Take our test to see how well your business is aligning with your customers’ rapidly evolving needs and expectations.
I need to continuously anticipate and deliver relevant, personalized products, services and interactions against fast changing customer expectations.
What's your biggest concern? (Choose one)
I want to create a proactive, intentional customer service experience that increases customer satisfaction while keeping the cost to serve at a manageable level.
I want to accelerate profitable growth by increasing the ROI on our investments in sales.
I'd like to deliver an excellent customer experience in order to profitably increase customer satisfaction.
I’d like a tailored customer-centric supply chain that is resilient, demand-driven, sustainable, and tax-efficient.
I want to grow my business and need to improve my online capabilities in order to be relevant.
I need better customer information to improve my customers’ experience and my sales team’s productivity.
Let's get a sense of how your business operates.
These questions will allow us to determine how well your business is adapting to a customer-centric business model. Try to answer each question as openly and honestly as possible.
For each question, click where you stand on the scale.
Our organizational structure supports brand consistency while taking into account locally relevant, real-time customer experiences.
Our technology stack supports data sharing, facilitates performance measurement as well as management and can be integrated.
Our skills in data management, analytics, financial planning, technology, and partner management are strong.
Our processes are lean and AI-augmented, allowing us to be cost-efficient, agile, and innovative.
Our marketing metrics consist of a porfolio of kpis that tie short-term performance to long-term financial value creation in terms of market/wallet share and brand strength.
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Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to make marketing decisions that move the needle.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to market-leading practices, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
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Culture:
Adopting a customer-centric culture—and mindset—is crucial to future success.
Organization Structure:
Creative new arrangements will empower the forward thinking CMO.
Metrics:
Traditional metrics need to be retired in favor of new ones.
Automation:
Modern marketing requires refined and flexible automation.
Analytics:
Analytics is the next frontier for CMOs who can learn to draw insight from customer data.
Data:
Data is the most powerful tool to capture a single view of your customer.
Data fuels the modern marketing organization. It gives us the ability to track the customer across channels and craft personalized experiences in real time. CMOs who want to think in terms of customer solutions rather than products will view accurate, consistent, and current data as a valuable corporate asset, focusing on its capture, integration, and ethics. Businesses must create a single view of the customer, with the goal being context: what happened and why. In order to gather, identify, and activate on customer insights, a data governance framework that gathers, shares, and utilizes data responsibly and ethically must be built.
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Advances in analytics processes allow marketers to draw insight from customer data and to determine the appropriate action in seconds. They’ve transformed traditional cycles of testing and ideation. The next frontier for the CMO is to institutionalize and formalize the way the marketing team harnesses and generates values from AI, machine learning, and neural networks. Data literacy and technical savvy skills are required for forward momentum. As the CMO’s understanding of analytic resources matures, a healthy understanding of the limitations of data will grow. Marketers need to understand how advanced analytic models, particularly AI, can be manipulated, as well as to discern when outcomes have been gamed.
In order to follow the customer and create personalized experiences across channels, organizations will need to adopt a refined, flexible, and integrated technical infrastructure. The internal technology stack will need to be refined so that it can integrate with other stacks while supporting data sharing, both within the business and with external partners. Open-access solutions, with ease of integration and scalability, will be the go-to option for CMOs.
In order to align with the front office and the enterprise at large, the CMO will need shared performance metrics to communicate strategy, maintain co-ownership, and test alignment. The CMO will need to calibrate the right mix of indicators to tie short-term metrics to long-term value creation, as measured in market share, wallet share, and brand strength. Traditional metrics, like those based on purely internal or function-specific priorities, will need to be retired. New measures and processes will emerge that embed customer-centric priorities, like developing and maintaining customer trust, effective partnership management, and innovation agility.
CMOs need to reconsider functional definitions that aren’t applicable or hinder strategic growth. They also need to consider creative new arrangements that balance transparency and accountability with dispersed authority and creative latitude in order to spur innovation. Some organizations may move towards smaller, more empowered teams, while others may combine internal and external resources whose formal demarcation will blur. Few CMOs will have the resources or know-how to go it alone. They’ll need an external ecosystem of technology and creative enablers. The best CMOs will work as master orchestrators to ensure that the marketing ecosystem operates effectively.
