Signs it’s time to evolve: Assessing your CX maturity.
You can’t evolve your CX with a technology-only strategy. It’s a tight-rope level balancing act between four areas: people, process, performance, and planning. Everything is connected. If you’ve been taking a technology-only approach you may find your CX maturity is not progressing as desired.
To implement a holistic CX strategy, you need a starting point. To know where you’re going, you need to know where you currently are. A great starting point is identifying which of the four areas you are underperforming in.
Assess your CX maturity by area
Start by assessing the following areas to highlight the initial areas of focus.
Your people are not empowered to be custodians of your CX.
Your people are the voice of your organisation. If they are not empowered to solve problems this could lead to low efficiency, unproductivity, job dissatisfaction, high staff turnover and of course impact your CX maturity levels.
Empowering your agents is a two-pronged approach. Prong one is the technology. Do they have the technology to handle your customer engagement quickly and efficiently? To assess customer sentiment? Understand the Voice of your customers? Ageing systems do not empower employees with the same support that modern contact centre systems systems do.
The second prong is hiring contact centre agents that are equipped with the correct skill set for your organisation. Do they have inherent, soft skills? Do they possess grit? If not, your technology won’t matter.
Your performance is stagnant or declining.
Over time the contact centre systems and CX strategies that you have in place will be subject to entropy, you must consistently adapt. If you do not you may find your performance begin to decrease. Tell-tale signs of this include declining CSAT/NPS scores, declines in customer sentiment and increasing abandonment rates. Simultaneously, you would experience increasing overtime costs, difficulties in cost-effectively scaling your team to meet increased volume and increased or flattened costs associated with compliance, errors, and refunds.
Your processes are holding you back.
Just like your call center systems and strategy are subject to entropy, so are your processes. When processes are outdated and in need of a maturity strategy you may find that the tools at your disposal are holding you back. Be on the lookout for disconnected applications and departments, and diminishing controls, ever-increasing outages and downtime, as well as diminishing ability to integrate anything new and growing costs for maintenance.
Your planning is based on inaccurate reporting.
Data is king. With smart, real-time analytics and data you can make quick decisions that positively impact your contact centre. You can even monitor their impact. Without this data, uninformed decisions are made. Uninformed decisions are more likely to hurt the contact centre and your business due to an inability to view the full picture. Worse than uninformed decisions – you could be unable to make decisions at all because there is simply not enough data to work with. Information is power.
Your planning is in jeopardy if:
- Have mismatched reports, gaps in information
- Standalone applications necessitating quick fixes and workarounds
- You’re not measuring customer retention or satisfaction
- You cannot aggregate data or compile reports for actionable insights
10X your CX
Chances are, at this point you have a good idea about what areas you’d like to work on. But how? How do you practically ‘get the ball rolling’?
There isn’t one singular, silver bullet i.e., only looking at technology. Instead, you need to look at leadership and planning, people, processes and performance. It’s the sum of the parts that make the whole.
We outline this in our eBook, 10X your CX.
What’s inside?
- CX maturity quiz
- Signs it’s time to evolve your CX maturity
- Organisational challenges for the CX team
- How to reposition your offering
- The ideal characteristics of a CX leader
- CX strategy
- KPIs
Bonus content:
- Change management