Who in your organization knows your customers best? Is it your leadership, customer experience professionals, sales and marketing, or frontline workers? I’m sure we would get different answers if we asked each of those groups. Most likely, they’d all claim that they know the customer best.
Let’s look at this positively: if you have that response, at least everyone is focused on the customer. As CX professionals, we know that is often half the battle. Getting an organization to think customer-first is a major challenge.
Yet I’ve seen many companies say they’re customer-centric but fail to deliver the joined-up experience that keeps people coming back.
When CX isn’t connected
Don’t believe me? There was an e-commerce company that had a lot of returns on a single product. The costs were hitting profitability, impacting wider customer satisfaction scores. The CX team had a look at the data but couldn’t see what was triggering the returns. They did many tests, but the buying experience was strong; there weren’t many abandoned carts or payment issues. There were no clear indications as to why the product kept getting sent back.
Eventually they turned to the contact center teams, who knew exactly what the problem was: the product images on the website showed an item with no wires, so customers thought it was wireless. When they received it, they were disappointed to see that it had wires that were needed to make it work. They sent it back because this wasn’t what they were looking for.
Each stage of the buying process had been optimized to deliver a great experience: the product images were very high-end, there were no problems with checking out, and the company had a great team that could help customers with problems. Every individual stage was customer-centric. What was lacking was the joined-up thinking that would have first identified that the images customers saw didn’t accurately reflect what they would receive and, second, integrated feedback from frontline teams to wider operations.
Convincing decision makers to act
Frustratingly, it often takes an issue like this to reveal a disconnect. And if there’s one, there’s likely to be others.
And it can have far-reaching consequences. Consumers increasingly buy directly – 63% say they buy directly from a brand’s website, with 29% saying they are considering it. So brands have to be set up to deliver exceptional CX.
Yet taking that to decision makers and convincing them that more needs to be done can be difficult. Many businesses understand the value of great CX; it’s not from a lack of investment or trying that they’re not yet delivering it. In fact, it’s often because of that investment that they’re less keen to change anything.
There’s also another factor – the scale and pace of technological change. We’re seeing this with artificial intelligence. Customers are aware of the latest trends, and when it comes to AI, they increasingly expect that businesses are using it to give frontline agents all the information they need. This can create a disconnect, as we saw with the example before: despite the investment in chatbots, the channel didn’t deliver the solution, and it became apparent that the fault lay in the gap between the content available to buyers and internal business processes.
What’s happening is that due to a lack of understanding of CX's connected nature, businesses are not getting the most out of their investment; they’ve bought a Ferrari, and they’re driving it like a Lada.
So how do we, as CX professionals, get our organizations not just to realize they have to be more customer-centric but to actually deliver?
Understanding your CX maturity levels
It starts by knowing where you are in your CX journey. So often, I see businesses that, for all their professed customer focus, are at very different levels of maturity within their organization. For instance, sales and marketing might believe they know everything about the customer, while customer service (CS) may also think that.
Yet, if the two functions never talk, how does anyone know what data sales and marketing holds versus what customer service has? It could well be that sales and marketing’s knowledge has gaps that the customer team can fill, or vice versa, such as in the example before. But you won’t know that until you clearly understand your maturity levels.
That’s why undertaking a maturity assessment can be so valuable to your CX journey. It can give you a snapshot of where you are and quickly identify problem areas. If you build it into a regular process, it can become a way of tracking progression and giving you a framework for continuous improvement.
When you do that, you’re looking to answer three main questions:
1. What is our CX maturity level
2. What are our areas of improvement?
3. What support do we need to achieve that improvement?
What’s more, it doesn’t have to be expensive to implement or require a lot of work. An initial, quick assessment can highlight challenges and allow you to start thinking about priorities.
To answer those three questions, you should take a deeper dive. That could focus on specific domains, such as strategy and culture, data and insights, technology, experience management, and customer relationships. It will depend on where your initial challenges are, but it will mean you can get to the heart of the problem and work out how you fix the issues.
What’s important to remember is that you’re not just assessing the tools with which you deliver CX but also the people, processes, data and technology that underpins it all. This isn’t about whether you’re getting a return on an investment in a new customer relationship management system but how mature each element of your CX operation is. You might have customer-focused people who can’t access the data they need to deliver the appropriate service levels or an IT infrastructure stuck in the early 21st century. If you want to build a world-class-experience business, you’ve got to have each part focused on delivering great CX.
How you conduct these assessments will depend on your organization. Some businesses run them regularly internally, but that requires dedicated resources. Most organizations are so focused on the day-to-day that having the time to stop and think about a maturity assessment is a luxury. That’s where working with an outside partner can help; in addition to having experience running these programs for other companies, they often also have external perspectives to help you make sense of the outcomes.
Taking the first step in your CX journey
Maturity assessments are the start of your journey to delivering joined-up CX, but they are a crucial first step. They will give you the data to demonstrate that improvements are needed and a route to success. This is critical to securing senior buy-in and getting the whole organization to not just think about customer-centricity, but actually be it.
Orange Business draws on its significant knowledge to help customers assess their maturity levels and identify opportunities to deliver exceptional experiences. Get in touch to learn how we can help you conduct a maturity assessment and kick-start your journey to greater levels of customer-centricity.
Karin is Head of CX & EX Digital Business Consulting and Innovation in Europe for Orange Business. Having previously worked at Philips and Shimano, she's a digital transformation expert and has helped some of the world's leading companies revolutionize how they interact with customers and deliver exceptional experiences.