General CX

The CX by Design Process: How We Work

One of the first things people ask us about the CX process is “How does it work?”. We get this question from prospective clients, business contacts, and basically anyone who is curious about the process behind improving the customer experience. 

Maybe you’re thinking about connecting with a CX consultancy and you want to know what to expect. Or maybe you want to start investigating your own CX journey. Either way, this series is for you. We’ll start with a broad overview of our entire process, and then we’ll dive into the details of each phase.

By the end of this series, you’ll understand our CX by Design process from start to finish.

Before CX by Design: Questioning the Customer Journey

The CX consulting process starts well before any consultants are contacted. It starts with someone realizing there are gaps in their business – gaps that they aren’t sure how to address. Maybe there are bottlenecks in business processes, slowdowns in response times, or a lack of customer engagement or satisfaction.

In short, something’s not right. At this point, the businessperson starts to investigate the problem and potential solutions. Eventually, they contact CX by Design with an issue that needs to be fixed. We consider this Day 0.

We’ll go into this journey more deeply in the next article. For now, let’s move on to the next stages in the CX process.

An Overview of the CX by Design process

First of all, it’s important to know that most of our clients are long-term engagements; we generally stay with a project for a minimum of six months. And we consider ourselves partners, not just consultants – we continue to support our clients as long as they need our help.

1. Defining the problem. This is where we come in. You might say this section is about identifying gaps and opportunities, but there’s a lot more that happens. We start by deeply understanding the company, its processes, and its customers. Then we create documentation and plans to clearly articulate the problem and how we’ll work together to fix it. This happens during Days 1-9.
2. Getting to work. Now that we’ve established a framework, we start by determining which business processes and metrics to track. We also discuss how we’ll measure them. And we start closing critical gaps in our client’s processes. This starts on Day 10 and carries on in two-week sprints until Week 10.
3. Prioritizing and addressing surfaced problems. Normally, new issues will surface during the first ten weeks of a project. We deal with these new issues as we continue to adjust and optimize our clients’ processes. We also start CX training and onboarding for our client’s teams. This takes place during Month 3 and onward. 
4. Establishing CX programs and best practices. Towards the end of our engagement, we’ll help our clients’ fledgling CX team create best practices and guidelines. This happens around Months 6-10.
5. Looking to the future. By now, there’s a CX-first mindset throughout the organization, and a basic, sustainable CX program is in place. The clients’ CX team is set for success, but we’re not going to leave them in the lurch. It’s time for our Above and Beyond CX program, which includes additional training and guidance as well as help with tricky CX issues. 

Up Next: A Deeper Dive Into Questioning the Customer Journey

As you’ve probably guessed, the CX process is too complex to sum up in a single blog post. We’ll start digging into the details in our next article. What triggers a potential client to reach out to a CX consultant? What questions do they have? And what does that initial contact look like? We’ll answer that in The CX by Design process, Day 0: Questioning the customer journey.