Editorial
The Gist:
- Comprehensive CX strategies. Mastering customer experience management requires a holistic approach, involving all organizational components and aligning business strategies with CX goals.
- Cultural shift needed. Achieving CX management maturity demands a shift towards a customer-centric culture, impacting leadership, HR practices and organizational environment.
- Tech integration is crucial. Investing in technology and systems is essential for enhancing CX management, improving operational efficiency and creating a seamless customer journey.
Abbott and Alderson first introduced the concept of customer experience in the 1950s, and since then, many numerous models, articles and numerous scientific titles have been published. Creating a strong customer experience is currently one of the most important goals for organizations.
Understanding, analyzing and managing customer experiences from the first touchpoint until the end of the journey is crucial, especially considering the current direction of businesses toward creating a CX-focused competitive advantage. In fact, the explosion of potential touchpoints and subsequent difficulty of managing every aspect of the customer journey require companies to integrate multiple business functions such as IT, service operations, logistics, marketing, human resources and business partners in order to provide a seamless, positive customer experience.
The challenge of CX is something that most companies face due to increasing competition and decreasing revenue. They need to focus on improving CX in order to differentiate their services from competitors.
However, implementing excellent customer experience management and continuously improving CX are not simple. According to Mayer and Schwager, until customer-centricity becomes the top priority and until business processes, systems and structures change to reflect this customer-centric priority, brands won't improve.
A recent study conducted in collaboration with Forrester to evaluate the maturity of CX management in telecommunications companies in South Africa provides more insight into improving CX. The study shows that although these companies have been focused on CX management as a strategic initiative and have a dedicated team for it, their endeavors to manage CX within their organization were not necessarily consistent and comprehensive. The same report mentions that one of the biggest obstacles to implementing CX management is the knowledge gap in incorporating CX in business operations.
Identifying organizational factors that enhance CX is one of the most important areas that need more attention. Marketing leaders must ask themselves: What organizational factors and components will be effective in the maturity of CX management in an organization?
The results of investigations and research indicate that these components follow the following conceptual model, which will be further elaborated on in this article.
Cultural Components for Effective CX Management
The cultural components of the CX management maturity model encompasses culture, leadership and human resource management. The most important common aspect among these components is the focus on putting customers first.
CX-Focused HR Management
Involve employees in designing the customer experience and addressing pain points. There is a strong relationship between employee experience and customer experience, and employees play a significant role in enhancing CX. According to Berry et al. (2002), one important factor in creating a positive customer experience is the human element. Employees' knowledge and behavior — as well as how they treat customers — significantly impact how customers perceive their experience with the company.
Colin Shaw and John Ivens (2002) also emphasized the pivotal role of HR in creating excellent customer experiences and suggested that organizations hire individuals who are empathetic to customers.
Remember these key points to foster this component:
- Train employees and develop their skills in CX
- Deploy incentives and a compensation plan based on customer experience
- Improve employee satisfaction and experience
- Recruit people who are inherently customer-centric and culturally fit the organization
- Foster commitment and participation of employees in CX program
Related Article: Why Great Employee Experience Leads to Great Customer Experience
Customer-Focused Leadership
Leadership plays a pivotal role in implementing CX management, according to Gartner’s Maturity Model. Leaders’ beliefs and personal commitments to keeping promises are always crucial. Leaders should put the customer at the core of business decisions in order to provide a positive experience, build long-term relationships and lead the organization based on adequate insight into the impacts of their decisions on CX.
To move to the next level of CX maturity, organizations must consider these key points:
- Foster management commitment and buy-in
- Assign a chief customer experience officer
- Support and develop cross-functional efforts throughout the organization
- Inject a customer-centric mindset into your company culture
- Level resources by focusing on customer understanding
Customer-Centric Culture
Manning and Bodine (2012) refer to culture as one of the six main disciplines that companies must pay attention to move toward customer-centricity. They said that culture has the greatest potential for creating customer experience transformation. It will be crucial to focus on both shifting toward a customer-centric culture and improving the organizational environment, as these will show signs of cultural change.
Considering these key points to cultivate and foster a customer-centric culture:
- Implement customer experience training for all levels of organization
- Implement a reward and recognition system to reinforce the change
- Implement performance management KPIs for all CX employees
- Make sure the recruitment process targets CX-centric candidates
- Reinforce the mindset that positive results should be rewarded and that the right behaviors should be rewarded
Governance and Strategy for Customer Experience Management
This layer of CX maturity is associated with change management, strategic planning and governance. The key consideration among these components is to manage CX efforts from both the strategic and tactical levels.