Customer centricity is, ultimately, about mindset. In order to meet the connected customer on equal terms, marketers will need a less compartmentalized view of their discipline and learn to consider the entire enterprise. CMOs have an opportunity to learn systems management, striking a balance between the needs of marketing, other front-office or business functions, and external entities. The systems view encourages all parties to create arrangements with shared benefits.
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Our customers are satisfied and loyal, with a high NPS.
We're able to provide our customers with the value they demand.
Our spending and operating margins are balanced and profitable.
Our organizational philosophy and processes drive value and profitable growth to our business.
We have a strong sense of cross-departmental collaboration, including between sales, marketing, service, and customer experience.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to customer satisfaction, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to provide them with the value they deserve.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to customer satisfaction, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Cultures that encourage building a personalized experience with customers must be fostered.
Organizational structures will need to change and adapt in the post-COVID world.
Performance metrics must be shared between sales and marketing.
Routine tasks should be automated, building upon your understanding of customer expectations.
Analytics requires a holistic, well-rounded approach.
Service interactions can be informed by effective data capture.
Serving the connected customer starts with data. It informs service interactions, helping organizations to be more prepared. Capturing data—for example, via intelligent objects and the Internet of Things—allows an organization to anticipate customer needs instead of just reacting to them. Data can also personalize interactions, allowing each touchpoint and interaction to be tailored to a customer’s individual preferences and behaviors.
Businesses can no longer rely on just one type of information. The approach must be holistic—analyzing data from a range of sources to create a “segment of one.” The goal is to empower colleagues to provide unique customer resolutions based on their personal needs.
Automating routine service tasks has already shown the potential to improve service effectiveness and efficiency, but it will only continue to be successful if it is built on a clear understanding of the customer’s expectations.
Integrating service with sales and marketing depends on developing shared performance metrics. The emphasis will move from internal measures of efficiency to new customer-centric priorities, such as engagement which, in turn, will correlate with revenue growth.
Organizational structure will look different in the post-pandemic world. While the top priorities will be driving revenue, improving the customer experience, and adding new digital capabilities to existing products and services, firms will need to take new factors into consideration. Before implementing any changes, leaders must assess customer service interdependencies and points of connection within the company.
With many businesses operating under a full- or part-time working from home model, organizational culture will be markedly different. Customer service employees must be empowered by management to act like owners—they’ll need to be equipped with the tools, skills, and resources to deliver a personalized service that generates real, relevant engagement.
Our sales channels and operating model are optimized to drive growth objectives.
Our core processes are modernized, allowing us to win seller and customer experiences.
We hire, develop, motivate, and retain highly effective sales talent.
Our sales operations capabilities have evolved from a supporting function to one that continuously informs and optimizes the business.
Our investments in technology are showing measurable value.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to organizational alignment and performance, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to enhance your solution-selling capabilities.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to organizational alignment and performance, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Seamless Integration:
Develop frameworks of seamless integration across the front office.
Collaboration:
Ways of working need to become more connected and augmented by data.
Personalization:
Offers and purchasing options will be highly customized and in line with expectations.
Resources, including investments into sales channels, should be dynamically managed.
Maintaining an intimate, real-time understanding of your customer base is key to success.
Sales needs to deliver on the promise of personalized customer experiences by leveraging internal and external data to help understand customer intent. By harnessing this data, organizations will be able to answer questions like: what do our customers want to buy? How will this purchase fit with previous ones? What is their mindset and current perception of the company? What do they value, and what alternatives are they considering?
Sales organizations can develop channel strategies, coverage models, and territory assignments to improve customer interactions and sales outcomes. To do so, they’ll need an intimate knowledge of customers and analytically driven insights on channel and seller effectiveness. Sales won’t just improve customer experiences, it’ll increase ROI on investments by better managing capacity.
Successful sellers will use both tools and insights to craft personalized offers. In the case of more solution-oriented sales, they’ll offer flexible purchasing and service consumption options. For some, this will mean creating the right bundle in terms of price and conditions for both parties. For others, this will mean crafting personalized service offers on a subscription or usage basis.
