CX: a new challenge for Enterprise Architecture?

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Research shows that Customer experience (CX) has become a key element in product and services design not only in traditional B2C, but also in B2B and B2G worlds. [1] [2] The companies leading in customer experience are more successful than their peers. According to a recent global survey of almost 13,000 marketing, advertising, e-commerce, creative and IT professionals working for both brands and agencies[4]:

Companies embracing customer experience are three times more likely to have significantly exceeded their 2019 business goals

Although there are many factors contributing to the company’s commercial success, studies show that customer experience may play a noticeable role in it [5] and seeking high levels of customer satisfaction and resulting advocacy is important for overall business success [6].

* * *

Still, many companies struggle to implement customer centricity.

It involves eliminating structural, cultural and technological barriers that prevent them from managing data and providing great experiences. There are two key types of challenges that businesses face.

First, in order to manage the experience an organisation needs to build new capabilities to study, model and use the information about customer journeys .

The customer experience is a dynamic phenomenon. It manifests in different stages of the customer journey: from initial consideration to interest to transaction to post-transaction interactions with the business. This involves multiple channels and multiple touch points, some of which are social in nature or in a different way out of the scope of organisation’s direct control. [7] [8]

In order to gain a comprehensive view of the customer experience, businesses need to invest in new ways of learning their customers, specifically understanding direct and indirect interactions customers have at various touch points over time and the emotional state of the customer at each interaction. This inevitably yields changes in the way the businesses are structured and operate.

Second, although customer experience based strategies might provide a superior competitive advantages, there might be some pitfalls.

The study “Customer Experience Creation: Determinants, Dynamics and Management Strategies” [7] suggests that providing a superior customer experience can be quite expensive and will provide superior performance only when it is combined with efficient processes.

It is not enough to understand and model the desired customer journey — the journey needs to be executed and brought to live in a manner that justifies the investment. Customer experience management requires a multidisciplinary approach in which multiple functions (i.e., IT, marketing, operations, customer service, human resources) cooperate to deliver a customer experience [9].

This draws a connection between the customer facing parts of the business and its operations. One may conclude that a close alignment between the parts of business responsible for customer insights collection and for operational management becomes crucial for success.

* * *

There have been attempts to bring the customer experience and operational efficiency practices together.

This resulted in tools and techniques that help model the experience and map it to the elements of the operational side of the business.

These approaches consist of techniques like:

• Multi Level Service Design (MSD) [10]

• Service Experience Blueprint (SEB) [11]

• Customer experience modeling (CEM) [12]

• Human activity modelling (HAM) [13]

These methods give a robust tool set to model and comprehend customer experience across touchpoints. However, their primary focus is on the customer’s side of the journey and they provide a limited ability to map the experience to needed business capabilities. Namely, MSD method talks about mapping the experience through the touchpoints to the backend systems in the business, skipping other levels of enterprise architecture. Thus, the act of operationalising the desired experience stays outside of the experience modelling techniques.

This leaves a few questions still open, such as:

• How should organizations be structured in order to successfully manage the customer experience, and

• How the firms need to effectively use technology in CX management?

* * *

The answer to these questions should lie in a specialised practice of management.

A practice, that focuses on connecting the dots between domains and layers of the business. Indeed, such a practice exists and is often referred to as Enterprise Architecture (EA).

Enterprise architecture helps describe and manage changes in enterprises so as to enhance their consistency and agility [14]. Originally viewed as a tool to manage the ICT assets of the organisation in a way that enables it to execute the business strategy, it organically evolved as a practice to also include the architecture of business [14] [15] [16] [17].

This means it considers what the business does (capabilities), how it delivers stakeholder, including customer, value (value streams), business vocabulary and relationships (information), and how the business is structured (organization) together with more typical elements of the EA such as the architecture of applications, data, and technology tooling, platforms and protocols [18].

As defined by the Open Group [19]:

The overall purpose of Enterprise Architecture as a practice is to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy

However, in practice implementation of an enterprise architecture initiative is a risky endeavor, which often results in failures. This is mostly related to the difficulties in bridging the different perspectives and concerns of architects and stakeholders.

In the research “Re-conceptualizing the practice of enterprise architecture implementation” this is called a “reality-design” gap [20]. This idea is based on a previous research in information systems development, which showed that [21]:

Failures may be a result of a gap between what the users deem important and what the system developers deem required

The reality-design gap is presented as a gap between the reality of the users and the design created by system developers.

Just like in software development world, in the enterprise architecture realm the failures are related to the challenges that architects face in aligning their interpretations of what is important with the interpretations of business and technology stakeholders. Add to this the fact that without an established CX practice customer expectations may be a mystery to business stakeholders — not to say the architects who are often even more barriered from the customers.

This contradicts the very idea of architecture as a tool to get different elements of the business aligned in achieving a common strategy. Instead, it creates a risk to make an established architecture practice another obstacle in delivering great experiences.

Combining Enterprise Architecture and CX toolsets promises to bring together diverse elements of the business under the common strategy to support specific customer journeys.

