My daughter applied for a credit card a month back.  It was all online, including &#8220;chatting&#8221; with someone to guide her through some of the more complicated areas.  Within 20 minutes, she had applied and was approved.  When asked about the experience, she said it was great because she got it done all online and &#8220;didn&#8217;t really have to talk to anyone&#8221;!!!  



Turn the clock back 30 years to when I applied for a credit card, it was obviously very different.&nbsp; There was no real &#8220;customer experience&#8221; that was taken into consideration.&nbsp; I filled out a form, had to wait a week for approval and then 3 weeks later received a card.&nbsp; I didn&#8217;t really have any options around the different products or how I would have preferred to go about the process etc.



Organisations now have renewed understanding that the services that support their products as just as important as the products themselves. This has been driven by a shift in consumers&#8217; expectations which in turn is likely influenced by the leadership of inventive organisations and the availability of supporting technology solutions.&nbsp; Customer experience is now a very important&nbsp; (if not the most important) differentiator amongst organisations looking to stand out from the crowd.&nbsp; As a result, the process of understanding a customer&#8217;s needs and delivering them a product/service that matches that need has also evolved.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Understanding a customer&#8217;s requirements takes many forms.&nbsp; It requires many perspectives and utilises numerous tools, processes, frameworks etc.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not easy!! And it&#8217;s definitely not the job for just one role.&nbsp; This is where I believe Experience Designers and BAs should work closely together to form a complete picture of what the customer needs and wants and what is practical and viable.&nbsp; There shouldn&#8217;t be a handover from CX to BA or vice versa.&nbsp; There should be constant communication and sharing of ideas between the two disciplines when developing a customer journey, researching, defining business and system requirements, documenting a process and writing a user story.&nbsp; At the end of the day, its all about requirements&#8230;.isn&#8217;t it? Or am I simplifying it too much? What has changed however is the perspective of who has requirements. 



CX and BA most distinctly are not the same thing.&nbsp; I believe there are nuances between the roles, but to me, the strength lies in the areas of cross over it seems like a very natural pairing of skills, experience and persona.



A friend of mine and fellow BA, Arvind Arcot, wrote an amazing article (<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-analysis-customer-experience-2-sides-same-coin-arvind-arcot/">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-analysis-customer-experience-2-sides-same-coin-arvind-arcot/</a>)&nbsp;about this a while back and we had a very robust conversation with a number of CX Designers during an open discussion.&nbsp; At the end of the discussion, there was agreement that the roles are intertwined.&nbsp; In a customer-centric world, BAs need to increase their knowledge of CX frameworks, tooling etc and be customer-centric.&nbsp; It&#8217;s a natural evolution to the BA role.



Look forward to hearing from the community out there.



Now, what was the spending limit on my daughter&#8217;s credit card again?!







Shane.

March 2021

CX Designers and BAs, there is so much to learn from each ot...