With 2012 coming to an end soon, we find ourselves reflecting on the year behind us and the year ahead. Now is a good time for reflection on your customer experience initiatives to see how far you have come and where you need to go.

Looking back on your customer experience efforts this year, were you able to accomplish the following?

• Customer journey mapping
• Align processes across the entire customer lifecyle (buying and owning)
• Connect all functional areas to the same customer data
• Deliver consistent and personal experiences across all customer touchpoints
• Make it easy and rewarding to be your customer
• Hire and develop talent that drives better customer experiences
• Tie key performance indicators (KPIs) to each of your customer experience objectives

This is by no means a complete checklist for your customer experience strategy, but it does help you determine if you have moved in the right direction for delivering great customer experiences.

If you are just getting started with customer experience planning or were not able to get to everything on your list this year, consider focusing on customer journey mapping in 2013. This exercise really helps your organization put your customer in the center and understand how everything you do affects that customer. At Oracle, we see organizations in various stages of customer experience maturity all learn a lot when they go through journey mapping. Companies just starting out with customer experience get a complete understanding of what it is like to be a customer and how everything they do affects that customer. And, organizations that are further along with customer experience often find journey mapping helps provide perspective when re-visiting their customer experience strategy.

Happy holidays and best wishes for delivering great customer journeys in 2013!