5 elements of Customer Experience Maturity Model

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5 elements of Customer Experience Maturity Model Exceptional Customer Experiences
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Customer experience is your key differentiator and competitive advantage in this market-saturated business world. 

  • 67% of customers say their standard for customer experience is higher than before.
  • 57% of customers switch to a different brand if it offers a better customer experience.
  • 86 % of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Customer experience is not a simple path. An organization cannot become customer-centric overnight. It involves the development and alignment of capabilities throughout the organization.

Superior customer experience depends on a shared vision and conviction to serve customers’ needs in a business. The vision should be clear to every member of the company.

Achieving all the advantages of customer experience requires several years of hands-on work. The 

company leaders must reach for evolving levels of customer experience maturity.

But how can you tell where you stand right now? And how can you further improve? 

A Customer Experience Maturity Model can help you assess the current strength of your customer experience strategy. The framework can help identify the areas for improvement & guide you to capture the true essence of customer experience.

Exploratory Research Guide

Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.

What is the Customer Experience Maturity Model?

A Customer Experience Maturity Model is a framework that CX leaders can use to determine different areas for improvement that contribute to your CX goal. The framework also helps identify critical milestones in each aspect of your CX strategy. 

A bad customer experience can drive your customers away. This makes evaluating your current CX strategy against a customer experience maturity model even more important to evolve your customer retention & acquisition strategies.

CX leaders use the customer experience maturity model to identify the gaps and shortcomings in the current customer experience of their business. The model helps to understand where the focus and effort should be to optimize the CX. 

A customer experience maturity model ultimately ensures that you work towards a customer-centered organization.

What makes the Customer Experience Maturity Model important?

A customer experience maturity model enables you to clearly see the strengths and weaknesses of the customer experience strategies of your business. It eliminates the guesswork and tells you where your CX needs improvement and where it excels. 

Establishing a customer experience maturity model can pinpoint if your company is truly customer-centric. 

By tracking your current CX against the customer experience maturity model, you can analyze:

  • How well-defined your cx strategy is
  • The readiness of leaders/executives are in transforming the business into customer-centric
  • The power of the technology
  • How to measure the CX efforts
  • The skill of your employees to take proper action on customer insights
  • How well you leverage customer feedback and act on it

Using the CX maturity model to assess the organization’s customer experience can help you develop a practical strategy to turn CX into your competitive advantage.

Developing Customer Experience Maturity Model

Understand customers

Design

Delivery

Measurement

Culture

Understand the needs, wants, expectations, and priorities of customers.

Establish the need for CX & develop a customer experience vision.

Implement what you have learned to refine the CX program.

Use metrics to track and improve CX efforts.

Ingrain customer experience vision to reinforce superior CX behavior.

Using the CX maturity model to level up your CX program can help you develop a systematic approach to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your program and understand the capabilities required to draw value. 

We have laid down the five elements of the Customer experience maturity model to help you become a customer-centric organization that delivers exemplary customer experience. 

1st: Listen & Understand your customers

To deliver a valuable customer experience, you must understand your customers’ needs, wants, expectations, priorities, and more. You need to dig deeper than the surface understanding. 

To better listen to your customers, you need to collect data. 

  • Ask for customer feedback after key interactions with the company. 
  • Analyze call center transcripts, support tickets, customer reviews, and other forms of unstructured data to gather insights on their needs and expectations. 
  • Use customer journey mapping to understand customers’ experience through all touchpoints. 

To ensure you understand your customers take advantage of customer data. Centralize the experience, operational, and marketplace data in a unified location. 

  • Leverage analytics to evaluate customer behavior to identify trends & patterns.
  • Leverage intelligent analytics to identify trends & pain points in real-time. 
  • Use AI-powered predictive analytics to anticipate customer expectations and deliver them. 

2nd: Design

To design and implement your CX maturity model, you need to ensure – 

  • That the company leaders see the value of customer experience, &;
  • A customer-centric culture is laced throughout the entire organization. 

In a customer-centric organization, your CX vision should be fully supported by your organization. Every member of the organization may have something valuable to contribute to the design. 

Each team may have a different vision or CX goal, and all these goals support the company’s ultimate customer experience goal to serve customers better. Get your teammates, executive, sales, customer service, product development, and other vital members onboard to design your CX strategy. 

To become a leading CX company customer-centric culture should be the top priority of your business. The idea of customer-centricity should be spread through every aspect of your business process to reinforce an excellent customer experience.

 3rd: Delivery

At this stage, you have accomplished three things: 

  • You know what your customers expect & want. 
  • You have identified which experience you need to improve
  • Your entire company sees the value of CX

So, this is the stage where you implement your refined strategies. Start by defining each employee/team’s activities that add value to a customer experience. 

Use the right technology and tools to make everyone’s job in delivering cx easier. In a customer-focused organization, all insights tools should be integrated to provide a holistic view of the business’s cx performance. 

Integrate all channels to deliver a customer experience that requires low effort from customers. Implement self-service to empower customers to resolve their issues and reduce the cost to serve. 

Train the frontline employees on how to engage with the customers, alleviate customer tension and deliver a satisfying customer experience. 

Establish a customer feedback loop. Continue to gather customer feedback after resolving issues or developing new strategies to understand what customers think about it.

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

4th: Measurement

This is the stage where CX is becoming the foundation for your company’s competitive differentiator. The vision of customer-centricity is now ingrained in every business process across the entire organization. 

At this stage of the customer experience maturity model, measure customer satisfaction of the delivered customer experience. Analyze the gap between the actual customer experience and the characteristics required for core experience. 

Generate CX data across multiple touchpoints and analyze them. Use the insight to understand how well you are faring and where to make more effort. 

The CX team should also use CX metrics to measure your progress in enhancing customer loyalty. Use the CX metrics to see its impact on business and make informed decisions. 

5th: Culture

To truly become a customer-centric business and reach the final stage of the customer experience maturity model, you must integrate CX deep into the business process to reinforce CX behavior across the organization. 

From the executive team to the frontline team, everyone in the organization must become customer-centricity. When you aim to establish customer-centricity, employee performance must be aligned with customer experience. This is where company culture fits. 

A company culture with shared core values and visions unifies every member. It impacts the employee’s behavior towards achieving the final goal. If your employee is unhappy, the customer experience suffers. 

Embrace employee experience. You can’t force customer-centric behavior on your employees. Try to understand employee experience & satisfaction with the company. 

  • Consistently collect employee feedback and act upon it to cultivate a customer-centric culture. 
  • Reward your employees for a job well done. 
  • Let employees see how they impact a customer’s experience to generate excitement and value in their work. 

Employee experience is well communicated with Voice of Employee programs in a leading CX company.

What are the Disadvantages of Secondary Research?

Assessing your CX program with a Customer Experience Maturity Model highlights critical capabilities you lack. It enables you to focus on areas necessary for success and helps evolve the customer experience strategy to deliver customers’ desires. 

The article should help you understand how to assess your company’s cx program. Whether you use this CX maturity model or choose to develop your own influenced by other models is not essential. 

The important point is that without a customer experience maturity model, your CX effort will likely become directionless and ineffective. You don’t want to assume that your CX program is working well and skip your customer experience. Dig deeper and take a good look at your CX strategy to make it your differentiator and not an obstacle. 

With a customer experience maturity model, you have a map to guide you through the evolution of your customer experience and reach the destination of exemplary CX.

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