Ultimately, your business success comes down to what your customers think and feel about your brand.
A Gladly 2022 report on customer expectations showed 42% of customers stop buying from a brand after two bad service experiences while 59% recommend a brand because of a good experience.
If they like you and value the experience you provide, life is going to be easier. If they don’t, you’re going to struggle to maintain profitability.
While that might seem a little too black and white, it’s in the shades of grey where opportunity lies – opportunity to drive growth by continually improving your customer experience (CX).
So how do you do it?
Chattermill created an Experience-Led Growth (XLG) maturity assessment to answer that very question. Let’s break down the first pillar of XLG maturity – Data and Insights – to discover how you can maximize your prospects for driving revenue growth in your organization.
Data and Insights: the first pillar of XLG
For companies curious about how XLG can increase profitability, it’s worth examining how to move through each stage of maturity.
Taking a data-driven approach to decision making may seem out of reach for many companies. Some companies struggle because they don’t have the information they need while the failure for others happens because they haven’t completely grasped the best way to analyze what they already have. By following the right approach, data-driven decision making becomes possible for every organisation.
Until you know what you’re trying to achieve in your business, data doesn’t hold a lot of meaningful insight. It’s one of the chief reasons leaders struggle to make data-driven decisions – customer experience analysis and the resulting insights have to be viewed through the lens of your business goals. Optimizing customer feedback data ensures that the voice of the customer is accurately translated into the insights and intelligence that is needed to achieve business goals.
Determining each stage of XLG maturity
To assess each stage, customer feedback data is mapped against the customer experience. This helps identify gaps in what customers are thinking and feeling about your brand and where adjustment to data collection needs to occur. Once those gaps are identified, Chattermill determines the actions for moving your business up the maturity ladder. Priorities for each action are assigned according to how they impact your business goals and your potential for profitability. No two action plans are the same because no two businesses are the same.
The four stages of XLG maturity:
- Gut feel – making decisions without the benefit of data to back them up.
- Developing – trying to make decisions with incomplete data.
- Influencing – using a consistent view of customer feedback, with multiple teams acting on this data.
- Leading – having customers at the heart of decision making is baked into company culture.
Moving from gut feel to leading the way on XLG maturity
With customer feedback data, you need to do two things:
- Ensure you’re collecting all the customer feedback data needed to make informed decisions
- Derive deep insights from the data about what actions to take.
Achieving maturity is not an aspirational exercise. Often businesses identify a capability as something they could do – even something they want to do or intend to do. However, maturity only occurs when those capabilities are implemented. In other words, it’s not what you can do, but what you do every day that counts.
What’s involved in the Data and Insights Pillar of XLG maturity?
- Data collection – how well customer feedback covers the customer experience including the quality of the responses that are gathered
- Data enrichment and analysis – supplementing customer feedback data where needed with additional metadata, and classifying the customer feedback responses so they can be used to extract deep insights.
- Insight extraction – detecting changes, discovering opportunities for growth and identifying hypotheses to drive positive change
What it takes to go from the Gut Feel to the Developing stage
Intuition is a key component in business success and the hallmark of many start-ups. The problem with operating on gut feel, however, is you can’t transfer it to other team members or divisions in your organization. You certainly can’t scale it, especially if your customer feedback enters into hundreds, thousands or even millions of records.
To move to the Developing stage, you need to recognize and commit to using customer feedback data in your decision making. Resources are devoted to developing CX capability, including awareness at the executive level, about the benefits CX can deliver.
Transitioning from the Developing to the Influencing stage
Developing organizations see the need for change, but their biggest challenge is not quite knowing how best to achieve it. To progress to the next stage they need to evolve from an inconsistent or limited view of the customer experience to a comprehensive view.
Organizations at the Influencing stage have taken this fundamental step towards putting the customer at the heart of all decision making. They have a consistent view of what their customers think and feel throughout the customer journey. The processes are in place to collect and analyze data, and insights are repeatable and predictable. This highlights the value of CX Intelligence and reinforces the drive to develop further.
Achieving the Leading stage for the Data and Insights pillar of XLG maturity
In the Influencing stage the company has implemented nearly all the key elements of CX Intelligence and is using them effectively. It’s focused on filling in the remaining gaps and improving processes.
The speed at which an organization transitions from Influencing to Leading is shaped by how important being truly customer centric is to them. This is a strategic decision involving the executive team and, quite often, the board. At the leading level, customer centricity – and having a comprehensive understanding of customers throughout their journey – is baked into the DNA of company operations and can’t be dislodged with a change of personnel or management philosophy.
Customer understanding is the key to XLG maturity
It’s vital to focus on incremental improvements to help your organization move from one stage to the next for Data and Insights maturity. Without a comprehensive understanding of what your customers think and feel throughout their journey, it’s almost certain that your customers’ perspective of your CX will be different from yours. The only way to address this discrepancy is to consistently identify actionable customer insights from your CX Intelligence and then take the appropriate steps to change their reality and drive profitability.
