To better understand and improve the AMADC member experience, AMADC’s Board of Directors is embarking on a customer experience (CX) project. Leading us in this effort is Ann O’Daniel, President of Experience Branding. Ann has 25+ years’ experience in both creative marketing and customer experience strategy and design. Ann is also a member of AMADC’s Advisory Council.

To better understand and improve the AMADC member experience, AMADC’s Board of Directors is embarking on a customer experience (CX) project. Leading us in this effort is Ann O’Daniel, President and Founder of Experience Branding. Ann has 25+ years’ experience in both creative marketing and customer experience strategy and design. Ann is also a member of AMADC’s Advisory Council.
 
In a nutshell, the goal of the project is to develop an outside-in (ie member) perspective to the way we approach the AMADC member experience so that what we are delivering is what members want. There are four stages to the project:

• Prescheduled yet informal conversations with AMADC Board members to understand our internal perspectives of the different stages that make up a member’s end-to-end journey and how AMADC can add value at critical points along that journey. These one on one phone interviews detail the distinctive stages in the lifecycle of an AMADC member, different member segments and their needs at each stage, and where there are points of pain along the journey with AMADC that can be turned into opportunities to delight members.
• After completion of the interviews, Ann will analyze and map those qualitative insights gained from interviews and create an “inside-out” physical draft of a journey map that will be used as the “straw man” map for a follow-on collaborative stakeholder workshop where the entire Board will further refine the map, determine key questions to ask members and use the map framework as a discussion guide for one-on-one interviews with members.
• Ann will then verify or amend the customer journey map with members in one-on-one phone interviews and identify the gaps between the AMADC Board (“internal) and members (“external”) perceptions of the member experience. 
• With a final map in hand, Ann will present the findings to the Board in a workshop where the final “Outside In” map is used to prioritize action plans.

The Board just launched this project. We’re hoping to get through the first and second stages by Thanksgiving and hold the member interviews in January.

We’re looking forward to sharing more about the project as the process evolves, and ultimately to providing an awesome AMADC member experience.