Advances in collaboration technology, knowledge management tools, and analytics capabilities will enable new ways of working that improve seller experience and effectiveness.
Marketing, sales, and service need to work seamlessly together as growth in digital commerce and as-a-service business models continues. To capitalize on this, they’ll need to develop cross-functional processes, embrace changing roles, and maintain one source of truth for customer insights. Tech advances, competitors’ innovations, changing customer demands, and other market dynamics will require sales leaders to continuously monitor and adjust their sales models. Businesses that deliver on their customers’ expectations will establish themselves as valued partners—and providers—for their customers, differentiating themselves from the competition.
We're able to pinpoint customer needs and expectations ahead of time.
We have a strong grasp of our customer insights and implement them as a core capability of our business.
We understand the entire customer journey from start to finish.
We're able to balance our customer experience strategies with the cost of delivering them.
Technology drives our ability to design optimal customer experiences.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to customer insights, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to provide the optimal experience.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to customer insights, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Resolution:
Achieving deep rapport through an understanding of the customer.
Expectations:
Minimizing customer effort and creating frictionless processes.
Time and Effort:
Turning a poor experience into a great one.
Using individualized attention to drive emotional connection.
Empathy:
Managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
Integrity:
Acting with integrity and engendering trust.
Integrity comes from consistent organizational behavior that demonstrates trustworthiness. There are trust-building events, where organizations have the opportunity to publicly react to a difficult situation, and trust-building moments, where individual actions by staff add up to create trust in the organization as a whole. For all customers, it is the degree to which the organization delivers on its promises that is consistently at the top of their minds. Trust and integrity originate in the organization's sense of purpose and how it ethically, morally, and socially executes this purpose.
Empathy is the emotional capacity to show you understand someone else's experience. Empathy-creating behaviors are central to establishing a strong relationship. They involve reflecting back to the customer that you know how they feel, then going that one extra step to demonstrate that you’re able to act in good faith to build a relationship.
Personalization is the most valuable component of customer experiences. It involves showing that you understand the customer's specific circumstances and will adapt the experience accordingly. Use of their name, individualized attention, knowledge of preferences, and past interactions are some things you can do to highly personalize an experience. But what truly distinguishes world class personalization is how the customer feels after their interaction. You want them feeling important, valued, and in control.
Customers are time-poor and so are increasingly looking for instant gratification. Removing unnecessary obstacles, impediments, and bureaucracy to enable the customer to achieve their objectives quickly and easily have been shown to increase loyalty. Many companies are discovering how to use time as a source of competitive advantage. There are clear cost advantages to saving time, as long as the other pillars are not compromised by these actions.
Customers have expectations about how their needs will be met, and these are increasingly being set by the best brands they have encountered. Successful organizations understand that expectations are set strategically by the brand promise and reinforced by touchpoint promises every day. Statements of clear intent set expectations, and when delivered upon, the customer is left feeling satisfied.
Customer recovery is highly important. Even with the best processes and procedures, things will go wrong. Successful companies have a process that puts the customer back in the position they should have been in as rapidly as possible. Still, the service recovery paradox teaches us that just fixing problems is no longer good enough; the customer has to feel great about the recovery experience. A sincere apology and acting with urgency are the two crucial elements of successful resolution.
We can adequately forecast and anticipate demand.
We understand our customer segments and our supply chain is tailored to meet their needs.
Our S&OP process is effective, with clear roles and accountabilities, and drives alignment across business functions.
Our supply chain network can adjust performance, cost, and service levels.
We have visibility across the end-to-end supply chain to foresee potential issues and opportunities.
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Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to automated, streamlined processes, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to generate value for your customers & ROI for your company.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—when it comes to automated, streamlined processes, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Partnerships:
No organization can do it alone—they’ll need to embrace transformative partnerships.
Talent Development:
Being future-ready starts with people and leveling up their skills.
Performance:
While new technology can be enticing, organizations need to lead with performance.
Consolidation:
Consolidation is the first step in leveraging data to improve core competencies.
Informed Offerings:
Understand the cost of complexity versus the value of variety.
Strategy:
To build a future-ready supply chain, organizations need to have a clear strategy.
