Chapter 3
Measuring Customer Experience Maturity
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
—Lao Tzu
What can't be measured can't be managed. Your customers are using different devices and channels as part of their decision journey—gathering, analyzing, and deciding if they should engage with your brand. Customers increasingly expect that you recognize them, and continue the conversation where they left off in the last interaction.
From Chapter 1, we know that building connected experiences has great value for your customers. They get more relevant and personalized experiences, and for your organization it increases the chance of achieving your strategic objectives for your organization. In research conducted by Econsultancy,1 94 percent of organizations surveyed acknowledged that personalizing the experience will be critical for future success.
The problem is that 72 percent of marketers don't know how to start building these relevant, connected experiences using personalization.2 They don't know what to do. And they don't know how to measure where they are to start, either.
That's very common among marketing organizations today, and it's something we have faced in our consulting with organizations across many industries.
This also led us to develop the Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™, as it's so easy to be overwhelmed with all the emerging technology and people and processes required. The maturity model allows you to take an incremental step at a time, building capability and value at each step.
To Be Successful Takes People, Process, and Technology
Even if you have cutting-edge technology available to build the Amazon.coms of your market, you cannot succeed if you don't have the right people to add insights and creativity, and if those people don't have the processes to guide them. To succeed you need the people and processes to get the most value from the technology.
As a marketer you will always be on a never-ending journey because the destination, connecting with your customers, continually evolves. But if you are willing, and innovative, the farther you'll be able to go on this journey and the better you'll be able to connect to your customers and build lifetime advocacy. To help you on this journey, we have developed the Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™—a model with seven stages that maps the customer experience maturity level of your organization and offers guidance on how to evolve through the different stages of maturity. This is not an academic model. It is taken from years of experience and best practices earned by helping hundreds of organizations ranging from midsize to global enterprises.
The Customer Experience Maturity Model and the steps in this book are the process part of people, process, and technology. These processes can be applied to any organization using any leading connected platform for customer experience management.
Customer Experience Maturity Model
The maturity model focuses primarily on how to align your digital marketing efforts with marketing objectives that drive strategic objectives. These digital marketing efforts are what you use to impact customer experience at all your customer touch points and to ultimately achieve your strategic objectives. Creating compelling customer experiences requires an environment that reaches across your entire organization and impacts many teams that have contact with the customer, like call centers, points of sale, websites, mobile apps, and ancillary print material.
So even though we don't specifically cover call centers, points of sale, or other marketing vehicles, the model is still valid to improving your customer's experience and improving input to your teams and systems.
As your organization evolves to higher levels in the maturity model, the strategic value of marketing increases. (See Figure 3.1.) The model starts at the Initiate stage, a basic website, and grows to the seventh stage, the Lifetime Customers stage, where your organization and customer interactions use customer intelligence to predict patterns of behavior and connect with the most relevant content and calls to action, creating the best possible experience for the customer.
Figure 3.1 Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™
Our philosophy with regard to the Customer Experience Maturity Model is twofold:
- If you want anything to last a lifetime, you have to care for it! The best way to care for customers is to go beyond just meeting their needs. You must anticipate their needs.
- Anticipating customer needs is based on establishing a single view of the customer, using data collected from many touch points to make the customer's future experience more relevant so they not only feel more valued, but eventually become Lifetime Customers.
Three Phases in the Customer Experience Maturity Model
There are three macro phases that encompass the seven stages of the Customer Experience Maturity Model. These three phases are the overarching focus for the organization in building connected customer experiences:
- Attract
- Convert
- Advocate
In the Attract phase, organizations tend to focus on attracting more visitors through different channels. This is typically reflected by metrics for channels such as Visits and Likes. These key performance indicators (KPIs) aren't correlated to the organizations' strategic objectives and are difficult to relate to strategic objectives.
