectives in the given timelines. For near-term projects, set up a regular meeting cadence to make sure you are on track to hit the milestones you’ve laid out. This may require a separate meeting or could be folded into existing CX governance activities. The goal here is to ensure that everyone who is responsible for bringing your roadmap to life is aligned with the plan and understands what’s expected of them and when.