Why are you the path to customer experience maturity

1. For Customer Experience Professionals
oCTOBER 11, 2013
Where Are You On The Path To Customer
Experience Maturity?
Assessment: The Experience-Driven Organization Playbook
by Megan Burns
with Harley Manning, Molly Murphy, and Corey Stearns
Why Read This Report
Success in the age of the customer requires the ability to design, implement, and manage customer
experience in a disciplined way — a capability few firms have today. They can build this capability by
following a four-phased path: Repair, elevate, optimize, and differentiate. Each phase requires employees
to adopt new, increasingly more sophisticated customer experience management practices that fix what’s
broken and prevent future problems. This report helps firms map practices from Forrester’s customer
experience (CX) maturity framework to each of the four phases on the path to maturity. CX professionals
can use it to assess which phase their organization is in today and which gaps they have to close before
moving on to more advanced activities in their plans to build an experience-driven organization.
the path to customer experience maturity has four phases
To compete in today’s business climate, companies need a disciplined approach to customer experience.
In our previous research, Forrester concluded that firms must adopt a set of 40 core practices in order to
achieve the necessary level of discipline.1 Companies should adopt these practices over time by following a
four-phase path:2
■ Repair. To get started, companies need to adopt practices that enable the organization to find broken
experiences, fix them, and measure the results. This approach builds expertise for customer experience
professionals and establishes credibility for their efforts.
■ Elevate. To advance beyond the endless cycle of finding and fixing customer experience problems,
firms must adopt practices that lead them to deliver the right experiences in the first place.
Those practices include crafting a customer experience strategy and sharing customer insights
programmatically with all employees. Companies should also start adopting practices that set the
stage for future advancements, like integrating customer insights into core business processes, adding
specific customer experience tasks to employee job descriptions, and following human-centered
design processes for new experiences.
■ Optimize. To lock in customer experience discipline, companies must become systematic at all 40
practices. That applies to both practices that got started in the elevate phase and new practices that
begin in this phase. New practices in the optimize phase include modeling the relationship between
CX quality and business results and applying strong design processes when updating experiences, not
just when creating an experience from scratch.
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2. For Customer Experience Professionals
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Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
■ Differentiate. Making it through the first three phases gives an organization the ability to
design a specific experience and deliver that experience consistently. But it doesn’t guarantee
that the resulting experience will yield long-term competitive advantage. For that, firms must
go beyond customer experience management by applying the customer experience innovation
framework introduced in our recent report, “Customer Experience Innovation Demystified.”
That framework calls for reframing business challenges in the context of unmet customer needs,
connecting innovation ideas to a firm’s customer experience ecosystem, and infusing experience
innovations with the brand.3
Take Our Self-Test To Pinpoint Your Company’s Current Level Of Maturity
To help customer experience professionals develop a road map to CX maturity, we updated a
previously developed assessment tool to align with our new findings. The graphic below lists all
of the practices that a company should perform in each phase and the minimum level of adoption
that firms should reach before moving on to the practices in the next phase (see Figure 1). CX
professionals can download an Excel spreadsheet version of the self-assessment to share with others
in their organizations.
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
October 11, 2013

3. For Customer Experience Professionals
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Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
Figure 1 The Customer Experience Maturity Self-Assessment
Minimum level required:
Practice
Systematic
Repair
Elevate
Ad hoc
Optimize
Differentiate
Collect operational data about customer
interactions (e.g., length of a call, web pages
viewed, errors encountered).
Collect unsolicited feedback from customers about
their experiences with the company (e.g., by mining
calls, emails, or social media posts).
Solicit qualitative feedback from customers about
their experiences with the company (e.g., through
surveys, interviews, or usability studies).
Measure how customers perceive their interactions
with the company (e.g., satisfaction with a specific
experience, overall satisfaction).
Calculate measures of customer experience quality
overall and by key customer groups, customer
journeys, or quality attributes (e.g., friendliness,
responsiveness).
Review customer experience metrics and project
status regularly to monitor progress.
Maintain a dedicated queue of current and proposed customer experience improvement projects.
Facilitate coordination across groups that share
responsibility for a given experience.
Communicate the importance of customer
experience to employees, customers, partners,
and other stakeholders.
Use informal rewards and celebrations to highlight
exemplary customer-centric behavior.
Analyze customer insights and data to identify key
customer pain points and opportunities.
Define a customer experience strategy that
describes the intended customer experience.
Align the customer experience strategy with overall
company strategy.
Align the customer experience strategy with the
company’s brand attributes.
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
October 11, 2013

