What Is CX Maturity?
Customer experience is about far more than just a customer’s latest interaction with a brand, its products, or its services. It’s about more than that brand’s retail or support teams. It’s even about more than the people and processes behind those teams.
Take a step back. Look at the bigger picture. While you’re at it, do away with the frame and look at everything hidden on the edges (or even the back) of that picture.
When looking at CX maturity, you need to think about customer experience in terms of everything that impacts the customer—directly or indirectly. If CX is everything that impacts the customer, then CX maturity is the readiness, understanding, and ability for everyone across the organization to contribute to that impact.
CX maturity encompasses your culture, your vision, your strategy, and your goals. It involves your technology and your processes, and it’s influenced by your decision-making, your focus on continuous improvement, and your employee engagement.
Why Are CX Operations Core to Unlocking Better CX?
The CX operations team ultimately owns the customer experience and most directly drives the outcomes. It not only runs the front-to-back processes but lives them daily. CX operations plays a critical role in identifying pain points within the customer journey (and the advisor journey) and is most invested in seeking out solutions. Team members have their fingers on the pulse when it comes to data and insights—largely because the team’s performance is measured by them—and are first to spot new trends.
All of that is great, but how does it connect back to CX maturity? Here is where we take that step back again and look at everything behind CX operations.
You need CX maturity to take the feedback from CX operations—both data and experience driven—to make things better. Connect teams across your organization with feedback loops, testing processes, and more. Empower teams to take the feedback and try new approaches—give them the freedom to test, learn, and pivot. Connect your teams and deliver on a way to work closely with everyone from design teams to go-to-market teams and everyone in between.
How Can Businesses Improve CX Maturity?
How do you go above and beyond, pivot quickly, and relentlessly improve your CX maturity? It’s not enough to design and build your customer experience; you need to keep it running in an optimal direction to ensure it meets the next generation of customer expectations.
- Deliver: Dashboards, operational rigor, and performance targets are all foundational elements of delivery, but organizations with CX maturity continually seek out the small percentages of improvement that will optimize CX. It’s about continually testing, learning, and delivering, based on data, to optimize customer experiences and outcomes. According to a Forrester analyst blog, “Even small improvements in CX quality can reduce an enterprise’s churn and increase its share of wallet, adding up to millions of dollars in revenue.” 1
- Optimize: Keeping pace with hyper-change means continuously optimizing based on evolving customer expectations. It’s about making better, faster decisions, informed by centralized data and insights, with the maturity to seize each new opportunity, evaluate it, action it, and adapt the experiences. Customers expect brands to go above and beyond when they need assistance or encounter a problem. Our research shows that customer service is two times more likely than cost to drive Net Promoter Score (NPS) (27% vs. 15%).
- Innovate: A mature CX organization can maximize insight-led brainstorming and ideation to identify untapped sources of innovation. With all teams, tools, and data working together, you can unlock new opportunities, mitigate risk, and drive iterative improvements to keep pace with an ever-changing CX ecosystem. Salesforce research shows that 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, and 70% expect all company representatives to have the same information about them, making innovation and optimization essential in creating a seamless and positive customer journey.2
How Does CX Maturity Allow You to Run Better CX?
“Run is the critical element where the interactions with customers take place,” says Rick Rosso, Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Account Management. “From digital engagement specialists to AI bots to CX technology that makes it all work, run is the last mile that delivers the desired customer outcome.”
Building CX maturity creates an ongoing cycle of improvement around making CX exceptional. It becomes a way forward, a mindset, a process that guides CX transformation, where every stage multiplies the data, insights, and learnings from what’s gone before.
In a world marked by accelerated change, with customer expectations evolving faster than ever, CX matters more than ever. By striving for better CX maturity and keeping your CX running in an optimal direction, you can ensure that your brand stays ahead of the curve and delivers exceptional experiences that will keep customers coming back for more.
Discover how our design, build, run approach can help you better address the disconnects that exist between systems, processes, and data to improve your CX immaturity.