Creating a Customer Experience Roadmap

⏱️ How To Measure UX (https://lnkd.in/e5ueDtZY), a practical guide on how to use UX benchmarking, SUS, SUPR-Q, UMUX-LITE, CES, UEQ to eliminate bias and gather statistically reliable results — with useful templates and resources. By Roman Videnov. Measuring UX is mostly about showing cause and effect. Of course, management wants to do more of what has already worked — and it typically wants to see ROI > 5%. But the return is more than just increased revenue. It’s also reduced costs, expenses and mitigated risk. And UX is an incredibly affordable yet impactful way to achieve it. Good design decisions are intentional. They aren’t guesses or personal preferences. They are deliberate and measurable. Over the last years, I’ve been setting ups design KPIs in teams to inform and guide design decisions. Here are some examples: 1. Top tasks success > 80% (for critical tasks) 2. Time to complete top tasks < 60s (for critical tasks) 3. Time to first success < 90s (for onboarding) 4. Time to candidates < 120s (nav + filtering in eCommerce) 5. Time to top candidate < 120s (for feature comparison) 6. Time to hit the limit of free tier < 7d (for upgrades) 7. Presets/templates usage > 80% per user (to boost efficiency) 8. Filters used per session > 5 per user (quality of filtering) 9. Feature adoption rate > 80% (usage of a new feature per user) 10. Time to pricing quote < 2 weeks (for B2B systems) 11. Application processing time < 2 weeks (online banking) 12. Default settings correction < 10% (quality of defaults) 13. Search results quality > 80% (for top 100 most popular queries) 14. Service desk inquiries < 35/week (poor design → more inquiries) 15. Form input accuracy ≈ 100% (user input in forms) 16. Time to final price < 45s (for eCommerce) 17. Password recovery frequency < 5% per user (for auth) 18. Fake email frequency < 2% (for email newsletters) 19. First contact resolution < 85% (quality of service desk replies) 20. “Turn-around” score < 1 week (frustrated users → happy users) 21. Environmental impact < 0.3g/page request (sustainability) 22. Frustration score < 5% (AUS + SUS/SUPR-Q + Lighthouse) 23. System Usability Scale > 75 (overall usability) 24. Accessible Usability Scale (AUS) > 75 (accessibility) 25. Core Web Vitals ≈ 100% (performance) Each team works with 3–4 local design KPIs that reflects the impact of their work, and 3–4 global design KPIs mapped against touchpoints in a customer journey. Search team works with search quality score, onboarding team works with time to success, authentication team works with password recovery rate. What gets measured, gets better. And it gives you the data you need to monitor and visualize the impact of your design work. Once it becomes a second nature of your process, not only will you have an easier time for getting buy-in, but also build enough trust to boost UX in a company with low UX maturity. [more in the comments ↓] #ux #metrics

Roadmaps are not one-size-fits-all. They should be tailored to each team. Why? Because roadmaps aren’t just timelines, they’re communication tools. And what you communicate depends on your audience. Consider these examples: - Product Development Teams need detailed, execution-focused roadmaps. Think engineering commitments by quarter, discovery vs. delivery status, and alignment on what’s coming next. - Sales Teams are looking for big-picture stories. They need to know which features will excite customers and when they might expect them. These roadmaps focus on value propositions rather than granular details. - Leadership needs a strategic view. Roadmaps for them focus on initiatives and capacity planning, linking back to the company's broader vision and goals. To create all these roadmap versions effectively, we need collaboration between product operations and product teams. That way, each roadmap serves its specific purpose and audience. Take Rebecca’s example from my Product Operations book with Denise Tilles. By keeping these roadmaps aligned with business rationale, she was able to bridge the gap between sales expectations and product realities, building trust and transparency across the organization. She also introduced a clear framework for sharing feature status across teams. This included stages like Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and GA. Understanding these phases ensures that everyone, from sales to engineering, knows the real status of a product feature and can communicate that clearly to customers. The magic happens when product operations steps up to support these efforts. By providing tools and frameworks, ProductOps help teams to align their roadmaps with strategic intents and prevent the kind of overselling that happens when teams aren’t on the same page. In short, roadmaps aren't just plans, they’re how you build alignment. How are you tailoring roadmaps for different departments in your organization? Let me know in the comments!