The future-conscious organization is faced with a myriad of investment choices, and often don’t know where to start. Start with a clear articulation of your strategy. Ask yourself: what are our value propositions? Who are our customers? How are our offerings differentiated? With your priorities in mind, you can assess your need to augment your decision-making, improve operational performance, enhance your capabilities, reconfigure your business model, and measure ROI.
To build a future-ready supply chain, organizations need to have a clear strategy
Too wide an offering of the wrong products and services reduces profit, even if it does meet a growing customer demand for choice. You’ll need to address both halves of the equation: what are the most valuable choices you can offer while reducing associated complexity costs? First you need to understand the market. What do your customers expect? What are your competitors offering? Which products and services do your customers respond to? Then you’ll need to integrate these insights into a differentiated target delivery model to drive efficiency and reduce cost.
To enhance your decision-making, you’ll need to consolidate the data you already produce or can access. You need to be able to leverage your business intelligence in a meaningful way to improve existing capabilities. Ask yourself: are you able to use IoT to predict product failures? Can you leverage supplier shipping notices to anticipate supply continuity issues? To help, you can build (or buy) an analytics platform to manage your data sources, which will enhance your processes and decision-making and set the stage for more advanced cognitive techniques.
Forget the hype surrounding the latest trends in tech—focus on your current capabilities and customer needs. Technology is meant to improve performance and augment decision-making. Start by identifying your performance ambition while looking at opportunities to remove friction in processes and decision-making. Identify solutions and capabilities that drive improved performance while factoring in the costs, including management change and upskilling.
People are your greatest resource. It takes time to recruit talent and upskill your workforce. Start now. An important step is to establish supply chain Centers of Excellence to curate best practices and consolidate lessons learned. Your supply chain CoEs can function as a specialist resource, provide guidance and insight, and create and facilitate training that accelerates learning and development.
No single organization will have a full suite of digital capabilities under one roof. The future is in outsourcing, not only capabilities but also hard-to-recruit skill sets. You’ll need to cultivate an agile ecosystem of partners, from small-scale regional manufacturers and logistics companies to gig economy tech professionals and universities. You can build a roadmap for the services you’ll need to outsource by focusing on your business strategy, customer needs, and current capabilities.
Our business model is adaptive and innovative.
We consistently deliver a great online experience for customers.
Our talent and operating models are synced and effectively support digital commerce.
Our commerce strategy and plan are well thought out.
Our digital platform is best in class so we can meet customer and employee needs while minimizing technical debt.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—for market-leading practices in accounting and planning, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to be more agile and sustainable.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—for market-leading practices in accounting and planning, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Digital Platforms:
Digital business platforms keep organizations ahead of the curve.
Sustainable Growth:
Operating at scale makes customer-centricity possible—and profitable.
Edgeless experiences fulfill the potential of digital commerce.
Business Model:
Commerce-powered business models spark disruption.
Your business model differentiates you while delivering value to the organization and its shareholders. It must be supported by an operating model that scales with growth.
When customer-centricity, data analytics, and a functionally integrated organization meet, amazing new things are possible. One aspect of this is that radical innovation works its way into how people want to live. You’ll need to develop the ability to deliver richness, choice, and personalization at scale, consistently and profitably.
A balance must be made between meeting customer expectations and generating profit. Sustainable growth needs to be able to scale with volume, but also needs the agility to respond to (and capitalize on) changing customer demand and market conditions. New digital business platforms shaped by insight will deliver seamless and differentiated customer experiences.
These platforms make exciting, new things possible—from edgeless experiences for customers to major advances in organizational efficiency and agility. To position your company as the new market leader, you’ll need to invest in these digital platform capabilities.
Commerce-powered business mod
Our tools give us a 360-view of our customers, which we use to optimize customer experience and sales cost.
Our data and systems allow us to make timely decisions which improve sales productivity.
Our pipeline data is transparent and enables accurate sales forecasting.
We have high quality data, adequate transparency, and strong governance.
Our platforms and infrastructure are flexible, allowing us to quickly respond to market changes and opportunities.
Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—for platforms and infrastructure in your industry, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Developing a better understanding of your customer empowers you to improve and plan for the customer journey.
