Customer Experience Assessment: Developing a Blueprint for Improving CX

Ponder this for a moment - what do you think about your customer experience? Do you have a well-defined customer experience strategy? And, most importantly - are your efforts really paying off?

Think about your role in the company. You're in charge of Customer Experience (CX). Or customer support, customer engagement or customer relations. You basically handle customer operations, and are responsible for developing an effective customer-centric culture in the organization through strategic process improvement initiatives. Even if you’re not in a senior role, you have a part to play in the overall development of customer experience in the organization.

Maybe you think you've done a really great job. You've taken the initiative to analyze the entire customer journey, selected the experiences that matter to your customer, and are using customer experience management strategies to achieve your CX goals.

To sum it up - your boss is really happy with you, or in this case, the CEO or board of directors. Your customers applaud your team for your efforts - you know what their needs are, and in return, they are loyal to your company. You've mastered the art of customer experience just like the pros. In fact, your company was awarded many times solely for the extraordinary experiences you provide.

Or maybe that's too far ahead from where your company stands today. Your customer experience is improving, but you still haven't reached there yet. And, although you've started to optimize your customer journeys, you're still far from market leaders in your industry.

Or maybe you've not really taken much action to optimize for customer experience. Although you've realized the importance of doing so, you're still searching for the ideal customer experience platform to handle the job right. Or you feel that if you had more information, you'd meet your business goals pretty quickly.

Whatever the case might be, you still need a method to assess your customer experience strategy.

If you've recently gone through our most important customer experience statistics for 2017, you know that 72% of businesses think improving customer experience is their top priority, according to Forrester. This is why it is important for companies to realize the extent of their customer experience maturity, or assessing how an organization uses customer experience management to understand, track, manage, and improve customer experience.

Customer Experience Maturity Roadmap: How to Achieve CX Maturity

In fact, most organizations go through pretty much the same stages to achieve customer experience maturity. They are:

• Find and Fix: Analyze the entire customer journey, listen to the voice of customerand select the most important experiences. Then, identify gaps in customer experience, fix them and measure the results of your CX strategy by tracking important metrics like NPS and CSAT scores. Share the insights with everyone who is involved in the customer journey. Don't miss a single step in the journey.
• Raise the Bar: Make customer experience an intrinsic part of the company's culture. Give rewards for employees who go out of their way for a customer. It should revolve around the customer, and delivering a seamless & consistent experience is all about integrating CX into key business processes. 
• Reform and Upgrade: Provide a framework and implement processes that make it easy to improve customer experience quality for the best business outcomes. Empower and encourage your employees to think in favor of the customer, and become customer experience advocates for the company.
• Make Your Mark: Make your experience truly unique, and different from the rest. Know your customer's needs, solve their problems, and make it as easy as possible for them to engage with you more effectively.

We've come up with a way to accurately perform customer experience assessment within your organization and establish a clear baseline. Using this, customer experience professionals can find out how far ahead they are in Customer Experience Management Maturity.

Here are 5 Customer Experience Assessment Questions you can use to assess your customer experience maturity:

Q1. To what extent is your brand integrated with the customer experience? 

• 1 - No significant brand development in the customer journey.
• 2 - Organization clearly understands the impact of brand alignment in the digital age.
• 3 - Key metrics are being tracked, and action is being taken to link CX with the brand strategy.
• 4 - Brand is integrated really well across the entire customer journey with no gaps. 

Q2. To what extent do you know really your customers?

• 1 - Organization knows nothing about the customer or their needs.
• 2 - Organization has taken actionable steps to understand customers and their behaviour.
• 3 - Organization has a clear cut plan for knowing their customers and their needs in the near future.
• 4 - Organization has a 360 Degree single customer view updated in real-time, giving them a clear picture of the customer. Agents use this information to engage further with customers in a much better fashion and gain their loyalty.

Q3. To what extent does your company act upon customer feedback? 

• 1 - Organization does not collect customer feedback to improve business processes.
• 2 - Feedback collection is implemented, but not acted upon. Organization understands the importance of collecting customer feedback, but does not use that information to improve customer journeys.
• 3 - Acting upon feedback happens occasionally, but is not the norm. Organization understands the importance of acting upon customer feedback, and has a plan to increase their feedback-to-action in the near future.
• 4 - There is prompt feedback-to-action. Organization actively collects and uses customer feedback to improve customer journeys and design interactions across all touchpoints.

Q4. To what extent are your employees engaged with the company?

• 1 - Employees are not being engaged well enough, or no effort is being made to do collect employee feedback.
• 2 - Organization understands the importance of engaging employees to better serve customers. Employee engagement surveys are occasionally conducted, but only as a formality - not as a necessity.
• 3 - Employee engagement surveys are regularly being conducted, however, immediate action is not being taken on the collected feedback.
• 4 - Employee engagement is an important business priority. Organization regularly ensures that employees provide valuable insights to improve internal processes and promptly acts upon the information to make the culture more employee friendly.

Q5. How easy is it for a user to engage with your company?

• 1 - Users can engage with the company, but only through emails, phone, and online contact form.
• 2 - Users can engage with the company on email, phone, online chat, website, and social media. There is no focus on customer experience.
• 3 - The company is largely multichannel, however, organizational siloes still remain. Customer experience is somewhat being focused on, but critical changes have yet to be made across the entire organization.
• 4 - Users can engage with company seamlessly using any channel of their choice, and still expect a consistent experience every single time. The company has progressed from multichannel to omnichannel, and organizational siloes are no longer an issue.

Now that you’ve chosen an answer for each of the questions for our customer experience maturity assessment survey, sum them up and you’ll get a customer experience assessment score. Let’s see where your company stands:

• Customer-Focused (18-20): If your score is between 18 and 20, users can expect seamless, engaging and personalized customer journeys across all channels. This is the best state to be in - truly omnichannel, engaging, and customer-focused with 360 Degree Customer View and AI/Big data technologies being improved upon.
• Engaging (15-18): If your score is between 15 and 18, you are probably on the path to omnichannel, or have already achieved omnichannel. You are easy to engage with, and have probably begun to segment customers and analyze customer journeys & customer feedback. Personalization is implemented, but it has not yet reached the next level of individualization.
• Digitally Proactive (12-15): If your score is between 12 and 15, you are digitally proactive and considerate towards your customers. Your sales and marketing teams are proactive, and you can consider yourself to be fully digital.
• Accessible (less than 12): If your score is less than 12, you are merely accessible. You have basic digital channels along with your offline sales, marketing and support teams. This is not particularly a bad spot to be in, but there’s still a long way to go in CX maturity.

The Way Forward

Hopefully, by now, you know where you are in your customer experience maturity journey. Knowing your customer experience assessment score will help in creating an effective customer experience optimization strategy.

It all comes down to aligning your customer experience goals with the overall business strategy. Customer experience should be given top priority, and organizational siloes should be eliminated to establish clear accountability. Channel roles should be clearly understood, and specific CX teams should work on streamlining customer experience across the entire customer journey. Personalization should be at an individual level by taking into account the customer history and behaviour. Analytics should be more focused on AI and machine learning technologies, giving out predictions and stats focused on the customer.

Ameyo Fusion CX helps businesses achieve a truly seamless, personalized and consistent experience. To learn how Fusion CX can supercharge your customer experience and take it to the next level, talk with our customer experience experts today!