I used to believe Customer Success should drive the product roadmap. Here’s what I know now. The roadmap should be a collaborative design, built by Sales, CS, Support, Product, Marketing, and Leadership together. No one team sees the full picture. ▶️ Marketing sees market shifts. ▶️ Sales hears why deals are lost. ▶️ Leadership ties it all to strategy. ▶️ Product builds scalable solutions. ▶️ Support sees recurring pain points. ▶️ CS sees where customers struggle. When we isolate roadmap ownership, we build for one team. When we collaborate, we build for the entire business. Want true collaboration? Set it up intentionally: 1️⃣ Monthly cross-functional planning meetings: Bring leaders together to align on customer feedback, market signals, and business priorities. 2️⃣ Voice of Customer (VoC) programs: Collect real user feedback consistently — surveys, interviews, success metrics. 3️⃣ Closed-lost analysis with Sales: Review why deals are lost and what patterns could inform the roadmap. 4️⃣ Support ticket and escalation reviews: Identify top friction points that need attention. 5️⃣ Market research and trend studies: Analyze competitor moves and emerging trends quarterly. 6️⃣ Executive alignment sessions: Validate that roadmap priorities map directly to company strategy. The roadmap shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a shared vision. One that every team feels connected to — and proud of. How does your company approach roadmap collaboration today? Because if you're only building with one team's input, you're only solving one piece of the puzzle. ____________________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share learnings, advice and strategies from my experience going from CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

Google dropped a fairly massive announcement at ‘NRF 2026’ the other day that signals a fundamental shift in how we need to be thinking about CX. Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for CX and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Instead of passive chatbots that just answer FAQs, these are multimodal agents capable of "seeing" (analyzing images of broken products), "reasoning" (deciding on the best replacement based on inventory), and, most importantly, and "acting" (executing checkouts and returns across different platforms like Shopify and Salesforce). The "customer" entering your digital storefront might soon be a Google Agent acting on behalf of a human. If your business strategy is solely built for human eyes and human clicks, you’ll eventually become invisible to high-intent buyers. Three Things You Need to Start Doing: (1) Audit Your Data Structure: Task your digital team this week to review if your product catalog, real-time inventory, and return policies are accessible via API, or structured data that an external agent can parse. If the agent can't "read" you, it can't "buy" from you. (2) Map the "Machine Customer" Journey: It's time to draft your first "Agent Journey." What happens when an AI tries to negotiate a return or find a product bundle? Where does the friction exist? If your site requires a captcha or complex visual navigation to buy, you’ll blocking the agent. (3) Focus on "Resolution" vs "Deflection" Stop celebrating high deflection rates. The new metric is ‘Autonomous Resolution’. Start measuring how many complex service tickets (returns, exchanges, modifications) can be fully resolved without a human agent and without the customer leaving the chat interface. The interface will be evolving, maybe even disappearing; meaning the future of CX may just be about designing better protocols as much as it is journeys. But cool tech aside, just building and launching agents won't deliver a better shopping experience. If Google's Agent Studio doesn't come with the right governance and embedded design guidelines, your customer's experience will just be fragmented and supercharged with AI. How are you preparing your teams for the rise of the machine customer? This could change your Corporate Real Estate team's view on finally developing that Customer Experience Lab for you and your team! #customerexperience #NRF2026 #innovation #ai

Are you applying product thinking to how you design people experiences? Then may I add some ingredients to what you’re cooking up. Because while product thinking is powering up PX, transformational experiences need a bit more than that. From spending the last decade working with teams in this space, I’ve boiled it down to three key ingredients (which is tough, because this space is complex, messy and beautiful, but here we go): 🛠 Product thinking 🎭 Service design skills 🤝 Facilitation = Experiences that deliver results, for your people and business. If you’re thinking, “WTF do those words mean?” - fair. PX can be a jargon-fuelled frenzy. So, I mapped it out (and not just so I can finally explain my job to my pals). Here's how these ingredients come to life using the double-diamond framework as a familiar structure to get us started: 🛠 Product thinking: A structured, actionable and measurable way to test, iterate & improve people experiences. 🎭 Service design: Aligning the front stage customer AND employee experiences with the backstage systems, process and tech that make it viable. 🤝 Facilitation: PX doesn’t work in a vacuum, often it's a teams confidence in the application and advocacy that means PX initiatives can wobble. Bringing the right people along for the ride through curated conversations, safe spaces, and feedback loops build confidence and buy-in. But great PX design isn’t just about how. It’s about who and why. 👑 Leadership: They set the tone, make the hard calls, and need to be in the journey, not just (begrudgingly) signing off budget. 🫶 Engagement: People don't resist change, they resist being changed without involvement. Build understanding and capabilities beyond your people team (come-on, they've got enough on their plates) Cross-functional collaboration, specialised squads, show and tells and feedback loops are key. 🎯 Purpose & mission: Keep the goalposts clear while allowing creativity and play in execution. If people don't know why something matters and how it contributes to the bigger goal, it won't stick. 📏 Values: Your design principles - guardrails that shape experiences unique to your organisation, ensuring your experiences standout from the rest. 🔽 I designed this diagram to show how it all fits together. But don’t be daunted - PX isn’t about doing everything at once. It’s about knowing where you're at, what your people and business need, and applying the right tools at the right pace, then test, review and adapt to set up your style. So, PX friends, what do we think? Natalie Pearce, Megan Trotter, Luke O'Mahoney, Jessica Z., Mark Lewis, Marie Krebs, Matt McFarlane, JooBee Yeow, PhD, Natalie Lineton, Lauren Gomes, Vanessa Monsequeira - चित्रलेखा ---- ⬆️ This is a snapshot into how I work with leaders & people ops teams to design transformational experiences. Want to learn more? Follow along or DM me 💌 #PeopleExperience #DesignThinking #ServiceDesign #ProductThinking