As outlined above, the CX approaches are designed to uncover the needs and expectations of the customers via extensive research of their behavioural patterns across the touchpoints, including uncovering of their expectations, motivation and emotional state.

When implemented, this potentially provides architects with a clear understanding of the requirements and seems to have a potential of eliminating or minimising the reality-design gap in architecture work.

This suggests the questions for further research in the area:

1. Is lack of architecture definition one of the key challenges to implementing a desired customer experience in enterprise environment?

2. Is lack of CX alignment one of the factors of enterprise architecture implementation failures?

3. Will achieving of CX alignment resolve the reality-design gap in enterprise architecture?

4. Should there be an extra layer that connects CX and EA practices in the business and how introduction of this layer may affect the roles of architects and experience designers?

5. How the paradigm of experience-driven product and service design affects architecture approach?

I hope we will find the answers to these questions soon and this will enable us to help businesses deliver better experiences.

References

1. Klaus, P. (2014), “Measuring Customer Experience: How to Develop and Execute the Most Profitable Customer Experience Strategies”, Palgrave-Macmillan, United Kingdom.

2. Hardyman, W., Daunt, K.L. and Kitchener, M. (2015), “Value co-creation through patient engagement in health care: a micro-level approach and research agenda”, Public Management Review, Vol. 17 №1, pp. 90–107.

3. Radnor, Z.J. and Johnston, R., (2013), “Lean in UK government: internal efficiency or customer service?”, Production Planning and Control, Vol. 2 №10–11, pp. 903–915.

4. Adobe (2019), 2020 Digital Trends Report

5. Jamie Lywood, Merlin Stone, Yuksel Ekinci (2009), “Customer experience and profi tability: An application of the empathy rating index (ERIC) in UK call centres”, Journal of Database Marketing &Customer Strategy Management (2009) 16, pp 207–214

6. Pennie Frow, Adrian Payne (2007), “Towards the ‘ perfect’ customer experience”, PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 15, NO. 2, pp 89–101

7. Peter C. Verhoef, Katherine N. Lemon, A. Parasuraman, Anne Roggeveen, Michael Tsiros, Leonard A. Schlesinger (2009), “Customer Experience Creation: Determinants, Dynamics and Management Strategies”, Journal of Retailing 85 (1, 2009) pp 31–41

8. Janet McColl-Kennedy and Anders Gustafsson, Elina Jaakkola, Phil Klaus, Zoe Radnor, Helen Persk, Margareta Friman (2015), “Fresh perspectives on customer experience”, Journal of Services Marketing, 9(2015) 6/7 pp 430–435

9. Katherine N. Lemon & Peter C. Verhoef (2016), “Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey”, Journal of Marketing: AMA/MSI Special Issue, Vol. 80 (November 2016), pp 69–96

10. Lia Patrıcio, Raymond P. Fisk, Jao Falcao e Cunha, and Larry Constantine (2011) “Multilevel Service Design: From Customer Value Constellation to Service Experience Blueprinting”, Journal of Service Research pp 1–21

11. Raymond P. Fisk, and Jao Falcao e Cunha (2008), ‘‘Designing Multi-interface Service Experiences: The Service Experience Blueprint,’’ Journal of Service Research, 10 (4), pp 318–334.

12. Jorge Teixeira, Lia Patrício, Nuno J. Nunes, Leonel Nóbrega, Raymond P. Fisk, Larry Constantine (2012), “Customer experience modeling: from customer experience to service design”, Journal of Service Management, Vol. 23 Iss: 3

13. Constantine, L. (2009), “Human activity modeling: toward a pragmatic integration of activity theory and usage-centered design”, Human-centered Software Engineering: Software Engineering Models, Patterns and Architectures for HCI, Springer, London

14. Noran, O. (2005) A Meta-Methodology for Collaborative Networked Organisations. School of Computing and Information Technology. Brisbane, Griffith University.

15. Ekstedt, M. (2004) Enterprise Architecture for IT Management: A CIO Decision Making Perspective on the Electric Power Industry. Dept. of Industrial Information and Control Systems. Stockholm, Sweden, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology.

16. McDonald, M. P. (2005) Architecting the Enterprise: An Approach for Achieving Performance, Integration, Consistency and Flexibility. Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. Delft, The Netherlands, Delft University of Technology

17. Enterprise Architects. (2013). 9 Trends for Business and Architects in 2013. Retrieved from http://enterprisearchitects.com/9-trends-worth-following-in-2013/

18. William M. Ulrich & Dr. Richard Mark Soley (2016), “Business Architecture: Putting “Business” into Enterprise Architecture”, CIO Solutions, May 9 2016

19. OPEN GROUP (2008) TOGAF, Enterprise Edition (version 9), Van Haren Publishing.

20. Mark Dale (2015), Re-conceptualizing the practice of enterprise architecture implementation. Faculty of Business and Law, Swinburne University of Technology

21. Heeks, R. (2002). Information Systems and Developing Countries: Failure, Success, and Local Improvisations. Information Society, 18(2), pp 101–112.