1 Benchmark Your Customer Experience Maturity To excel at customer experience, organizations must routinely perform the practices required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a disciplined way. Forrester scanned its 13 years of customer experience research and created a framework that outlines 40 essential practices across six disciplines: customer understanding, measurement, governance, strategy, design, and culture. Organizations looking to move up the maturity curve should take stock of how they perform these practices today if at all and build a plan to turn an ad hoc set of activities into a self-improving customer experience management machine. Forrester defines customer experience maturity as: The extent to which an organization routinely performs the practices required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a disciplined way. In order to be customer centric, Forrester believes that a company must consistently engage in a series of best practices in disciplines that include: Forrester also defined four stages of adoption that reflect the most common scenarios we see within organizations:
2 Project Approach The overall objective of this engagement is to teach your team/stakeholders what it takes to incorporate each of these components into your organization and how they come together to make customer experience a discipline within your organization. Attendees will understand the benefits of creating a customer-centric culture, and how you can measure your level of customer experience maturity. Participants from your organization will get a clear picture of how mature various departments / business units are, we ll identify existing practices that can be leveraged across the organization, and we will identify specific areas for improvement. Forrester recommends the following approach: Conduct Webinar on Forrester s Customer Experience Maturity Framework. Forrester will lead a Webinar with key stakeholders at your organization (those who will attend the workshop below) to walk the group through Forrester s Customer Experience Maturity Framework. The intent of this first meeting is to introduce the model to your team so that stakeholders have an understanding of the six customer experience disciplines and the underlying practices. This Webinar will also provide stakeholders with the necessary knowledge to complete a customer experience self-assessment in the next step. Ample time will be allotted during this Webinar for discussion and Q&A. The Webinar will be 90 minutes 2 hours in duration. Prepare CX Maturity self-assessments for your stakeholders. Forrester will prepare the customer experience maturity self-tests to be sent to your stakeholders. Electronic copies of the self-assessments, along with any necessary instructions, will be sent to you. Stakeholders complete their CX Maturity self-assessments. Each stakeholder from the various departments / business units will conduct a customer experience maturity self-test for their part of the business. The self-assessments will be returned to Forrester and the materials will be used to drive portions of the onsite workshop. Forrester analyzes results of self-assessments. Forrester will review all of the self-assessments and aggregate the information to help prepare for the workshop. During this step Forrester can also review an
3 inventory of current customer-centric initiatives that you have, and attempt to categorize them into the six buckets of Forrester s Customer Experience Maturity Framework. This is another step that will enable Forrester to prepare for the workshop. Prepare workshop materials. Based on the intake and self-assessments, and our extensive research into creating customer-centric organizations, Forrester will prepare the materials that will be used during the onsite workshop. This will consist primarily of a PowerPoint slide deck that will include a short recap of the maturity framework, Forrester s summary of the results of the self-assessments, Forrester s thoughts on how those results compare to the maturity levels at other firms, as well as guidelines for the group exercises in which we will discuss how to prioritize closing the maturity gaps that those results bring to light. Conduct onsite meeting. Forrester will lead one in-person meeting at your offices to conduct the strategy session. The meeting will include Forrester presentation as well as plenty of time for discussion and Q&A. Topics to consider for the day include: o Customer Experience Maturity overview, self-tests, and discussion Presentation: Forrester s analysis of the current state of CX maturity at your organization based on the results from the self-assessment Discussion: What activities are currently happening at your organization? Who is doing what, and (at a high level) how are they doing it? Based upon the self-assessments, what are the key gaps / areas to improve in your organization s customer experience maturity? What disciplines are most important to focus on right now? How can you begin thinking about improving your customer experience maturity? Ex: what projects / initiatives need to be done? Who should lead the various projects and initiatives? o Charting the path to greater CX maturity Presentation: Examples of how other organizations have improved their customer experience maturity, including factors that impact the prioritization decisions. Discussion: How can your organization begin making improvements to the most important disciplines for its customer-centricity strategy?
4 What gets done? What is prioritized? Who leads various initiatives? What are the immediate next steps from today s discussion? At the end of the meeting the expectation is that the participants will have a solid vision of what is required to begin a transformation to become a customer-centric organization. There will also be an understanding of the pockets of Customer Experience Maturity that exist in various divisions that could be emulated across the company. Questions We Will Answer How do you become a customer-centric organization? And what is the value of doing so? What is the level of customer experience maturity across the organization? What current practices exist within divisions that can be leveraged across the company? What specific actions and initiatives should you take to begin a customer-centric transformation? Project Timeline: 6-8 weeks Investment begins at: $45,000 Please note that this document is a Discussion Document. As a next step, should you want to move forward, Forrester will schedule a call to further scope the project approach and timeline. As a final step, Forrester will deliver a formal proposal that outlines step by step methodology, and final timeline and pricing detail
5 The Forrester Consulting Difference High Value to Time Ratio Traditional consulting firms offer advice based on knowledge acquired from the inside out that takes weeks to build. In contrast, Forrester s expert analysts take an outside-in approach and come to the table armed with role, industry, consumer, and competitive knowledge and insight. Result: you save time and money with Forrester. Objectivity Unlike other firms whose expertise may be based on or influenced by their commercial interests, Forrester remains independent of any technology or vendor bias or influence. Result: you can trust our recommendations. Analysts Traditional consulting firms staff projects with junior resources, whereas it is the analysts at Forrester who perform all our consulting work. Result: Clients scope and engage with the same analyst experts who write our research.