It surprises me how many e-commerce brands pretend to offer a personalized storefront, but show the same store to everyone. The attached visual that shows what a modern storefront actually looks like behind the scenes, which is a simple system that reacts in real time. Thought it would be useful to break this down into three stages with the recommended tech stack below: Stage 1: Signals (data in) You capture (live) what’s already happening the moment someone arrives. How they got there, what they’re doing, what device they’re on, and whether they’ve bought before. Typical stack: • Segment or RudderStack for event capture • Shopify events and customer data • Google Tag Manager • Meta / TikTok UTMs for paid context Focus on clean, real-time signals without overengineering identity. Stage 2: Decisions (what to show) Those signals get turned into a simple decision immediately. Which message, which products, which path makes sense for this visitor right now. If it’s not fast enough to change the first screen, it doesn’t count. Typical stack: • Dynamic Yield or Nosto • Vercel edge logic • Cloudflare Workers • Simple rules or light models, not heavy AI Remember, speed beats sophistication. Stage 3: Experience (what changes) The storefront responds on arrival. The hero, first product grid, and primary CTA change instantly so the site feels relevant from the first moment. Typical stack: • Shopify Hydrogen or native Shopify sections • Contentful or Optimizely • Server-side or edge-rendered changes, not client-side flicker Important, personalize above the fold first. A returning high-value customer sees new arrivals and a faster path to checkout. A first-time visitor from paid sees a clearer offer and fewer choices. A deal-driven shopper sees bundles and savings upfront. Everything else comes later. If you want to start without overengineering: • Pick the two audiences that matter most • Personalize only the hero and first product grid • Measure lift on conversion rate and revenue per session • Add complexity only after this works Start simple: focus on one working example that proves the storefront can adapt in real time in a way customers actually feel.

Meetings cut in half. Escalations down 75%. No new tools required. A cross-functional marketing team at a major global retailer was drowning: only 22% thought their meetings were a good use of time, and just 39% understood the metrics they were being evaluated against. No calendar audit fixed it. What did? Getting their team working norms aligned, starting with cross-functional goals. With help from Sacha Connor at Virtual Work Insider, the team worked through five intensive 90-minute sessions over two months. Three focus areas made the difference: 🔹 Align goals before anything else. They mapped KPIs side by side and found one function's top priority barely registered for the other. They worked to get aligned, and shared understanding of team metrics went from 39% to 83%. 🔹 Clarify decision rights first. Designated points of contact absorbed a brutal 15:1 staffing ratio, without adding headcount. It also cut down on meetings ("where are we on X") and reduced escalations by 75%! 🔹 Create norms for communication. One rule on Teams: drop an eyeball emoji to acknowledge you've seen a message. Information-flow effectiveness jumped from 41% to 83%. As Sacha put it about Team Working Agreements: most companies put a toolkit on the intranet, maybe a couple teams download it, work through the logistics and call it done. It's not. Three-quarters of teams have never established formal norms. If you're about to layer AI on top of that foundation, you're building on sand. 👉 Full case study in today's newsletter, linked in comments What's actually standing in the way of your team doing this work? #Meetings #Management #AI

