As a consultancy doing work across many types of projects and with many and varied organisations, we are exposed to the good and the bad of how organisations run what we call customer-facing business improvement projects. These projects are looking to generate improved business performance by designing a new or improving an interaction at key touchpoints.

Recently, we’ve started to collate some thinking around how to optimise these projects. We’ve drawn on our own learnings as well as  intelligence from a broad spectrum of smart thinkers around this area: Adaptive Path on feasibility and impact trade-off scoring and linking behaviour and financials, Cooper on personas, De Bono on lateral thinking and Blue Ocean Strategy team of Kim and Mauborgne on evaluating innovations. This isn’t a dialogue about project management, it is seven easily implementable ideas on what we believe every business should build into these customer-facing improvement projects.

1. Prioritise a specific set of customers in a channel using feasibility and impact trade-off scoring. This will avoid a generic ‘everything to everyone, nothing to no-one’  focus. In every channel some people are more important and more malleable than others, you need to focus on these people and king-hit the opportunity.

2. Establish the link between key financial metrics and customer behaviours.  This is great thinking from Adaptive Path around identifying the specific customer behaviours that directly affect the business’ financial metrics in that channel.

3. Use ethnographics to enable you to go ‘deeper’ into the mindset of customers. Ethnographics is the art of observation and gets around the issue of what people say they do and what they actually do do as being sometimes a tad different.

4. Use personas to model the target customer, their needs and goals around the specific behaviour from the insights. John Cooper created them to put the user at the centre of software development, but they can be used for development work in any channel. They are superb for getting affinity with the customer from all stakeholders.

5. Visualise the whole journey and prioritise touchpoints in the channel from a customer’s point of view.  We’ve created a journey map that in one page brings to together the stages of the journey, the customer’s emotional state, the value drivers, the prioritised touchpouints and a sense of competitive vulnerabilities or advantage at points across across the journey.

6. Use creative thinking tools that get to ground-breaking opportunities. De Bono was a pioneer thinker around the limitation of the human brain to generate breakthrough ideas and how the use of thinking tools help the brain break free from conventional thinking and move onto truly lateral ideas.

7. Judge ideas on both feasibility and impact in the context of a limited pool of resources. More Adaptive Path trade-off scoring where a group can get to prioritised ideas very quickly ensuring they’ll both work and can be done.

If you want more explanation around any of these our white paper on optimising customer-facing business improvement projects is available here.