There is a reason Customer Experience Management has risen to prominence among management consultancies. It is rapidly emerging as the primary method by which many firms will need to differentiate themselves and ensure revenue growth as their sector and its services become increasingly commoditized. (I wrote about the emergence of CXM and its potential impact on financial performance in prior posts.)

In a nutshell, firms must think holistically about customer journeys, and consider each touchpoint in relation to every other touchpoint and how the entire journey represents a firm’s brand and values.

But knowing where to start can be daunting. Even firms that already put the customer first, often do so inconsistently. If branded and memorable customer experience journeys depend on the cumulative impact of multiple interactions across multiple touchpoints, the ability of a company to engineer these experiences depends on the cumulative impact of its customer-facing and back-office processes, systems, organization, governance, and culture.

Coordinating all these elements is a tall order. Before attempting a plan, we advise that firms first assess their overall organizational readiness. To facilitate this, the Synergy Consulting Group has developed a proprietary CXM Maturity Model. It is a tool that helps organizations assess their progress as they move along the CX maturity journey. It defines 13 key readiness, across external (market), organizational, and CX management processes, with five maturity levels:

Level 1: Non-existent. Companies are technology, sales, or product focused, have little or no branding guidelines or customer segmentation. There are no CX initiatives or customer-related KPIs; and budgets do not consider CX needs.

• Level 2: Fragmented. There are some CX objectives set in the business strategy, but the brand values are still detached from what customers are experiencing at touchpoints. The organization realizes the severity of the dissatisfactions of customers in certain individual touchpoints, and works to alleviate these weaknesses; but it is still unable to coordinate the silo’d touchpoints with each other, as most touchpoint improvements are managed by channel owners in isolation.
• Level 3: Managed as a program. Led as a program by the PMO, CX is a core pillar/theme of the firm’s strategy. Initiatives are underway to filter brand values into touchpoints but their budget and their planning takes place outside of business-as-usual activities. The PMO also coordinates journey activities among touchpoint owners while setting up cross-functional CX steering committees and/or councils and working with market research, analytics and tech leaders to build a single view of the customer.
• Level 4: Established. The firm is well on its way to implementing its CX strategic pillar, with brand values clearly experienced by customers in a consistent manner across touchpoints. A new but temporary CX Head is appointed, ideally reporting directly into the CEO and with authority to coordinate the CX journey re-design and improvements across all functions in the organization. The CX Head is tasked with operationalizing and managing the cross-functional CXM process.
• Level 5: “In our DNA”. Managing the customer experience becomes business as usual for the firm. Brand values are manifest both internally and externally, customers broken into micro segments, and multiple KPIs and processes put in place for incremental CX improvements. There is no longer a need for a CX Head that coordinates the CX transformation (Indeed, a CX leader’s ultimate goal is to put themselves out of a job), and no need for a separated CX budget, as CX is fully integrated into all elements of day-to-day business processes, organization, planning, and resource allocation. Divisions and departments work harmoniously together with ad hoc network and teams forming around CX issues on an as-needed basis.

Once completed, a maturity assessment does two important things. First, the CXM Maturity Model’s external (market) criteria ensure that the market (customers, competition intensity) is aligned with the speed of the organization’s move up the CX maturity levels. For instance, it does little good to attempt in-depth customer segmentation when IT systems are not in place to provide a clear view of the customers. It also makes little sense to have a cutting edge, state-of-the-art, “In-our-DNA” CXM process if the entire industry is still creeping along at a fragmented level, as the customer base may simply not yet put enough value on such an advanced approach.

Second, a completed assessment creates a report card that tells a company how to coordinate the internal change agenda (at the wider organizational level as well as the CXM process maturity levels), and where it needs to focus its resource as it aims to make customer experience part of its DNA.

And in the DNA is where it needs to be. It ensures firms have the mind-set and flexibility to continually respond to and serve customer needs while maintaining a distinctive identity that encourages long-term loyalty.

See if our Customer Experience Management Consulting Practice can help you.

Customer Experience and how to implement it at your organization, download Synergy Consulting Group’s White Paper: From Satisfaction to Emotionally Connected.