It’s no secret that customer experience (CX) is crucial. Salesforce reports that 80% of consumers value a company’s experience just as much as its products and services, and 57% have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience.
As you develop your strategies and budgets for new ways to reach customers and instill loyalty, consider the future of customer experience for your brand. Our CX Maturity Model is a framework that helps to assess your current organizational approach and provides an achievable roadmap for moving forward.
Level 1: Developing
All companies start at this level of undifferentiated engagement with customers. Digital experiences include one-size-fits-all websites and blast email campaigns driven by loosely defined personas. Data must be manually gathered across decentralized tech tools and only reflect channel-level or campaign-level analytics reporting based on traffic.
Level 2: Emerging
At this level of CX maturity, companies build more advanced, one-to-some experiences by expanding digital channels and segmenting audiences by geography or device. Campaigns and experiences are still created manually and within single channels, but they use A/B testing, optimization, and personalization to target their audience segments. And while the company’s CMS, CRM, and analytics tools are semi-connected and deliver data tied to KPIs, information is siloed to the department level. Insights between marketing spend and performance are few to nonexistent.
Level 3: Strategic
Once companies begin growing experiences with a multi-channel approach, they enter the third phase of CX maturity. Here, the view is one-to-few, and personalization, measurement, and optimization take place across website, email, and marketing automation. Some CX elements are automatically triggered, but offline integration is limited This is the first stage where it’s the experience, not the channel, that gets optimized. Segmentation practices are multi-faceted and robust at the cookie and customer levels, delivering cross-channel data that get centrally stored on well-integrated platforms. At the organizational level, departments collaborate to execute against a defined CX roadmap, and plans exist for governance and training in personalization.
Level 4: Leading
The goal of leading customer-focused companies is 1:1 omni-channel personalization across every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle, including website, app, email, paid media, and offline. Customer profiles are enriched at every touch, and continuously iterative optimization delivers highly automated, always-on CX. At this level, data drive experience design, predict and anticipate customer needs on an individual level, and enhance pathways for upselling and cross-selling. Analytics and insights incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence, enable loyalty tracking, and produce accurate attribution and ROI reports with robust data visualization. The organizational culture is data-driven, obsessed with CX, and collaboratively aligned to carry it out.
How to improve customer experience using the CX Maturity Model
When looking at our CX Maturity Model, you may discover that your customer experience management is less sophisticated than you previously thought, but no organization starts out at the “leading” level. You have to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. It’s impossible to create individual customer profiles without first creating loose personas and then narrower audience segments. You can’t personalize campaigns without developing them first. And automated AI tools won’t work without baseline web traffic analytics and A/B optimization testing data.
Our framework helps you take a realistic look at how your organization creates customer experiences. Consider how complete and integrated your MarTech stack is, what insights your data and analytics yield, and how individually you address your users. Assessing your CX maturity is the first step to achieving true data-driven customer experiences that inspire customer loyalty, and this framework can help guide your roadmap from developing CX ambitions to leading customer expectations in your industry.
—
Need a partner for creating and executing your CX roadmap? Let’s talk.
