Hey CX Lead—You Are Your Company’s Most Strategic Asset!

By Ken Ewell, Chief Customer Officer, Momentive 

For most organizations, CX is a strategic asset, and yet so many Chief Customer Officers like myself struggle to understand where they stand today and to chart a course for where they want their organization to be in six, twelve, or eighteen months. When it comes to assessing how your customer experience program stacks up, I’m a big fan of using maturity models to help the dialogue along.

GetFeedback’s maturity model assessment, which we developed in partnership with CX expert and CEO of Experience Investigators, Jeannie Walters, goes a step further than just gauging a general sense of your CX capabilities, as other models do. Our CX maturity model assessment prioritizes the actions that you should take based on your maturity level, with concrete steps to help you get even better. 

In a session of our CX Leadership Roundtable at Momentive, we asked 100+ senior CX leaders how they leverage CX maturity models effectively. Here are the 4 top takeaways that a CX program of any maturity level can learn from. 

1. Challenge: You can’t improve without buy-in from cross-functional leadership.

Tip: Don’t cut corners on engaging internal champions.

While 48% of the CX leaders in our roundtable had never used a CX maturity model, they were clear that the most compelling reasons to leverage one were to have a framework to improve their organizations’ CX maturity (88%) and to help CX leaders drive action in their organization (86%). 

In the roundtable discussion, participants agreed that an ideal model would enable them to assess where they stood so that they could have objective conversations with their leadership teams, as well as provide with specific steps they could take to improve. A successful CX program requires alignment across the entire organization, not just within the customer service center. Check out our on-demand webinar for ideas on how to gain buy-in and collaboration from your leaders and teams. 

2. Challenge: A CX program that isn’t aligned with the company’s mission will see limited success.

Tip: Ensure that your program ladders up to existing company goals. 

We recently asked Jeannie Walters to lead us through a discussion of best practices and common failures. It was important that leveraging a CX maturity model was not just an academic, intellectual exercise that would collect virtual dust in the leaders’ inboxes. 

Often, organizations name a CX leader and immediately focus on tactics without stopping to get explicitly aligned on how their CX program will serve their company’s mission — nor to clearly document how they will measure success with quarterly deliverables. As a result, a program with the best of intentions risks fizzling out before making significant improvements. 

Walters found that CX leaders who have a documented mission, strategy, and roadmap for their CX program are able to deliver meaningful business impact with their CX program. 

3. Challenge: Program governance is hard. 

Tip: Don’t cut corners - Governance takes time, but it's worth it.

While there are multiple CX maturity models on the market, many were considered too complicated and overwhelming to be actionable. When asked how CX leaders would rate their organization’s maturity on common elements, 40% stated they were most mature in the areas of culture, people, and leadership. On the other hand, 58% said they were least mature in the area of governance. 

A consistent, effective governance program helps CX leaders drive organizational accountability, leverage insights across the organization, and resource initiatives to improve their customers’ experience. To prevent future complications from a lack of accountability, start off any CX initiative with a clear governance program in place. A framework that outlines deliverables, responsibilities, goals, and the workflow of the project can be the difference between a successful initiative and one that flounders. With CX becoming increasingly visible within businesses, it’s critical for CX leaders to set themselves up for success. 

4. Challenge: CX teams don't communicate what they are doing to stakeholders. 

Tip: Share progress and results broadly, frequently and consistently. 

CX leaders were guilty of diving into execution with their working team and forgetting to update their broader stakeholders early and often. Without ongoing and frequent communication, CX leaders are not able to affect change through influencing peers and leaders around them. This is a crucial part of any business initiative that can easily be overlooked: share early, share often. 

In order to demonstrate meaningful progress in months and not years, CX leaders need to share achievements with the wider organization. Walters noted that, like a music producer using an audio mixer to dial up or down a particular track, a CX leader might lean into one dimension of the maturity model for a quarter or two before dialing back to focus on another dimension. That is an effective way to make progress, but it can’t be done in a silo. When a shift in focus happens, CX leaders can’t forget to socialize that with stakeholders who need to know what to expect from the CX team. Having an agile CX solution, like GetFeedback, empowers CX leaders to make these shifts in focus seamlessly. With that, it’s just up to the CX leaders to remember to be proactive about sharing changes. 

The goal is not to achieve a specific maturity level, but to identify the actions to take next

In summary CX maturity models are a tool intended to help a CX leader drive action in their organization to improve their customers’ experience. The goal is not the scorecard or the slides, but rather, the action it inspires. 

Of course, like any other effort to improve your customers’ experience, don’t forget to ask your customers for input. Customer-centric organizations benefit from invaluable feedback from customers to shape future experiences. “Take the time to ask your customers” is always the right answer.