You can’t evolve your CX with a technology-only strategy. It’s a tightrope-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 are currently. A great starting point is identifying in which of the four areas you are underperforming.

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.

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? To understand the voice of your customers? Ageing systems do not empower employees with the same support that modern systems do.

The second prong is hiring agents who are equipped with the correct skill set for your organisation. Do they have soft skills? Do they possess grit? If not, your technology won’t matter.

Your performance is stagnant or declining
Over time, the systems and 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 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 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 When processes are outdated and in need of a maturity strategy, you may find that the tools at your disposal are holding you back.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 making 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 you:

Have mismatched reports, gaps in information;
Have standalone applications necessitating quick fixes and workarounds:
Are not measuring customer retention or satisfaction; and
Cannot aggregate data or compile reports for actionable insights.

10X your CX

Chances are at this point that 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 silver bullet, like 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 e-book, 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

Download the e-book

About Pivotal Data

Pivotal Data is a specialist provider of contact centre and enterprise communication solutions. We assist organisations of all sizes by consulting, implementing, maintaining and managing solutions that simplify complexity and create agile, customer-centric organisations. Our solutions provide our customers with the ability to make every interaction engaging, insightful and profitable, helping grow businesses and improve competitive market positions.

For more, visit pivotaldata.co.za or e-mail Ingrid Green at [email protected].