The role of Business Analysis in Experience Design

By Michelle Badenhorst- Founder Map & Key | 6 min read

Business analysis is an important link in experience design. Unfortunately, many times it is also the weakest link. Probably because we have never considered it as a people-oriented process or function.  Good business analysis is about ‘asking the right questions in the right way to the right people at the right time’.

You cannot change what you do not understand. Hence ‘understanding’ is a very important function of business analysis. So much of creation is about ‘discovery’ - and you can’t discover if you don’t understand the underlying influences.

Customer experiences are mainly influenced by 4 drivers: the customer journey, internal business processes, technology and data. All of these enable and influence the customer experience, whether good or bad:

• Customer Experience Professionals are responsible for managing the end to end customer journey. They analyse, improve and manage customer touch points across channels. 

• Business Analysts typically engage with internal stakeholders to get to grips with their worlds. They have to understand what the business needs are and how they can enable that or make it happen.

• Business Analysts are also responsible for assessing the organisation’s business model and for analysing and documenting their business processes and system functionality. They help the business to improve their processes, products and systems through data collection and analysis. Some business analysts also analyse and document the data flow across the business processes.

A more human-centred approach would be to closely integrate these two functions to ensure complete alignment. This will ensure the business follows a more balanced approach when it designs processes, products or services.

It’s important to understand the four fundamental layers when designing any organisational change. These four layers need to be in harmony if you want to create exponential business value. There are various influences or factors why businesses might be prone to be more IT-led, versus experience or process led.

The four layers are as follows:

1.     Start by understanding your current customer journey. Make sure you map your end-to-end customer journey and base your journey analysis on actual customer insights. Too often we find ourselves mapping the customer journey based on business assumptions and not actual customer insights. When you have a view of your current state journey you can dive into designing your future state customer journey.

2.     The next step is to identify the critical business processes in your customer journey and set up alerts to monitor the impact of the business processes performance on the customer experience.  This way you will be able to identify and fix any underlying process inefficiencies. Effective Business Process Management (BPM) is critical to ultimately improving your overall customer experience. Some CX professionals refer to this as “Voice of the Process”. The clue is to align your operational process measures with your key customer moments of truth (MOT’s).

3.     Only when you have aligned your customer journeys and business processes can you delve into the third layer – technology. Here it is important to analyse and understand how your existing systems – hardware and software enable business processes to deliver the customer journey. Start with the ‘as-is’ or current view and move unto the ‘to-be’ or future state technology design.

4.     Managing your business data is crucial for delivering high quality experience. How to store, use and present data is key to managing customers’ experience. Not only do customers and the rest of the business trust you will manage their data, they trust you will use it in the most discrete way.

Business Analysis provides critical insights into business processes, technology and data; allowing the business to turn potentially difficult events into positive moments your customers will remember.

Michelle Badenhorst

Michelle is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and founder of Map & Key - a bespoke business design consultancy specialising in building customer centric organisations and confident, successful CX leaders.

Michelle has more than 25 years’ experience, is a qualified Coach to aspiring CX professionals and recently co-authored a two #1 bestselling customer experience books with various international CX professionals. In these books they share their current best-thinking around best-practice CX principles.

Michelle resides in Cape Town and enjoys spending time with her family camping and being in nature.