CX Centric Leaders Podcast: Michelle Spaul on Successfully Building Business Cases
Our Talk with the wonderful Michelle Spaul
In this episode of the CX Leaders Podcast, Michelle Spaul gives best practice advice on building business cases for Customer Experience (CX) initiatives. The distionary definition of a business case is: “ the reasoning for initiating a project on task, it is the information needed for authorisation of the project.” Business Cases are a key component of the CX Centric Framework. We need to be able to justify investments in CX, so upskilling in this area is important for CX professionals. There are many professionals within the CX arena who have problems with this, so we sat down with Michelle to get some advise.
Michelle Spaul is a Customer Experience and Change Consultant based in the U.K, guiding Leaders who use Customer Experience for business growth. Michelle is of the belief that successful Customer Experience management engages people, culture and governance before data and information technology. Her time in the corporate world has taught her the value of building compelling business cases for CX. She is passionate about making change by helping businesses to perform much better to also helping people who are unfamiliar with digital technology amongst other things she is passionate about. Michelle is also the author of a very interesting book titled “The Price of Oil”.
Customer Experience Business Cases
The podcast kickoff with the host (Jonathan Daniels) mentioning the subjects which the episode covers, which includes CX transformations, CX programmes and Business cases. Michelle further highlighted the challenges involved with initiating CX programmes. She defined CX programmes (which is the first business case one has to write) as being basically bigger than projects and generally involving strategic change. The common challenge she mentioned about CX programmes is that they are a bit more complex and some of the activities involved with CX programmes don’t deliver benefits for the organisation. Also as a challenge, Michelle also mentioned that for CX programmes, one needs to be constantly setting up experiments on how to improve their Customer Experience which is definitely not an easy task to execute.
On this podcast episode, common mistakes that people make when starting off a business case were also discussed. These mistakes include: professionals assuming that everyone believes that investing in CX is the obvious thing to do. Michelle also shared the best practices organisations can use when initiating a business case. These practices include the organisation’s Leaders being able to listen and learn from the people involved in the project. Michelle also highlighted the importance of governance. She defined governance as all the actions (e.g. the openness in the reporting structure of the project) one has to put to support the project.
The full episode can be found here:
