Do You Have a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy?
This article was first published on Linkedin here.
It is likely your business fits into one of these 3 categories:
Delivering your customer experience strategy day to day
Planning your customer experience strategy ready to begin delivering it
Thinking about planning and establishing your customer experience strategy
How is Customer Experience (CX) defined?
Here is how Zendesk define it which is pretty much how I would describe it:
Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer's perception and feelings about it. "Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with an organization over the life of the relationship with that company or with that brand"
During my 20 years experience working in user experience and customer experience, there is one crucial ingredient that a company needs to be focussed on in order for them to plan and deliver a rewarding, memorable customer experience.
The crucial ingredient?
The company has to be genuinely and actively aiming to become customer-centric.
How is Customer-centricity defined?
Here is how we define it:
Customer-Centricity is respecting, speaking to and listening to your employees and customers, and adapting your customer experience to better suit what they are looking for, both now and in the future
Why is Customer-centricity so important?
From my experiences working with various size companies across different sectors, customer-centric companies bring many things into the workplace and world.
Customer-Centric companies make customers, employees and shareholders happy. They also make the world a happier place - more humility, more respect, more happiness
Let me take you back to 2014 briefly
In 2014, as Founder of CX & CRO agency PRWD, I recognised that over recent years, organisation’s attention on customer-centricity was increasing and many business leaders were striving to become a truly customer-led business
For many of those businesses starting to focus on their customer, the results were incredibly varied and growth potential left untapped, mainly due to a lack of cultural change, relevant team skills and mature processes to improve and measure the customer experience
I realised that in order to truly understand the companies we were working with and how best we could add value to the organisation, as an agency we needed to develop a Customer-Centricity Maturity Model to begin auditing companies.
Work began on creating the 1st version of our Maturity Model in late 2014 and it was completed in early 2015.
What knowledge and experiences were harnessed to create the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model?
The Maturity Model was first created by myself and some of the senior team within the CX agency, PRWD
Knowledge to create the Maturity Model originally was harnessed through the following:
PRWD being the UK representative of the Global Conversion Alliance, a small group of the worlds leading customer experience and conversion agencies across the world
With myself regularly speaking at and attending the industries most advanced conferences on growth through customer-centricity
With myself delivering customer-centricity strategy training for Econsultancy to global brands
What areas of a business does the Maturity Model cover?
From its initial conception in 2014 through to writing this today in 2021, there are 4 pillars of the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model:
Strategy & Culture
Tools & Technology
People & Skills
Process & Methodology
Here is an overview of each of the 4 pillars:
1.0 Strategy & Culture
This area focuses on how well customer-centricity is aligned to the growth strategy of your organisation. It explores what type of culture and mindset the business has, what is the employee experience (EX) within your organisation, how aligned are different departments on customer experience, and whether or not there are senior, influential champions who are advocating a truly customer-led culture.
2.0 Tools & Technology
This area focuses on the tools and technology your organisation uses to enable a robust customer experience improvement strategy. It includes the web analytics platform, VOC and behavioural insight tools, and what level of resource and skills your organisation has to harness the technology that has been invested in .
3.0 People & Skills
This area focuses on what type of appreciation your organisation has towards investing in a multi-disciplinary team to help drive an intelligent customer-led user experience improvement programme. It looks at skill sets including user research, UX design, web development, persuasion and copywriting.
4.0 Process & Methodology
This area focuses on the approach that the business takes to deliver customer experience improvements through a customer-led mindset. It looks at the key characteristics of how hypotheses are created and prioritised, the design process for CX improvements, and how changes to the CX are analysed and learnings gained and shared
Customer-centricity isn't just "yes or no", it is a journey
As part of the development of the Maturity Model, we established 5 levels of maturity, recognising that everything we were evaluating within a business has multiple levels of maturity - every company is on a journey to becoming customer-centric.
Here are the 5 levels of maturity - they are applied to the company overall, each of the 4 pillars and every individual assessment point within the Maturity Model.
Beginner
Aspiring
Progressive
Strategic
Transformative
What specifically is important within a business to become truly customer-centric and deliver a rewarding, engaging and persuasive customer experience strategy?
When the Maturity Model was 1st created in 2014, there were a total of 49 individual assessment points identified across the 4 pillars.
Following the 1st client audits using the Maturity Model, the number of assessment points was reduced in order to ensure that Maturity Model was as applicable and usable to as many companies as possible.
The intention of the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model has since been to make it:
Relevant to any revenue size of company
Relevant to companies working in all different sectors
Relevant to companies irrespective of where they are currently in customer-centricity maturity
Relevant to companies with various sizes of team
In early 2021, when Paul Rouke joined with Paul Postance to set-up Become Customer-Centric, (Paul Postance has worked in senior client-side roles in customer experience for 20 years), the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model was further refined, with 5 new assessment points added and 2 assessment points removed as they no longer served a worthwhile purpose.
We now believe that the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model is the most comprehensive, usable and valuable Maturity Model available to companies around the world.
Here are the 24 assessment points important to businesses to accelerate them on their journey to become truly customer-centric. After this overview, I have provided an explanation as to why each of these 24 assessment points are important and an integral part of the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model.
1.0 Strategy & Culture
1.01 Core Business Strategy
1.02 Business Mindset
1.03 Senior, Influential Champion
1.04 Continuous Learning
1.05 Product-Led versus Customer-Led
1.06 Cross-Departmental Dynamics
1.07 Employee Experience (EX)
2.0 Tools & Technology
2.01 Primary Analytics Tool
2.02 VOC and Behavioural Insight Tools
2.03 Business Wide Access to Customer Learnings
2.04 Resources & Skills To Harness Tools & Tech
3.0 People & Skills
3.01 Behavioural & User Research Resource
3.02 Data & Analytics Resource
3.03 UX Design Resource
3.04 Development Resource
3.05 Experienced Lead Strategist
3.06 HCI & Persuasion
3.07 Persuasive Copywriting
4.0 Process & Methodology
4.01 CX Improvement Hypothesis Approach
4.02 CX Change Prioritisation
4.03 CX Design Process
4.04 QA and UAT Process
4.05 CX Change Analysis
4.06 CX Results & Learnings Report
1.01 Core Business Strategy
To maximise the impact customer centricity can have on the growth of a business, it simply has to be at the core of a business’ strategy.
Businesses that have disrupted their marketplace have cultivated a customer-driven culture from the top down, allowing them to evolve not only with the marketplace, but with their customers, too.
1.02 Business Mindset
A business’ mindset dictates its chance of employee engagement, customer centricity and business growth. As more and more businesses are coming in the marketplace, those new and old companies with a ’growth’ mindset are flourishing.
Being less hierarchical, more attuned to one’s customers and more willing to take risks and challenge the status quo leads to a more stimulating workplace and a greater chance of long term success.
1.03 Senior, Influential Champion
Like any strategic objectives within a business, customer-centricity requires a senior, influential champion to tap into the growth potential this company philosophy has.
Striving to have the CEO and C-suite appreciating and championing the strategic value of becoming a truly customer-centric organisation is imperative for long term success.
1.04 Continuous Learning
With the world moving as fast as it is, the only way to meet and surpass expectations is through gaining continuous user behaviour insights and applying the findings throughout the business.
A continuous stream of insights and learnings will allow a business to evolve, optimise and improve its customer proposition and the overall customer experience.
1.05 Product-Led versus Customer-Led
Progressing from where most companies exist – product led – to a place that truly puts both its customers and its employees first, is one of the most important journey’s any company can go on.
The transformation take companies from “what we think and feel our customers want” to “lets find out what our customers want”.
1.06 Cross-Departmental Dynamics
No matter what size a company is, the dynamics and relationship between people from different departments plays a significant role in how the business runs.
Often companies have strained or sometimes non-existent relationships between departments, leading to competing for budget and recognition. This needs to change for a company to flourish.
1.07 Employee Experience (EX)
The saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. The environment in which employees work goes a long way in influencing the overall customer-centricity of the business.
Businesses, where employees can work autonomously through the respect and humility of managers and leaders, will flourish. Businesses that engage their employees, asking for and valuing their ideas, will flourish.
2.01 Primary Analytics Tool
Data integrity is critical if a business wants to alter aspects of the user experience.
Typically, one of the biggest areas of improvement is in the advanced configuration of the web analytics platform to provide accurate, granular level insights and give depth and clarity to understanding visitor behaviour.
2.02 VOC and Behavioural Insight Tools
A key foundation for becoming customer-centric is utilising both qualitative and quantitative insights to inform the user experience (UX) improvement roadmap.
Not only is it crucial that businesses invest in tools to provide visitors with feedback options and insights in to their behaviour (which isn’t possible with an analytics tool only), but that they have the necessary expertise to extract and interpret the results.
2.03 Business Wide Access to Customer Learnings
Ultimately, having a customer-centric mindset will lead to having a continuous stream of insights of user and customer behavior.
Providing access to these findings and learnings across different divisions of a business ensures that wherever there are opportunities to improve the customer experience, existing customer learnings are harnessed as part of the planning process.
2.04 Resources & Skills To Harness Tools & Tech
There is no point a company investing in tools and technology without having the resources and skills to harness the features and functionality those tools provide.
There can often be cases where companies have made significant investment in tools which appear to offer everything the company could ask for in order to excel, yet they simply don’t have the available resources or required skills to harness what is now available.
3.01 Behavioural & User Research Resource
For any business to become truly customer-centric, they have to invest in 1-1 user research, whether planned and carried out internally or externally.
A specialist in behavioural research working through the end-to-end customer experience provides invaluable insight for improving the end to end customer experience, and they are influential in developing a customer-centric mindset.
3.02 Data & Analytics Resource
Alongside expertise and resources for user research, it is crucial that businesses invest in specialists in web analytics and data analysis.
The more advanced the expertise, the greater levels of insights and stories that will be gained from the behavioural data of the customer experience, in turn leading to stronger, more valid insights from which to make business decisions.
3.03 UX Design Resource
UX designers are responsible for the interactions that users experience online.
Harnessing a team of experienced UX specialists who use quantitative and qualitative data to inform new experiences (in a collaborative team dynamic), leads to an increased probability that new experiences will significantly impact user behaviour and performance metrics.
3.04 Development Resource
Investing in specialists in both front-end and back-end development are integral to realising the growth potential of being a customer-centric organisation.
Considered investment in front-end and back-end development will remove the friction hindering user experience improvements and allow for the creation of more innovative new UX designs with a greater chance of commercial impact.
3.05 Experienced Lead Strategist
Alongside having a senior, influential champion (ideally one of the C-suite), a business needs an experienced lead strategist who will spearhead the delivery of customer experience improvement strategy.
This person not only oversees the customer experience roadmap, but coordinates all divisions engaged in the process and feeds the continuous stream of data and customer learnings around a business.
3.06 HCI & Persuasion
Understanding why people do what they do and why they make decisions are crucial skills which enhance any business striving to improve its customer experience.
There are a wide range of techniques which can be used to engage visitors, persuade visitors, delight visitors and overall, provide visitors with an exceptional customer experience which they will tell others about.
3.07 Persuasive Copywriting
The words people read about a companies products and services play a highly significant role in determining whether they will choose to become one of their customers. From social media adverts and magazine adverts through the landing pages and product pages, communication through words influences decisions.
Companies that have people within the organisation that understand persuasive copywriting have a competitive advantage, as this is still a very undervalued area of marketing.
