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Last week I had some business travel that took me to Europe and I learned how small the world can be. I was checking in to my hotel near London Heathrow airport and I heard someone calling my name. It turned out to be my wife’s cousin Jenny, who lives quite close to where we live near Chicago. What are the odds?
I had the opportunity to have dinner with Jenny and we began talking about what we each were working on and what brought us to London. Jenny works in supply chain and was working with various manufacturing facilities around the globe to find efficiencies that will increase her company’s profitability. Each year she gets a new target for how much inefficiency the organization would like to drive out of the system. Jenny’s role is nowhere near unique.
Supply chain roles and operational effectiveness initiatives are a way of life for many companies. Companies engage in these activities because they know that they will create an impact on the bottom line.
What about Customer Experience?
Are there similar opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the way companies treat their customers? Absolutely. Few people involved in CX would argue this point.
Is there a way to measure the impact that individual CX improvement efforts have on profit? For many practitioners and line-of-business folks, this might seem like a tough question. It shouldn’t be.
At MaritzCX we have researched companies that provide excellent customer experience, and used that research to develop a framework that measures CX efficiencies and successes and their relationship with company profits. We call it CXEvolution. The framework covers 14 specific CX competencies, and allows a company to measure its CX maturity against industry leaders in each of these 14 factors.
Most CX professionals do not feel that their CX programs are as successful as they could be in driving business outcomes. Our work in developing the CXEvolution framework shows that in order to drive greater success, CX pros need to broaden their focus, helping to evolve the CX competence of the organization, not just the information, customer intelligence and tools that the organization uses.
In CXEvolution, MaritzCX identifies 14 critical CX competencies and defines what it takes to improve on each one. These are concrete, well-defined steps.
Should companies begin to have roles within the company that are similar to the “supply chain” role that Jenny has, but focused rather on driving out CX efficiencies? Actually, I think these roles have started to appear in the form of chief customer officers and similar positions.
Most companies haven’t yet figured out what the job should entail in the long run, nor have they defined the ideal background for individuals asked to fill those roles.
CXEvolution assessments and comparisons to industry benchmarks will help to clarify the opportunity and provide a roadmap for companies to follow.
Learn more about CXEvolution by watching the webinar, reading more CXEvolution articles on the CX Café Blog, visiting our CXEvolution web page, and taking the CXEvolution self-assessment.
