Rik Reppe, advisory partner at PwC’s The Difference, summarizes the crux of most CX practices today by saying, “[As a CX pro] you may have 1,000 projects you could do, 100 projects you should do, and 10 projects you can do.” So which ones do you do – and more importantly, which ones do you say no to?

For a customer experience (CX) transformation to take hold and drive sustainable gains, CX pros must proactively assess and manage multiple projects, often conflicting stakeholder interests, limited budgets, and constrained resources.

Prioritization draws from customer research, CX measurement, a roster of projects, the corporate strategy, and the CX vision. Once this groundwork is in place, CX professionals can stand up the competency in a short amount of time.

Forrester believes that developing a rigorous approach to prioritizing these CX projects and programs can help — and could even be the catalyst that moves a CX Index score from good to great. At its core, this CX management maturity competency requires CX transformation leaders to focus on what’s most important for their customers’ experience and their business’ success. The two essential activities it involves are:

  • Identifying and ranking your most important customer groups, journeys, and interactions.
  • Allocating company resources based on what matters most to both your customers and your organization.

By drawing from customer research, CX measurement, corporate strategy, and CX vision, CX pros can frame the parameters of a basic but effective prioritization approach. Forrester recommends starting with a simple scorecard to grade the relative importance of initiatives. An initial CX prioritization approach begins with the three core categories of customer impact, business impact, and feasibility.

To progress to the next level of prioritization, CX pros need to build on the three fundamental categories by adding a forth dimension, risk, and introducing more granularity to the assessment questions.

Remember that the overall objective of CX prioritization is to create a tool that will empower the CX professional with a rationale for saying yes — or saying no to projects that don’t fit the priority criteria. Once you have developed the categories and criteria, you can share the tool across the organization as a link or a short project intake survey to help the respective stakeholders assess their own CX projects.

For specific recommendations, tool templates and company recommendations – take a look at our series of CX Prioritization reports for Forrester’s CX transformation playbook:

Prioritize Your CX Efforts By Three Categories

Power Prioritization Decisions With A Dynamic Tool