CX Change Management
"Customer experience management is a business function rooted in continuous improvement, which means change," said Jeff Sheehan in his book, “Customer Experience Management Field Manual.” One of the biggest challenges for CX leaders is driving change within their organizations. Leaders should consider these key points to drive and reinforce change:
- Choose the proper change methodology by considering the size of organization, operations cadence of the organization, current culture and the extent of changes that the CX program will bring to the organization
- Choose the best CX audit framework to assess your CX organizational readiness and maturity
- Monitoring the change, implementing the CX program and re-audit
CX-Focused Strategic Planning
One of the most critical components for starting CX programs in an organization and guiding their implementation is strategic re-planning with a focus on customer experience. Gartner emphasizes in its CX maturity model that aligning vision, objectives and CX strategies with the core business strategies and other functional strategies is crucial.
Some key points for strategic planning within a customer-centric organization include:
- Define the CX mission and vision
- Define the CX Strategy by considering brand strategy, brand promises and customer understanding
- Set new CX goals and attune them with other goals
- Check the alignment between the CX strategy and overall business strategy
CX Governance
Organizations can choose from a spectrum of governance models precisely tailored to their distinct requirements and industry. Governance models are as diverse as organizations are. Regardless of the type of organizational model chosen for implementation, governance practices help you drive accountability by assigning specific CX management tasks to specific people within your organization.
A great CX governance keeps CX connected to the business, fosters strategic CX plans that are aligned with overall business strategies, encourages a customer-centric culture, manages CX operations and showcases CX impact.
Related Article: Where Customer Experience Goes, Governance Must Follow
Process Considerations for CX Management
The process components layer includes a framework for aligning business processes with CX, as well as a CX design and implementation process. Aligning CX is the most important consideration here.
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A Framework for Aligning Business Processes With CX
Effectively designing and implementing CX processes requires overcoming silo mentality and ensuring cross-organizational collaboration. It is essential to realign CX with business processes, and it is expected that necessary changes will be made to all types of processes, including core, support and management processes.
CX Design and Implementation Process
The CX design and implementation process is a cycle that starts with understanding the customer and ends with measuring the experience.
The first step is understanding the customer. If there is no proper understanding, designing experiences and services for customers will not be possible.
Designing these experiences requires mapping and managing the customer journey. Then, organizations must deliver the designed experience. This requires involvement from testing groups across the customer journey from discovery to conversion.
Finally, establishing a framework for measuring CX can help you understand the effectiveness of your design efforts. According to Plessis and Vries (2016), a continuous improvement cycle of CX is needed for this process to be institutionalized from start to finish.
Related Article: Customer Experience Metrics: 3 Steps That Drive Growth
Technology Considerations for CX Management
This layer of CX maturity relates to CX knowledge management as well as CX-focused technologies, systems and channels.
Managing CX Insight and Knowledge
Effective customer insight requires customer data analysis and a deep understanding of customer motivations, behaviors and sentiments towards the organization. This allows the organization to gain the necessary insights for designing and improving CX through any channel during customer interactions.
CX-Focused Technologies, Systems and Channels
Investing in technology is one of the most crucial strategies that C-suite executives use to enhance customer experience and establish themselves as market leaders.
Technologies, systems and channels need to be implemented in a way that is aligned to the CX strategy. Technological efforts generally focus on the following areas:
- Enhance the user experience (UX) in technological products and online channels
- Use technology to improve overall CX throughout all channels and parts of the customer journey
- Use technology to improve operational efficiency (i.e, ERP)
- Use technology to gather feedback on the customer experience (i.e., sentiment analysis, CRM)
- Use technology for customer response and support (i.e., chatbots and intelligent IVR)
- Use technology to create a single view of the customer (i.e., customer data platform)
Driving Customer Experience Management Forward
Successful implementation and maturity of customer experience management and improving the customer experience is the goal here. All components of the organization need to be involved; it's a fundamental and pervasive change in the organization. It means that the change starts from the goals, vision and strategies of the organization, and it impacts on not only the infrastructures, technology, processes and data, but also human resources, culture and style of leadership.
And as a powerful approach, it needs its own governance and processes to guarantee success and institutionalize it across the organization. Meanwhile, attention to the alignment frameworks between current business processes, vision and strategies with customer experience is so important as well.
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