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To propel your firm to world-class performance, an assessment for almost-automatic CX excellence is now available. You can fast-track your customer experience (CX) maturity with gigantic financial gains, as I learned when we faced a customer crisis early in my career. We aimed from the start to align every work group with customers’ priorities, engage every group in improving CX efficiency and effectiveness, and embed customer-focus in running our business. Within the first two years, we saved enormous time and money for employees, customers, partners and investors. This led to substantial gains in trust, lifetime value, and ongoing growth.

What’s the point of customer experience management, ultimately? To maximize value to customers, employees, partners, and investors. How is value maximized? By minimizing dysfunction in delivering what’s promised.

How can customer experience management achieve this? By building individual and organizational competencies for almost-automatic CX excellence. When the people across your organization’s ecosystem are tuned-in, they proactively create new value for customers. And refreshingly, a tuned-in ecosystem prevents occurrence of issues.

Wouldn’t it be great if customers had no need for remedies? Almost-automatic CX excellence is what leaders like Ritz Carlton and Disney demonstrate. While no organization is 100 percent perfect, impressive performance is attainable when you set up your organization for it. Great news: it is less expensive than what you are doing now in CXM.

Organizational and individual competencies are crucial for almost-automatic CX excellence. While technologies and data management can improve consistency and minimize many issues, you still depend upon people to set parameters, inputs and outputs. In fact, technology deployment requires full-time management. Interestingly, every digitalization study reveals that primary success factors are cultural. My favorite quote on this topic is from a Clorox executive: “We were trying to do digital, and we realized we needed to be digital.” High levels of coordination, competence, and consistency are necessary for success of technology, employee experience, digital experience, and financial efficiency.

While great strides have been made in deploying customer experience management in most organizations, significant weaknesses persist in strategic competencies, as shown by a Temkin Group study. And as you may guess, over the past few years, performance has actually declined, not improved. For example, up to 90 percent of customer experience managers self-assess their strengths as very low for being strategic about when, where, and from whom information is solicited. The same percentage of CX managers are not skilled in user-centric approaches for identifying changes that will improve customer experience. 

The assessment for almost-automatic CX excellence contains 3 evaluations: 1) organizational competencies short assessment, 2) organizational competencies deep assessment, and 3) individual competency assessment.

Your organization’s scores reveal your customer experience maturity: Mobilize CXM, Operationalize CXM, Align CXM, Embed CXM. These 4 maturity levels should be pursued in tandem. When I led company-wide customer experience, we discovered that aiming for Align and Embed allows you to bypass many of the typical CX practices (because they are remedial and you’ve risen above that).

Your individual scores reveal your competencies in facilitating customer experience maturity, as described above. Success factors for Align and Embed maturity levels are your methods for facilitating automatic CX excellence:

• Ask: how you collect customer insights sets the stage for how customer-centric you run your business
• Absorb: how you share CX insights shapes managers’ absorption of keys to customer-centric management
• Adopt: how managers adopt CX insights determines their commitment to almost-automatic CX excellence
• Apply: how managers apply CX insights indicates your Align CXM and Embed CXM maturity levels
• Account: how managers are accountable for application of CX insights reveals your CXM ROI
• Applaud: how you celebrate CX progress inspires and rewards all of the above

Your assessment scores can range from 0 to 200. Scores below 100 mean you are at the Beginner stage for almost-automatic CX excellence. Scores above 180 mean you are at the world-class level of CX maturity. Download File

While numerous CX competency resources are available in many formats, ClearAction’s skill-building is specifically designed to fast-track your maturity and financial gains, in accordance with this assessment for almost-automatic CX excellence.

Since the global economic downturn of 2009, organizations of all kinds have invested heavily in customer experience management. Our profession has made great strides in the past dozen years. Still, this progress is not keeping pace with what customers need, as evidenced in numerous studies this year. The ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) reported that customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in 16 years. Only 8% of firms are in the top 2 levels of CX maturity, compared to 13% in 2019, per the XM Institute 2022 State of Customer Experience study. Forrester’s 2022 CX Index dropped to 2020 performance, customer-obsessed firms dropped from 10% in 2021 to 3% now, and no industry has ever performed in the Good or Excellent category.

Now is the right time to advance your organizational and individual CX competencies. As uncertainty and value pressures rise, we can also rise to the occasion by managing customers and our organizations more wisely. After all, customers are the “hand that feeds us”.

See more in the full article at Assessment for Almost-Automatic CX Excellence.