4.01 CX Improvement Hypothesis Approach
The process and insights behind developing CX improvement hypotheses is critical to the success of a business looking to become more customer-centric.
The more a business employs user research, data insights, heuristics, prior customer experience learnings and other information streams in to a CX improvement hypothesis; the greater chance the change will be successful and provide additional user behavior insights.
4.02 CX Change Prioritisation
There are infinite improvements any business could make to its overall customer experience. The key to growing a business is prioritising which of those UX and CX improvements to invest in, in which order.
Having an intelligent framework that considers the ease at which a UX or CX change can be applied, the potential impact of the change, the customer learnings that fed into the hypothesis and ensuring the change is aligned with the strategic business objectives, will lead to the most significant commercial impact for the business.
4.03 CX Design Process
No matter how informed a UX or CX improvement or change may be, the design process is just as crucial to its success.
Interdepartmental workshops lead by a senior CX leader stimulate creative ideation and positive collaboration, and a UX designer should incorporate various specialisms from the wider team (e.g. persuasion and psychology techniques) into their design process to increase its chance of positively impacting the customer experience.
4.04 QA and UAT Process
Before implementing UX changes, a rigorous QA process, often including UAT (tested in the “real world” by the intended audience) is necessary.
This reduces the possibility of any changes breaking the site and inducing a negative user experience, as well as certifying that all aspects of a the UX improvement, whether big or small, are working correctly.
4.05 CX Change Analysis
The approach to analysing (where possible) the post user experience and product change impact determines what learnings will be take moving forward.
Despite the impact (positive, negative or flat), a specialist in this area can extrapolate data and build a user story that can inform business decisions and decide future UX and CX improvements the business will invest in.
4.06 CX Results & Learnings Report
Such a document provides detailed analysis of a UX or CX change and its impact. Crucially, it will highlight new insights into user behaviour for different audiences.
Shared with the wider business, a UX or CX change insights and learnings report will visualise the significant impact becoming more and more customer-centric is providing the business.
OK, so how can your business use the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model?
Any company is able to begin thinking about their company in relation to the 24 assessment points. Many may not be areas that you have considered important before.
You will find that quite a few of the individual assessment points have a connection with other assessment points often within another of the 4 pillars.
As you invest in or make improvements in one area, this will naturally have a positive affect on the maturity rating of one of the other assessment points.
Here are a few examples:
if your business makes a decision to begin focussing more on the customer as part of their growth strategy (1.01) this will very likely lead on to the company investing in behavioural and user research resources (whether internal or external) (3.01) - this in turn will improve the approach to developing hypothesis for improving your customer experience (4.01)
if your business decides to invest in some or more data and analytics resource (3.02) this will improve your maturity in your resources to harness tools & technology (2.04) and will also improve how your company is using your primary analytics tool (2.01)
if your business decides to bring in a senior stakeholder who champions customer-centricity (1.03) this will absolutely have a positive impact on many other areas of your business - the business mindset will begin moving from being fixed to what you have always done to having a true growth mindset (1.02), your business will begin progressing from product-led to customer-led thinking (1.05), and all this will improve your core business strategy (1.01)
At Become Customer-Centric we provide companies with a Customer-Centricity Maturity Audit. We also deliver our 3-day Customer Centricity Masterclass based upon the MMU strategic course I have been delivering since 2019.
The Managing Director of our latest client Alamy had this to say about the Maturity Audit we delivered across Q1 and Q2 in 2021.
“Paul and his co-founder Paul Postance used their collective and extensive experience in the fields of ecommerce and conversion optimisation to audit Alamy for customer-centricity. They provided valuable insights that only come from an outside perspective, and gave us a detailed set of recommendations. Their approach is focused on business value and business growth and their final report packed with home truths that have given us the kick-start we needed.”
Emily Shelly, MD of Alamy
Thank you for reading this, and please do share it to your network if you feel there could be some of your industry contacts who will benefit from reading what I have shared here.
