The CX maturity model should revolve around a firm’s strengths and weaknesses.
This approach removes all the ambiguities and makes CX mission very clear for the organisation.
Components of a CX maturity model
Data - The CX maturity model has key components but the journey starts with data. It’s important to analyse the data to get a clear view of the customer via the insights
Metrics - All organisations have vast volumes of data, the data needs to have a strong metrics component around it
Governance – Ensure your data is protected, secured and regulated. The governance component ensures policies and procedures are in place for data privacy and data security.
Strategy – Next, the CX strategy needs to be very clearly defined, this includes your vision and mission. Define your customer experience vision and mission.
Design – In the design component you design the maturity model, link it all together
Culture – all these components need to be embedded with a very clear culture. So, from top to bottom everybody should know what your expectations are, what needs to be delivered, what is the maturity model moving towards.
Stage - Once you have defined your disciplines, you need to then identify at which stage do you exist? Are you at the beginning of each element, each discipline? Are you at the ad-hoc level? Are you at a maturity level or are you at an advanced level?
Benchmark - There are lots of benchmarks available and the beauty about customer experience is that it need not be confined within the industry. A bank can easily benchmark itself with the hospitality industry.
Functions - Last but not least, your maturity model should also cover all functions. For example, it needs to cover IT, finance, marketing, thus all these components within the organisation should be part of the maturity model.
I heard someone once say that “in God, we trust. Everyone else please bring data”. Data is a key enabler for organisations to understand customer experience, customer journey and to integrate it into different systems and the different tools that they are using needs to be coupled with enablers and you talked about the different stages so that’s very very relevant and important for us.
Olga Budieri, Global CX Head, Aramex International
B2B and B2C interplay in organisations
When covering both segments, B2B and B2C, it’s very important to have a common language and foundation, in terms of principles, governance and so on.
Once you set up the governance, ie how things should run in these two segments, you define the methodology.
B2C is more mature compared to B2B
Trust - Establishing a valuable long-term relationship and positioning yourself an advisor is important. So, customers should come to you with the same trust as when they go to a hospital. When you want to find a cure for a problem you look for the best doctor to give it to you, your brand should be perceived in the same way.
Data - B2B is well established as the regional dynamics have facilitated nurturing long-term relationships with a lot of companies. The difference in terms of maturity is made by data. So, whilst there is data in both buckets, there is definitely more understanding of what’s going on in the B2C segment.
Maturing framework - A maturity framework helps to do check-ins and regular assessments to continuously build CX. Across the function and across the company, you can evaluate the maturity model. The Temkin maturity model is a well-known model that can be used for this purpose. The key is to move to the operational and embedded level, wherein people are working across functions, and looking at journeys end to end, with metrics in place for measuring results.
Connecting customer insights with the cross-functional experience management
What organisational capabilities would we see developing over the next 5 years towards gain higher levels of CX maturity?
Customer centricity is all about building the organisation’s knowledge base and organisational memory, the collective ability across different departments to collect customer data and transform it into customer insights. These customer insights are either attitudinal insights or behavioural insights, that each department can act upon. Different departments have different cognitive processing abilities to aggregate, transform, and act upon these customer insights. This is mainly due to the nature of their operation - what they know, how they know and their experiences, taste and knowledge. For example, a marketing team will use and exploit customer insights in a different manner than a customer service team, which see a different point of view or a different view of the same customer. So, whilst customer-centricity exists, every department is seeing a different view of the same customer. To become a customer-centric organisation, we need to acknowledge these differences and help different departments to infuse these customer insights in their day-to-day operations. Allow them to understand the impact based on their taste, knowledge, know-how and operation.
The case for B2B is a bit more challenging because, for B2B CX, the traditional quantitative survey-based approach will not suffice. The client numbers are less and to get the consumer insights the CX team needs to really deep-dive and apply a more qualitative approach to understand the consumer better.
When actioning these customer insights for B2B, you need to look for two loops. For B2C, you act upon the customer insights directed by your customers, but for B2B, you have two loops. The first loop is with your end-user, the second loop, the outer loop is with the organisation at large. So, you need to keep both happy. Your buyer as well as your end-user, who sometimes with whom you may not have a direct encounter or interaction.
This is the difficulty with B2B CX. You need to look at direct and indirect interactions.
Codin Caragea, Head of Customer Experience, Bank Muscat
Next: Importance of executive sponsorship for CX initiatives. Read on.
