The Six Stages of CX Maturity

In the Temkin Group Insight Report: The Future of Customer Experience, Bruce Temkin shares the six stages of CX maturity:

  1. Ignore: Company does not see customer experience as a key differentiator.
  2. Explore: An ad-hoc group is established to understand how the company can improve customer experience.
  3. Mobilize: A full-time executive leads the effort to improve customer experience and the company establishes a cross-functional governance system.
  4. Operationalize: Company redesigns many of its operational processes using clear insights about customers.
  5. Align: Customer experience behaviors are widespread across employees and they are supported by the company’s standard measurement and incentive systems.
  6. Embed: Company delivers great customer experience without focusing on it explicitly. It comes as a result of the entire organization being committed to the company’s clear sense of purpose.

The report also identifies eight emerging customer experience skills:

  • Journey-centric alignment
  • Mobile-infused experiences
  • Predictive personalization
  • Distributed contextual insights
  • Federated CX capabilities
  • Business rhythm integration
  • Rejuvenated purposefulness
  • Promoter activation

Where is your organization in terms of CX maturity? To learn more, read The Customer Experience Revolution: How Companies Like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks Have Changed Business Forever.