For a startup business, knowing how effective you are in delivering an excellent customer experience is a must. After all, it will help you chart your future course. But getting that picture can sometimes involve a lot of guesswork.
One way of making that work easier is by doing a customer experience maturity assessment. But what is it exactly and how should you use it to get the most benefits? Let’s take a closer look.
Understanding Startup Business Customer Experience Maturity
If you are not yet familiar with it, customer experience maturity refers to a measure of how well you are delivering the level of CX you want to reach. To get a more comprehensive picture of that level, you need to use a customer experience maturity model. That model identifies the key areas of your CX effort that needs to be developed.
Image from Matty Ford.
Additionally, the model lists the different milestones you have reached in each area. This makes it easier for the startup business and its stakeholders to keep track of the various developments. They can then use the information to guide the evolution of the experience.
Building Your Startup Business Customer Experience Maturity Model
CX maturity models can come in different forms, depending on the needs of your startup business. However, all those models focus on five key areas. Note that these five are interconnected. Any change in one will significantly affect the others. As such, you would need to assess them all together continuously.
Data
The first area of your customer experience maturity model is data. To effectively develop and implement your CX strategy, you need to have enough data about your customers. Thus, the driving question for this area is whether you are getting and using that data right for your strategy. Going back to the feedback questions you ask customers is a good way to assess the quality of the data.
Image from Digital Marketing Institute.
Here, you will have an idea of what data your gathering process prioritizes. For instance, you might commonly ask your customers how they rate your service. Such a question shows that your focus is more on quantitative data.
You would also want to look into the sources of your customer data. Often, these would be the usual places like customer-facing surveys. But beyond these, you might also want to look for other sources. These can include things like:
- Emails
- Support tickets
- Social media engagements
- Transcript of interviews
The more data points you take into account, the more detailed the picture of the customer you can get. As such, you would want to coordinate with the customer service and marketing departments to see if there are additional data sources you can take advantage of.
Virtua Solutions can also help you in this area. We provide additional personnel to handle data gathering work. This way, you can cover more of the data sources you have identified. Our service experts can also help you interpret this data more accurately.
Design
Once you have a clearer picture of the customer and their wants, the next aspect to look into is the design of your experience. For this, you need to have a clear vision of what that experience would look like. Think about how you would want customers to move through their purchase journeys. You would want to consider the various obstacles they might encounter and how you will help them overcome those.
Image from Interaction Design Foundation.
But you should not be the only one developing and defining that customer experience vision. Instead, it needs to be a company-wide effort. In particular, get the insights of those who directly deliver the product or service to customers. These include people like product managers, sales team members, dev teams, and service managers. You would also want to make your vision available to advisors.
Another thing to weigh on when designing your customer experience vision is whether it stays true to your brand. Here, you might be tempted to implement all the customer feedback without weighing on their bigger effect on brand development. As such you should weigh on which components to provide customers while remaining on-brand.
Delivery
The key to the successful delivery of your customer experience is everyone in the startup business knowing their roles. Define each team member’s activities clearly so that they can readily jump to work. But you should also take time to get feedback from them about their duties. Their voice will help you better refine those roles and help perform better.
Image from CMC Canada.
You should also determine how to expand your delivery strategy. Having only a small team can often limit how well you can deliver a good experience. Outsourcing a portion of the work to us can help you grow your customer service delivery faster and satisfy customers.
We can also help gather important feedback from customers through your various support channels. Such feedback is vital as it will serve as the basis for more improvements in your CX.
Measurements
Measuring the response of customers to the experience you provide is a straightforward task. However, you might tend to overlook it with all the other activities you have to do. This is another area where Virtua can lend a hand. Our agents can help your team keep track of and measure these responses
But beyond accurate measurement, you would also want to make your customer experience data more meaningful to the company. Explain to everyone how the data relates to the work that they have done. For instance, you can highlight how positive customer response can benefit the company and the individual members in the long run. When the team knows what’s in it for them, they are likely to adapt to your new customer experience strategy.
Culture
The last component of your customer experience maturity model is company culture. Does your company completely embrace the idea of improving customer experience? Do your teams also take that idea in at a more personal level?
Image from Survey Legend.
Once you answer those questions, you need to look into ways of moving your company culture towards your customer experience goals. This can include instituting habits that will help your people better adapt to those changes. You can also create rewards to encourage them to embrace that new culture.
Where Does Your Startup Business Go From Here?
Once you have a clear idea of the customer experience maturity of your startup business, you can start evolving your CX strategy towards a new direction. And we at Virtua are always ready to lend a hand in your journey. Connect with us and find out how you can use our services to satisfy your customers.