Study Shows Organizations Evolve Through Six Stages of Customer Experience Maturity to Master Competencies
WABAN, Mass., Jan. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Temkin Group, a leading market research and consulting firm that helps organizations improve their customer experience, released a new research report: "The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies." The report identifies the capabilities required for organizations to build and sustain customer experience differentiation.
The research, which updates a previous Temkin Group report from 2010, shows that organizations that provide great customer experience operate differently from their peers. These customer experience leaders master what Temkin Group calls the four customer experience core competencies:
1. Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values.
2. Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization.
3. Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers.
4. Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization.
The research includes data from more than 250 large organizations that shows how effective companies are mastering these four competencies. It turns out that only 15% of large firms are very good at purposeful leadership and employee engagement while an even smaller percentage are very good at customer connectedness and compelling brand values.
"Customer experience success requires more than superficial changes, companies need to embed a series of practices within the operating fabric of their organization," states Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group.
Companies can't achieve customer experience success overnight; it requires the commitment to a multi-year transformational journey. The research outlines the six stages of customer experience maturity that organizations evolve through as they increasingly master the four core competencies:
- Stage 1: Ignore. In this stage, organizations do not see customer experience as an opportunity for differentiation.
- Stage 2: Explore. In this stage, executives see value in customer experience and establish a team of employees to examine what the company should be doing in this area.
- Stage 3: Mobilize. In this stage, organizations establish a dedicated customer experience team and begin to make changes.
- Stage 4: Operationalize. In this stage, organizations have cross-functional governance structures for customer experience. They actively redesign key operating processes and track clear customer experience metrics.
- Stage 5: Align. In this stage, organizations reinforce good customer experience practices within all of their HR practices, including how they hire, train, promote, and fire employees. They also regularly make trade-offs between short-term financial success and longer-term loyalty gains.
- Stage 6: Embed. In the final stage of maturity, companies don't focus on customer experience as an independent activity; it's just a part of their brand and culture.
The report also includes a 20-question self-assessment that organizations can use to gauge their stage of customer experience maturity.
The report "The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies" can be downloaded for free from the Customer Experience Matters blog, at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com as well as from the Temkin Group website, www.TemkinGroup.com.
About Temkin Group: Temkin Group is a leading customer experience research and consulting firm with one simple goal for its clients: increase customer loyalty by becoming more customer‐centric. The company combines customer experience thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of large organizations to help senior executives accelerate their results. For more information, contact Bruce Temkin at 617-916-2075 or send an email to Email.
About Bruce Temkin: Bruce Temkin is widely recognized as a customer experience thought leader and is Customer Experience Transformist and Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He is also the author of a very popular blog, Customer Experience Matters® (ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com). Prior to forming Temkin Group, he was a VP at Forrester Research for 12 years. Bruce is a highly demanded speaker who consistently receives high marks for his content-rich, entertaining keynote addresses. He is also the co-founder and Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org), a global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management.