Understanding CX maturity models: CX Mini Masterclass – E78

welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday, and designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts, and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 78, and it’s the first episode for the month of April 2020. Regular listeners of the program will know that the first Thursday of the month is usually an interview episode, but the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a bit of a wrench into some of my interview scheduling. But I do have an interview episode headed your way later this month, so stay tuned for that. Today is a CX mini master class, and we’re going to be looking at CX maturity and some models for charting progress with customer centric evolution.

The CX profession was born out of the age of the customer, a confluence of market factors that led to the rise of empowered customers and a shift in power from companies to consumers. As companies responded and became more customer centric, there needed to be ways of measuring, evaluating, and charting the progress. This gave rise to CX maturity models, which can be valuable tools for any CX professional to help their organization plan for and drive CX change. In this episode, I’m going to explain CX maturity, talk about some of the most popular CX maturity models that have been developed over the years, and provide you with some practical ideas on how you might be able to leverage these in your work as an agent of customer centric change.

If you’re interested in learning more about a tool that is fundamental to customer centric evolution and goes straight to the heart of the CX profession, then this episode is for you. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Truth be told, when the age of the customer arrived, most established businesses were ill-prepared.

They were inward-looking and had been set up to solve business problems, not customer problems. The process for companies to change, adapt with the times, and become customer-centric was just that, a process. Generally speaking, the larger the business, the longer that tends to take. There isn’t a cut and paste solution for customer-centric transformation.

This will be a unique journey for each organization. But there are some similarities in key milestones that can be charted along the way. As we progressed into the age of the customer and more and more businesses were responding to the new market conditions, CX professionals started to see patterns and similarities, which gave rise to the development of CX maturity models. These models normally track the different phases of CX evolution from outright denial of customer experience as a strategic imperative at the very lowest level to a fully integrated customer-centric business utopia at the highest level.

Plus, all the steps in between. Some of the most popular models out there have been developed by the likes of Forrester, Gartner, and some of the other big name research houses. Most of the models in high rotation are conceptually quite similar, and vary mostly in their terminology. So personally, I think the magic is in how you use the model, not which one you pick.

I often reference Bruce Temkin’s model, and I’m going to use that as my example here, but I just want to stress that I’m not endorsing one maturity model over another. Temkin’s model includes six stages. Stage one is ignore, in which an organization does not place importance on, or really pay much attention to customer experience. Stage two is explore, where an organization might start some efforts to learn a bit more about customers and improve customer experience, possibly through some ad hoc voice of customer research, maybe a little one soft journey mapping, something like that.

The next is stage three, or mobilize, where CX management begins to take some permanent shape through the creation of a CX team and possibly some CX governance. Next is operationalize, which is stage four. Here, we see more visible leadership support for customer experience, though not unanimous, and the CX team gains influence across the organization. Stage five is Align, where some leaders start to prioritize customer experience as a strategic driver and a core value.

Again, not all the leaders, but maybe most of them. In this stage, CX teams would expand and maintain their distributed skills. Finally, stage six is embed, where leaders uniformly support customer experience as a top priority and a core value. Customer experience becomes the responsibility of the entire organization, and it’s just what everyone does.

See what I mean about CX Utopia? As you see, a CX maturity model helps us understand how an organization moves through its customer-centric transformation and how each of these phases is quite unique. For each of these phases, one can evaluate different criteria or competencies. The Temkin model looks at purposeful leadership, compelling values, employee engagement, customer connectedness, and CX organization across the different stages as their competencies for evaluation.

If you want to move the dial with overall CX management and customer centricity, you can’t just focus on one or two of these. So, for example, customer connectedness or employee engagement. You have to look at how to drive change across all the competencies. And organizations may have some areas where they’re more advanced than others.

That’s definitely not uncommon, and in fact, I’d say it’s probably the norm. CX maturity models can be really useful both as diagnostic tools for establishing where an organization is, as well as formulating the strategy for driving transformation going forward. If you’re a CX professional, the approaches that you might use to move from ignore to explore would be very different than those that you would use to move an organization from Operationalize to Align. So understanding where you are is helpful in charting where you’re going to go.

Doing a CX maturity diagnostic can be a great reality check for leaders to understand where they are and what they need to do. So if you haven’t done so already, I suggest sitting down with your leadership team to have a frank discussion about your organization’s CX maturity. In advance of this conversation, you might want to pull cross-functional leaders, get some feedback from them, or come prepared with some examples to share and discuss. In my experience, these can be very eye-opening conversations, but you’ve got to plan ahead for them.

As mentioned previously, it’s unrealistic to expect a business to jump from stage one to stage six overnight. And a CX maturity model might be something that you can use to craft the right approach for your organization. So for example, if you identify that the lack of clearly defined customer promises is what’s keeping your organization from moving from explore to mobilize, you can plan some actions to address this. Maybe in the other competencies, you’re doing just fine.

If your team is also responsible for day-to-day management of customer experiences, it’s especially important that you create a plan for driving CX maturity. I’ve seen time and time again. It’s just too easy for these teams to get wrapped up in the day-to-day and lose sight of the bigger picture. A CX maturity model might sound like some sort of abstract convoluted strategic thing at first, but it’s actually an incredibly useful and very practical tool for moving from goals to action.

If you’re looking for help with a CX maturity diagnostic strategy formulation or figuring out how to drive tangible CX change, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

I’ll see you then.