Organizations in the Attract phase tend to invest most of the marketing budget on attracting visitors instead of optimizing the experience and improving their relevance to visitors. This is not to suggest that spending to attract visitors is wrong, but the focus of the spending should be on what matters to your organization, which is like focusing only on maximizing the quantity of customers gained instead of also improving quality, in terms of profitability. The last stage of the Attract phase in the Customer Experience Maturity Model is the Align stage. In the Align stage organizations begin to align their digital goals and analytics with strategic and marketing objectives.
Based on our experience, aligning digital goals and marketing objectives with strategic objectives is essential. From the strategic standpoint, the purpose of marketing is to achieve strategic goals. From the day-to-day tactical standpoint, having clear strategic objectives makes it easier to track outcomes and to optimize marketing efforts.
In the Convert phase of the Customer Experience Maturity Model organizations focus on getting visitors committed and ultimately converting on key digital goals, those goals that are most likely to help achieve objectives. The focus here is converting by using various optimization tactics to provide better and more connected customer experiences. This can start with the low-hanging fruit of testing and personalization and then move to more advanced capabilities.
In the Advocate phase of the Customer Experience Maturity Model the focus is on creating strong advocates among customers. Advocates are customers that are more vocal. They recommend your brand and do more business with you. Research shows that promoters are 5.2 times more likely to buy more, compared to detractors.3 Building customer advocates goes beyond marketing; it's an organizational task that involves different teams and systems. It takes the valuable customer insights from many teams and systems across many touch points to create customer advocates. Creating customers who are advocates is a critical competitive advantage.
Stages in the Customer Experience Maturity Model
There are seven stages within the three phases of the Customer Experience Maturity Model. Each of these stages is an approach of people, process, and technology that marketing must evolve through to get to a higher level of customer experience. When you take the Customer Experience Maturity Assessment, referenced in the end of this chapter, you will learn what stage(s) your organization is currently in. In the following chapters you will read how your organization compares to others in your industry, learn about the specific details of each stage, and learn what steps your organization can take to move to higher levels. It's not only a vision of what your organization's future can be; it's a step-by-step guide on how to get there.
Initiate
The Initiate stage is the beginning of the customer experience journey. Most organizations at this stage have static websites. Marketers use email campaigns to send content to broadcast or to very large segments of recipients.
Most efforts go into creating and maintaining content that typically centers on the organization's point of view, not the customer's. Search engine optimization is key to attracting visitors to the site and has a heavy influence on which content is developed. The web analytics focus on site activity such as the number of visits or time on the site.
Value for Your Organization
The organization shares content about the organization, products, and services. This content gives generalized information to visitors and informs them of change with press releases or job postings.
Value for Your Customers
Customers have access to basic information about your organization and services as well as guidance on how to contact you.
KPIs
Traditional web analytics focus on traffic and content usage.
Tactics
Content ais created and maintained from the organization's viewpoint. Search engine optimization is key to attracting visitors, and influences which content is needed. Email is used to broadcast content to customers.
Radiate
In the Radiate stage, organizations begin reaching out to customers through multiple channels, not just mass email. The organization develops a mobile website and begins building a social presence. Marketing recognizes that the customer comes first, knows which channels the customer uses, and distributes content through those channels. As content becomes more accessible through different channels, it reaches more customers in the context the customer expects and uses. Customers, especially through social channels, are much more likely to share marketing's content with others and broaden the distribution and connections. Analytics focus on channel volume and effectiveness. Connection through customer-centric channels is a key objective for organizations in the radiate stage. Pay-per-click (PPC) programs grow as a method of attracting more customers, and give insights into intent of the customers.
Value for Your Organization
Content distribution begins to go through specific channels used by customers. Content focus becomes more on brand and increases the likeliness of customers including you as part of their decision journey and thereby increases the potential to reach larger audiences.
Value for Your Customers
Content is accessible through multiple channels, making it easier for customers to research and find your information. By connecting channels and giving your customers the ability to share content with their peers, you increase your distribution and your content becomes more relevant.
KPIs
Traditional web analytics continues to be used but with greater awareness of channel performance and segmentation.
Tactics
Context begins to form content, with mobile and social channels changing the content, style, and layout. Integrating messages across channels is more prevalent, giving a single message to customers. Customers share and like content on web and mobile sites.
