Every organisation has limited resources and unlimited opportunities to improve customer experience. The organisations that succeed are the ones that can systematically decide where to invest and just as importantly, where not to.
We often see organisations struggling with this. Teams chase new features while existing pain points persist, investment decisions get made based on who argues most convincingly rather than customer evidence and there's no systematic way to validate whether the investments you made actually delivered the returns you expected.
This is why we have included Prioritisation & Investment as a category in our CX Scorecard.
It's not about having perfect prioritisation frameworks. It's about whether you use customer journey data and insights to make investment decisions, whether you balance fixing current problems with building new capabilities and whether you validate that your investments are delivering the outcomes you expected.
The real problem this solves
When prioritisation isn't grounded in customer evidence and business outcomes, resources get spread too thin. Without clear prioritisation, teams try to work on everything at once. New projects get funded while existing customer pain points go unresolved. Nothing gets the focus it needs to actually improve and effort gets spread across too many initiatives that deliver incremental results rather than meaningful impact.
Decisions get made without customer evidence. Investment choices get driven by internal opinions about what customers need rather than data showing where friction actually costs you the most. The projects that get funded are the ones with the most persuasive advocates, not necessarily the ones that would create the greatest value for customers or the business.
And you can't validate if investments are working. Without systematic review of whether initiatives delivered their expected returns, you can't learn what works and what doesn't. Business cases make promises about improved retention, reduced cost to serve or increased satisfaction but there's no process to check if those outcomes actually materialised.
What strong capability looks like
They use customer data to prioritise investment. Journey performance data, customer insights and friction analysis inform which improvements warrant investment. Prioritisation is grounded in evidence about where customers struggle most, what impacts business outcomes like retention or cost to serve and where fixing problems would create the greatest return.
They balance fixing current problems with building new capabilities. Resources get allocated between resolving existing customer pain points and developing new features or channels. This prevents the trap of always chasing innovation while fundamental issues remain unresolved or conversely, only fixing problems without building competitive advantage.
Investment decisions connect to measurable outcomes. Business cases don't just describe activities, they specify expected returns in customer and business metrics. This creates clarity about what success looks like and enables validation after implementation.
They validate whether investments delivered expected returns. Initiatives get reviewed against their original business cases to confirm whether promised improvements in customer experience and business outcomes materialised. This creates a learning loop that improves future prioritisation decisions.
What we're measuring
We're identifying whether investment decisions are grounded in customer evidence and whether you're learning from what works and what doesn't.
Organisations that systematically prioritise based on customer evidence and validate outcomes are the ones that can demonstrate the commercial value of customer experience improvement and sustain investment over time.
If you're responsible for customer experience but investment decisions get made without customer journey data or you can't validate whether past initiatives delivered their promised returns, that's the gap this capability fills.
Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.
