EA Approach to Customer Experience Design
In my first article in this series we introduced the need for an architectural approach and foundation to digitisation, transformation and the delivery of exceptional customer experience within the financial services industry. We will now take a closer look at how to set the vision and shape the strategic direction such that customers want to use your products and services, and employees feel highly engaged within your organisation.
Across nearly all industries, a brand's value is increasingly dependent on the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.
In fact, services-oriented industries are those with the most burning need to create superb experiences that surround the direct (transactional) engagement.
Whether they’re in wealth management, business asset financing, general retail banking, insurance, or anything in-between, financial services firms will only remain relevant by continually delighting their customers. For this reason, embedding experience design into every facet of their services has become the mantra for any forward-thinking financial services organisation.
But – with often millions of customers to look after – so many financial organisations are struggling to translate these lofty ideals into tangible reality.
As noted by this Open Group paper titled ‘Roads to a digital customer experience’ new technologies "are rendering obsolete the traditional frameworks and models that companies have been using to capture and design customer journeys and customer experiences”.
The answer? Start with the architectural building blocks
It’s only by developing the right architectures, processes, and systems that the organisation’s customer experience vision can find solid footing. By taking an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach to experience design, the vision becomes a defined set of behaviours, incentives, and operational processes.
"By taking an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach to experience design, the vision becomes a defined set of behaviours, incentives, and operational processes."
Ultimately, this spawns a new culture of customer-centricity that delivers meaningful enhancements to customers’ experiences. Empowered by new technologies and unshackled from outdated ways-of-working, staff are given the tools to execute on the customer experience vision.
EA enables the organisation to build a clear roadmap to transition from its current state, to its desired target state – by looking through the lenses of Business, Information, Data, Applications, and Technology (BIDAT).
By developing the roadmap in the context of these five domains, the organisation can pinpoint exactly how EA can facilitate the organisation’s goals of delivering exceptional customer experiences.
It unearths the complex inter-relationships within the organisation that impact customer experience, supports those that are responsible for designing and implementing the change.
For instance, EA helps firms understand where their customers’ data is housed, helps to eliminate duplications of this content, or identify overlapping systems that are trying to achieve the same objectives.
Ensure the brand and vision are guiding behaviour
As the financial services organisation moves from a product focus, to a customer experience focus, it becomes imperative to look at the internal company culture – and eliminate the ways-of-working, cultures and habits that are no longer competitive.
This requires all areas of the organisation to come together and agree on the vision, and the definition of the target state that everyone will work towards.
By taking a transformative, almost ‘entrepreneurial’ approach to one’s operations, it becomes possible to start optimising and digitising processes, and decluttering wherever inefficiencies exist.
At a foundational level, EA enables the organisation to clearly delineate and distinguish between one’s functions, processes and capabilities.
EA enables the organisation’s leadership to link roles to processes, generate useful process guides, and define the training needs analysis for those various roles. Not only does this give individuals clear career paths; it also reduces the costs of producing training material (now that roles and processes are clarified and standardised).
In our next article, we will discuss ways in which the conventional customer engagement model is under threat.