Align
In the Align stage, executives and marketers begin to ask, “Why does our website exist?” “Why do we have five people working on creating content for social channels?” “Why did we just spend $1 million on a new mobile app?”
Key to answering these questions is aligning digital goals with marketing objectives that drive strategic objectives; an important focus at this stage is on achieving well-defined marketing objectives. Customer information provides a more informed view to marketing and sales about customer needs and intent.
Value for Your Organization
As marketing aligns with business objectives, reports show executives how marketing is driving business, where optimization is needed, and where additional investments are needed.
Value for Your Customers
Marketing realizes that it needs better and more relevant content that helps customers through the decision journey. Typically this changes the nature of the content so that content becomes more customer-centric.
KPIs
Experience Analytics complement traditional analytics. Value and Value per Visit are used to compare and optimize across different channels. Management and executive reports focus on marketing's impact on business objectives.
Tactics
Analytics focuses on business outcomes, the effectiveness of marketing, and the quality of customers. Marketers compare cross-channel effectiveness and make holistic decisions looking at the entire cross-channel portfolio, moving away from optimizing individual silos. Campaigns are leveraged or optimized using the Marketing Optimization Matrix discussed in Chapter 7, which considers both value and attractiveness.
Optimize
In the Optimize stage, marketers focus on improving key customer touch points, starting with the most important digital channels used by the customers. Marketers also focus on making the customer experience more relevant to customers' needs and intent. With the focus on customer relevance, there is more monitoring and optimizing of content and channels as a way of achieving business objectives. Customer profiles are built, and content is mapped to personas or customer segments and the decision journey. Personalization tailors content to increase relevance to specific segments.
Value for Your Organization
The Optimize stage focuses on accelerating customers through the decision journey and converting on key digital goals that drive marketing and strategic objectives.
Value for Your Customers
Marketing becomes more relevant as content, messages, and channels are optimized to achieve high value, which in turn makes all marketing efforts more relevant to customers. This is a win-win for customers and marketers.
KPIs
Marketing's targets and metrics align with the organization's strategic objectives. Marketing can prove its effectiveness, and it is easier to justify new initiatives and additional resources.
Tactics
Simple personalization increases the relevance for customers, as they see content that is more relevant to their needs. A/B testing increases conversion rates and identifies content that is more relevant.
New initiatives in tracking customer behavior builds customer-related data and profiling for use in personas. Customer communities are built to increase sharing and distribution to peers.
Nurture
The Nurture stage uses more advanced optimization capabilities to enhance the customer experience and increase total conversions. Nurturing increases customer engagement and provides a cross-channel dialogue with the customer based on the customer's profile. At this stage organizations initiate automated marketing flows mapped to stages of the customer decision journey as well as the entire Customer Life Cycle. For example, a customer might first connect with marketing due to a thought leadership paper during the early stages of the decision journey. This could be followed by nurturing sequences about the best use of products or services that accelerate the customer through the decision journey.
Value for Your Organization
Marketing and sales teams are given an extra level of power and credibility with customers due to the nurturing programs customers have received. Customers are more accepting and informed when they first make contact with sales.
Automated two-way dialogue with customers informs the organization about customer intent and usage of products and services.
Value for Your Customers
Based on their behavior, customers are able to get valuable information relevant to their intent for that stage in the decision journey.
KPIs
Metrics include information about activity and engagement at different stages in the decision journey. Conversion funnels may map micro and macro conversion goals.
Tactics
Focus is on relevant customer-centric dialogue, which is based on collecting explicit and implicit information about the customer that can be used as a basis for the automated flows.
Social channels are more integrated, and behavior can be captured from these channels and used to enrich the customer profile.
Engage
This stage can be a huge step for many organizations, as Engage focuses on connecting the different customer data repositories—it empowers a single view of the customer across online and offline touch points. In many cases, creating this is a transformational task, as it includes data from many repositories and crosses different organizational units. But building this repository is necessary in order to be relevant to the customer at any time and at any touch point. It is also necessary for all units in the organization to have a single, integrated view of the customer. You need this single view to collect behavior and data from all channels and have those data accessible in real time at any customer touch point.