Years ago, I visited two stations in the same airline network in the same month. Same routes. Same type of aircraft. Same passenger volumes. Same operational complexity. One had a reputation passengers trusted. The other did not. I spent some time trying to understand this. Station A had a reputation for reliability. Passengers who regularly used both stations described the experience there as predictable. Communication was clear. Staff were professional. Standards held whether the operation was busy or quiet. Station B was described as variable. Good sometimes. Less consistent at others. When both stations experienced a significant disruption within the same month, the difference became apparent. Station A managed it smoothly. The leadership response was composed. Communication was structured. Standards held under pressure. A few passengers complained about the operational disruption. Very few complained about how it was handled. Station B's disruption was more difficult. Not because the operational circumstances were worse. But because the inconsistencies present in normal conditions were amplified under pressure. Communication became fragmented. Responses varied across staff. Passenger feedback was significantly more negative — not about the disruption, but about the handling. The difference was not talent. It was discipline. Trust is not built through occasional excellence. It is built through predictable professionalism. Through the reliable assurance that when a customer encounters the organisation, the experience will meet a consistent standard. That assurance is not created by exceptional moments. It is created by everyday ones. What builds operational consistency in your experience — training, culture, leadership presence, or something else? #OperationalConsistency #FrontlineLeadership #AviationOperations #CustomerExperience

Customers expect seamless interactions across every channel, whether they’re online, in-store, or on social media. While this is the backbone of customer satisfaction and loyalty, ensuring that every interaction feels seamless and personalized can often be a challenge. It’s not just about solving problems as they arise but also about truly understanding your customers' journeys, addressing their pain points, and creating a unified experience across all platforms. So, how do we make this happen? Here are five steps to delivering a consistent omnichannel experience: 1. Know Your Customer Understanding your customers’ preferences, behaviors, and challenges is the foundation of a great omnichannel strategy. Dive deep into your customer data to truly know who they are and what they need. 2. Integrate Your Systems Seamless integration between your systems ensures smooth communication and data sharing across all channels. This prevents disjointed experiences and empowers your team with the right insights at the right time. 3. Maintain a Consistent Brand Image Whether it’s a social media post, an in-store interaction, or an email campaign, your brand identity should remain consistent. A cohesive message builds trust and reinforces your brand’s promise. 4. Create Seamless Customer Journeys Transitions between channels should feel effortless. Customers shouldn’t feel like they’re jumping between disconnected silos but rather engaging with one cohesive system. 5. Implement Personalization Strategies Customers expect personalization. Tailor your offerings, interactions, and messaging to each customer to make them feel valued and understood. Are these steps easy to implement? Not always. I believe that just as empathy in customer service requires ongoing effort and training, delivering a consistent omnichannel experience demands constant evaluation, refinement, and investment. But the payoff is undeniable nevertheless – you realize that stronger customer loyalty, better brand reputation, and more meaningful connections with your audience. What’s your biggest challenge in creating a seamless omnichannel experience? Share your thoughts or insights in the comments. We’d love to learn from your journey! #CustomerExperience #Omnichannel #CustomerJourney #EmpathyInBusiness #CX #KSA

So, how much did being genuinely nice to our customers earn us this quarter? Now imagine asking this question to your CFO. Today we are well aware and sometimes even obsessed with metrics: NPS, CSAT, churn rates…all perfectly calculated. But translating the warmth of customer happiness into cold, hard financial results? Well, that's not so simple. After all, it is not easy to connect a ‘smiling support rep’ to ‘higher EBIT’. However, the truth bomb here - Top CX performers consistently outperform their competitors. But the magic they create is not just in making customers smile. It is about connecting every delighted customer with revenue, retention, and even willingness to pay a little extra. The question for us to answer is - Are we connecting dots, or just coloring the margins? As business leaders, are we digging deep enough? What would happen if CX was tagged to every financial review, not just a customary part of the annual presentation? You could be walking into your next review, armed with not just satisfaction scores, but a clear graph of what those scores added to the bottom line. If you think ROI from customer experience is not just fairy dust, then here are 4 metrics to add gravitas to your next board meeting: ☘️ C - Customer Retention Track repeat purchase rate/ renewal rate. Know how many customers come back. Even a 5% increase in retention can boost profits considerably. ☘️ T - Ticket Size Happier customers spend more. We all do that. Measure if your CX improvements lead to higher average order value. ☘️ S - Share of Voice Delighted customers talk. Track organic referrals, online reviews and social media mentions. Don't forget - word of mouth reduces marketing costs. ☘️ S - Service Cost Zero-effort experiences reduce complaints and rework. When customers don't need to call back, your cost to serve drops. Measure cost per support ticket and first contact resolution rate. These may not happen in a day, but start somewhere. One step of transition a day leads to transformation over a quarter or a year. Let’s get past the vanity metrics and start making CX pay its own bills. About time no? #cx #customerexperience #serviceexcellence