Introducing the NOW CX Maturity Model

The three-stage roadmap for creating a meaningful competitive advantage through customer experience.

Right now, there’s an urgent opportunity for modern CX: move beyond the legacy contact center model… or fall behind.

At a time when customer experience is at the heart of your brand and customer neglect threatens the bottom line, making the leap to NOW CX provides organizations like yours with a leg up.

The NOW CX Advantage

With NOW CX, customers truly come first. Your customer service operation can serve customers across every channel –without email backlogs, slow response times, grueling preparation, or faulty forecasting. You can choose to be more like Netflix or Zappos, actively engaging your customers (with fewer limits) instead of deflecting volume to minimize the cost of care. 

This is a far cry from run-of-the-mill customer experience, and it requires more than just a new way of thinking about CX. It requires a new way of doing CX. 

The Journey to NOW CX Maturity 

It’s one thing to paint a picture of a better future for customer experience organizations and the people who lead them. It’s another thing entirely to provide a practical, step-by-step roadmap.

That’s why Simplr developed a three-stage NOW CX Maturity Model:

Let’s take a closer look:

• Stage 1: If the legacy contact center model is CX Stage Zero, getting to Stage 1 means making the move toward a scalable staffing model that optimizes your service and support organization to deliver a consistent, responsive, omnichannel customer experience for every NOW Customer. As a CX leader, you’ll spend less time forecasting, reduce workforce management issues, approach “perfect efficiency,” gain “spike protection,” and achieve consistently higher satisfaction scores. The obstacles and opportunities related to Stage 1 can be found in Part 2 of Experience is Everything. 

• Stage 2: Organizations in Stage 2 have transitioned from cost center to revenue driver. They leverage customer understanding and product expertise to turn pre-sale customer interactions into opportunities to establish brand preference, recommend relevant products, improve conversions, and simplify the buying process. Then, they maintain a connection with the customer to foster upsells, cross-sells, repeat purchases and referrals. The walls that separate CX from marketing, sales and even ecommerce operations weaken, as CX begins to function as a profit center. As a CX leader, you gain the ability to change the perception of CX (and yourself) among your peers and company leadership. 

• Stage 3: By Stage 3, CX delivers a holistic, whole company—and whole customer—experience that reduces customer effort and maximizes lifetime value. A fully mature NOW CX operation is no longer constrained to service and support. Customer obsession drives the entire organization, a robust customer understanding underlies every operational decision, and customer experience is recognized as central to corporate strategy. As the person leading CX at a Stage 3 organization, you are seen as a forward-looking senior executive who has earned a seat at the table alongside top-level decision-makers in marketing, sales, operations, and finance. In Chapter 9 of Experience is Everything, we argue that transitioning CX into a strategic role is both natural and necessary for any organization looking to thrive in the age of the NOW  Customer.
  

We hope that you’re as excited as we are about what adopting a mature NOW CX model can mean for you, your team, your company, and even the entire industry. 

But…

We have some bad news. And you probably already know what it is: Most CX organizations are stuck at Stage Zero. The odds are that you are too. Fixed and rigid, instead of scalable and flexible. Besieged by backlogs and beholden to business hours. Neglecting shoppers across a range of must-have digital touchpoints as you struggle to be consistently responsive to the demands of your NOW Customers. Never mind driving revenue, spearheading strategy, or delivering a true end-to-end, effortless experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

There is, of course, good news as well. In reading Experience is Everything, you can learn about all the core components of a successful NOW CX strategy.