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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