Value for Your Organization
For organizations that succeed in building the single view of the customer, the value is tremendous; not only are they able to build relevant connected experiences in the different touch points, but they also enrich the data across different organizational units. Salespeople get access to all customer data, making for better customer conversations. Marketing gets better data for segmentation and personalization, which results in more focused marketing efforts.
Value for Your Customers
Customers feel more valued and even positively surprised when they receive messages that are relevant at each touch point with the organization.
KPIs
Targets and metrics are tied to a Customer Life Cycle funnel using customer-level metrics segmented for specific channels.
Tactics
Customer data is connected to give a single view of the customer so that a picture of the customer is available at any touch point along the decision journey.
Calls to action are automated based on similar behavior from other customers.
Lifetime Customers
At this stage the organization uses customer insights blended with intelligence, predictions, and agility as a key competitive advantage. Customer intelligence and predictive algorithms optimize the customer experience across multiple channels. Agility is key, and the speed of launching or testing new initiatives becomes a competitive advantage. The organization not only anticipates the needs of the customer, but also uses predictive analytics to launch initiatives in anticipation of a customer's needs. Automated big data analysis keeps the organization informed and able to react quickly with data-driven decisions.
Value for Your Organization
Data drives decisions in achieving marketing and strategic objectives. Optimizing efficiency and effectiveness drives organizational units.
Value for Your Customers
Not only is content relevant, but it also gives great value to customers by providing recommendations that are timely and closely matched to their needs.
KPIs
Targets and metrics are closely tied to deeper and more detailed decision journeys, and forecast future outcomes. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is used with loyalty and retention.
Tactics
Data is used at every level to make every touch point immediate, relevant, and predictive.
Automated data analysis provides actionable advice for optimization across most digital areas.
Cross-channel attribution optimizes marketing initiatives.
Predictive analytics informs executives on probable future outcomes.
The seven stages of the Customer Experience Maturity Model are covered in greater detail in Chapters 6 through 11.
Mapping to Capabilities
When you know which maturity stage you are in, it's best to first build a solid foundation of technology and capabilities. This will make your move to the next higher level easier and safer.
The version of the Customer Experience Maturity Model presented in Figure 3.2 shows technical capabilities mapped to the different stages and how they progress.
Figure 3.2 Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™ with Capabilities
For instance, social sharing starts as part of the Radiate stage, helping you distribute content on social channels. As you move across to the Align stage, social listening is used to monitor the alignment between customer relevance and achieving organizational objectives. During the Nurture stage you will want to use social channels to engage your customers individually.
Another example is testing. Testing starts with simple A/B testing as part of the Optimize stage. As the benefits and value of testing are recognized, you will invest more in testing and begin using more advanced testing like multivariate testing in the Nurture stage.
Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly!
Based on our extensive analysis on the maturity of different organizations, covered in the next chapter, we see that the majority of organizations are in the first two of seven stages. Therefore, we strongly recommend that for most organizations their first action should be to use the current stage to build a mobile presence and create social connections that radiate out to customers. Following that, a key task will be aligning strategic objectives, marketing objectives, and digital goals—doing this will ensure that your marketing foundation is stable and is based on achieving your organization's objectives.
In the short term, many organizations will want to prove their business case, harvesting the low-hanging fruit as described in Stage 4, Optimize. In the longer term, the ambition should be moving to the higher stages while coordinating maturity across your entire organization so that silos don't develop.
Next Steps: How Mature Is Your Organization?
An important part of any journey is understanding where you currently are, so you can properly map your destination. To help with this, we've created a tool to assess how mature your organization is, measure where you are today so you can establish a baseline, and then use this book to help guide your progress.
Visit www.ConnectTheExperience.com/cxassessment and fill in the assessment. Once you have completed it and received the evaluation of your organization's maturity, continue to the next chapter and learn how you compare with others in your industry.