(This article was first published at Customer Think - republished here by the consent of the author)
It’s no surprise that leaders in CX gain a higher ROI than those who are not improving their CX.
But only 25% of CX professionals say their company’s CX programs actually improve customer experience. With so much on the line, and such a worthy goal to pursue, why do so few get this right? There are many reasons a CX effort can get derailed: score-chasing; functional myopia; tool overload; skipping steps; siloed investments, initiatives, and KPIs. So many departments- Sales & Marketing, Retail, Operations, R&D, Manufacturing, HR/Talent, Corporate Services- touch the customer experience and they are often not aligned. There is often a lack of integrated strategies to achieve common business goals.
You can use CX as an offensive weapon.
When you proactively manage the customer experience across your enterprise to impact business outcomes, you are driving toward superior performance. To create your system for sustainable organizational change, a structured step by step approach toward CX centricity is required. Here’s how to transform your organization.
Your approach must consider your brand’s CX Maturity
CX Maturity is the ability to proactively design, implement, manage, and continuously enhance the customer experience in ways that will impact business outcomes. Based on discussions with nearly 1,000 CX professional’s globally* exploring CX Transformation, ENGINE has identified 8 key elements that drive CX maturity; four foundational, and four that drive activation:
The greater the level of performance on each of the 8 competencies, the more mature the level of customer experience. Measuring against this framework allows you to advance your level of CX maturity, with the ultimate goal of reaching the level of CX Leaders.
As you move through your transformation, this framework can help:
• Identify priorities of focus
• Design prescriptive solutions driven by your unique needs
• Ensure early “wins” to bootstrap the organization forward
• Provide a holistic cross-organizational system to guide change
• Drive your business outcomes
• Create lifelong connections with your brand
Seeing it in action – a case study
ENGINE’S CX consultancy has spent the last several years working with a global pharmaceutical manufacturer as they aggressively implement a customer-centric strategy. The goal was to establish a baseline level of customer maturity and to identify the underlying elements of influence. This insight would drive awareness, cross-functional involvement and actions that would positively impact the customer experience.
An in-depth audit of customer insight combined with an internal assessment of the organization’s CX beliefs, commitments and resources, was undertaken to determine the baseline level of customer maturity. This audit helped the organization define, socialize and galvanize around its customer-centric strategy. It provided a clear understanding of the maturity journey, the current state and its desired future state. Prescriptive details were also socialized to help every functional group, across all levels of the organization, understand the core elements that impact their ability to reach their desired maturity state over time. The insight was aligned with existing business initiatives to integrate the voice of the customer into as many business decisions and investments, as was reasonably possible.
Over an 18-month period, this organization was able to elevate its customer maturity level based on the actions it has implemented from its baseline assessment. It has routinely updated the maturity assessment to ensure the actions it is implementing are having the intended impact, as recognized by the associates in the organization as well as the customers its serves. The integration of customer maturity with broader business initiatives has also helped to close gaps that initially existed across functional teams, seniority and tenure levels of the organization. These gaps could have undermined the culture and senior-level commitment to the customer-centric strategy, if not addressed.
It is now several years beyond the baseline assessment and the organization has not lost its momentum. It continues to proactively embrace the customer-centric strategy by utilizing its customer maturity map to guide its decisions and investments. Most recently, the organization has invested in significant tools to raise internal knowledge and understanding of customer needs. This insight can now be leveraged by many different aspects of the business to inform the enhancement of customer processes and the creation of needed services. Over time, these actions are expected to drive efficiencies that will impact the bottom line.
At the same time, customers recognize the cultural shift this organization has undertaken. This comes through customer marketing and communication, responses to inquiries and issues as well as the modernization of processes related to product availability, delivery and returns. And customers are reinforcing their loyalty to the brand through increased market share and expansion of spend into new product categories.
This industry leader is determined to outperform the competition and, where possible, to be the game changer in how it embraces its customers and their needs.
* Participants were rigorously screened be active CX practitioners. The sample is concentrated from the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia.
This article is written by Don Simons:
Don Simons is the CEO of ENGINE Insights in North America, and a member of ENGINE’s management board. Don’s 25-year career has been in Insights, learning the business from the ground up. Don has a particular focus on CX research and the application of technology to enhancing the business impact of Insights investments. He’s customer-obsessed and passionate about telling great stories that make insight useful.