4. For Customer Experience Professionals
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Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
Figure 1 The Customer Experience Maturity Self-Assessment (Cont.)
Practice
Document what you know about customers in a
way that is easy for all employees to understand
(e.g., personas, customer journey maps).
Repair
Elevate
Optimize
Differentiate
Share customer insights with all employees (e.g.,
distribute personas, voice of the customer reports).
Collect input from employees about their
interactions with customers.
Share the customer experience strategy with all
employees (e.g., distribute documentation, conduct
training sessions).
Follow a human-centered design process any time a
new experience is introduced or an existing
experience is changed in a significant way.
Use customer insights to focus and define
requirements for projects that affect customer
experience.
Define a consistent customer experience metrics
framework that aligns with how customers judge
an experience and is consistent across functional
and business unit silos.
Share customer experience metrics with all
employees.
Consider the impact to customer experience when
making business decisions about policies, processes,
and technology.
Identify the complex interdependencies among
people, processes, and technologies that shape
interactions with customers (e.g., map your
customer experience ecosystem).
Add relevant customer experience management
tasks to employee job descriptions.
Define specific customer experience metrics for
employees and organizations based on how they
contribute to overall customer experience quality.
Evaluate employee performance against relevant
customer experience metrics.
Screen candidates for customer-centric values as
part of the hiring process.
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
October 11, 2013

5. For Customer Experience Professionals
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Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
Figure 1 The Customer Experience Maturity Self-Assessment (Cont.)
Practice
Repair
Elevate
Optimize
Differentiate
Screen candidates for the specific skills needed to
deliver on the organization’s intended customer
experience as part of the hiring process.
Provide training to help new and existing
employees build and maintain the skills they need
to deliver the desired customer experience.
Perform rituals and routines that reinforce the
importance of customer experience and what it
takes to deliver it.
Collect and share stories of customer experience
best practices across the employee base.
Model the relationship between the drivers of
customer experience quality and business
outcomes to determine which ones matter most.
Define a consistent set of customer experience
standards across the organization.
Use “impact to customer experience” as a criterion
for approving, funding, and prioritizing projects.
Connect formal reward structures (e.g., raises,
bonuses, promotions) to performance on CX
metrics.
Whenever a change is approved to a policy,
process, product, or technology that affects
customer experience, proactively adjust the design
of that experience to reflect the change.
Use iterative ideation, prototyping, and evaluation
as part of the experience design process.
Conduct observational research studies in
customers’ natural environment (e.g., in-home
observations, shadowing).
Engage customers, partners, and employees as part
of the experience design process (e.g., co-creation).
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
October 11, 2013

6. For Customer Experience Professionals
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Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
R e c o m m e n d at i o n s
create a realistic road map for change
This self-assessment is designed to help customer experience professionals create a road map to lead
their organizations along the path to customer experience maturity. Here’s how to take your results
and translate them into a plan for change:
■ Find your starting point. Compare your firm’s current adoption level for each practice
to the minimum requirement for each phase, starting with repair. If you’re appropriately
systematic or ad hoc for every practice in the repair phase, move on to the elevate phase
and begin looking for gaps to close there. But beware: Although most firms will find they
have work to do before advancing beyond the repair phase, they’ll be strongly tempted to
skip ahead. Resist the temptation. Trying to master more advanced practices without first
establishing solid fundamentals will drastically increase your chances of failure.
■ To close gaps between your current and ideal state, plan to get personal. If you marked
a practice ad hoc, it’s because people who should be performing that task aren’t doing it
when they should. Make a list of all of those people, and then define how often they should
be performing the practice and any events that should trigger action (e.g., time elapsing,
customer scores dropping, a new process phase beginning).
■ Build a customized plan for each group or role. Once you’ve got a list of the who and when
by practice, sort it by group or role. This will help you communicate more clearly to others
by showing: 1) all of the things people in a group or role need to start doing; 2) when and
how often those people should be doing each of their tasks; and 3) how you’re going to layer
those tasks into their daily activities over time.
Supplemental Material
Online Resource
The online version of Figure 1 is an interactive tool to assess the state of an organization’s CX
maturity. It lists the practices in each phase and the target adoption level and then lets you choose
the level that best reflects where your organization actually is today by calling out any practices for
which there is a gap.
Endnotes
The six discipline of customer experience are: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement,
governance, and culture. See the June 14, 2012, “Customer Experience Maturity Defined” report.
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
October 11, 2013

7. For Customer Experience Professionals
Where Are You On The Path To Customer Experience Maturity?
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Forrester studied companies that tried to adopt customer experience discipline over time. We concluded
that firms that actually succeeded at this goal followed the same four-phase path. See the July 1, 2013, “The
Path To Customer Experience Maturity” report.
“Innovation” has become a buzzword in the customer experience field. Everyone talks about it, but no one
knows quite what it is or how to attain it. In fact, most firms that believe that they’re innovating are actually
thwarting differentiation and wasting massive amounts of time and money in the process. Our research
provides a framework to help customer experience professionals create true innovations: new experiences
that drive differentiation and long-term value. See the June 27, 2013, “Customer Experience Innovation
Demystified” report.
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Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.
Forrester works with professionals in 13 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs.
For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.
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located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.