How can you identify critical skills for your organization using customer journey mapping?

2 How to assess your current and desired capabilities?

Before you can identify the skills you need to improve your customer experience, you need to assess your current and desired capabilities. This means mapping out the current state of your customer journey, as well as the future state you want to achieve. You can use tools like personas, empathy maps, surveys, interviews, analytics, and feedback to collect data and insights about your customers and their journeys. Then, you can create a visual representation of your customer journey, highlighting the key touchpoints, channels, actions, emotions, and pain points along the way. You can also create a vision statement that summarizes your desired customer experience and the value proposition you offer.

3 How to identify skill gaps and opportunities?

Once you have mapped your current and desired customer journeys, you can compare them and identify the skill gaps and opportunities for improvement. You can ask yourself questions like: What skills do we need to deliver the desired customer experience? What skills do we currently have and how well do we perform them? What skills are missing or underdeveloped and how do they affect our customer journey? What skills are most critical and urgent to address? You can also use frameworks like SWOT analysis, competency models, or skill matrices to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your customer journey.

4 How to create a learning and development plan?

After you have identified the skill gaps and opportunities, you can create a learning and development plan that aligns with your customer journey goals. You can prioritize the skills based on their impact, urgency, and feasibility, and define the learning objectives, methods, resources, and metrics for each skill. You can also consider the different learning styles, preferences, and needs of your employees, and design a blended learning approach that combines formal, informal, and social learning. You can also involve your customers in your learning and development plan, by soliciting their feedback, co-creating solutions, or inviting them to share their stories and best practices.

5 How to implement and evaluate your learning and development plan?

The final step is to implement and evaluate your learning and development plan, and monitor its results on your customer journey. You can use tools like learning management systems, dashboards, or feedback loops to track and measure the progress and performance of your employees and their skills. You can also use tools like surveys, interviews, analytics, or feedback to assess the impact and satisfaction of your customers and their journeys. You can also use tools like A/B testing, experiments, or pilots to test and refine your solutions and innovations. You can also celebrate and reward your successes, and identify and address your challenges and failures.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?