It looks like we didn’t get enough data from your responses to place you on the customer-centric maturity scale. Please go back to the previous page and answer the questions once you’re ready. Whether you're still figuring out where to begin—or set the bar—for platforms and infrastructure in your industry, there's always opportunities to be more collaborative and to leverage powerful new tools to prepare for the challenges that the future brings. Here are some key considerations for your company.
Data and tech can be used to establish a master strategy.
Meaningful business intelligence and management reporting should be based on data.
Centralization:
CRM can be used as the central repository for all customer interactions.
Best Practices:
CRM can act as a guiding star for continuous transformation.
Unification:
Customer lifecycle and experience can be unified through CRM and other technologies.
For future success, you’ll need to unify the entire customer lifecycle and experience by utilizing CRM’s capabilities and other peripheral technologies. It’s common for organizations to be aligned on strategic goals with the front and middle office, but having difficulties sharing information due to data silos that prohibit the creation of a cohesive customer experience. When organizations seek to be more disciplined with their customer engagement, CRM is the way to unify the front and mid-office to achieve success.
CRM enables you to plan for continuous transformation throughout your organization. Organizations that view CRM implementation as a one-time event often fail to meet their expected ROI. On the other hand, organizations that establish a Center of Excellence that defines people, processes, governance, technology, and performance insights needed to improve will have a better chance of success.
Successful organizations view CRM user adoption as a unique opportunity to position CRM as the central repository for all customer interactions. This is an often overlooked aspect of CRM implementation, and is a common pain point for organizations struggling to meet their ROI expectations. To succeed at user adoption, you’ll need to engage your user base and frontline management, gain executive buy-in, and align CRM features to short-term win themes and long-term business objectives.
Customer data pulled from CRM is essential to creating a plan to deliver meaningful business intelligence and management reporting. A lack of coherent intelligence and analysis strategy can result in a fragmented approach to analyzing customer insights. This leads to leadership not operating from standardized intelligence, which results in inconsistencies. When your business builds intelligence and strategy from CRM data, it’s possible to align on agreed-upon metrics, increase trust in reporting, and forecast accurately.
Future success requires organizations to establish a business-driven technology strategy. This includes considerations for master data strategy among front, middle, and back office applications, as well as a coherent architectural plan. Peripheral technology that enhances CRM must be both aligned to business objectives and managed by the CoE governance mechanism. CRM architecture must be integratable to other enterprise platforms while also focusing on continuous maintenance, improvement, and upgrades.
Here's where you stand.
Based on our diagnostics, your business has a Foundational level of maturity. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
To achieve success, you need to anticipate rapidly changing customer expectations and then deliver on them, which requires a new operating model. Leading CMOs are reconfiguring and transforming their marketing capabilities to integrate with sales teams and service functions—creating an interconnected front office.This allows them to capitalize on a huge opportunity for growth: to be agile, data-driven, and technology-enabled. They’re able to deploy messaging, experiences, and services, all at the speed of the customer.
Foundational
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Based on our diagnostics, your business has an Evolving level of maturity. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
Evolving
Everything about the customer is changing - motivations, connections, expectations, time and purchasing power. Life events are less predictable than they were in the past. Organizations that don’t detect these shifts, and fail to build strategies based on the new realities and lives of the customers they service, will struggle to remain relevant in today’s marketplace. Leading organizations understand that the below six areas are intertwined and, in combination, provide a powerful mechanism to help organizations understand how well their customer experience is delivered across channels, industries and company types. Leading organizations demonstrate mastery of their pillars and are outstanding at all of them.
To achieve success, you need to anticipate rapidly changing customer expectations and then deliver on them, which requires a new operating model. Leading CMOs are reconfiguring and transforming their marketing capabilities to integrate with sales teams and service functions—creating an interconnected front office. This allows them to capitalize on a huge opportunity for growth: to be agile, data-driven, and technology-enabled. They’re able to deploy messaging, experiences, and services, all at the speed of the customer.
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Operational
Based on our diagnostics, your business has an Operational level of maturity. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
Mature
Based on our diagnostics, your business is mature at the customer-centric level. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
Based on our diagnostics, your business is Mature at the customer-centric level. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
Based on our diagnostics, your business has a Leading level of maturity. You’re likely starting to define best practices in some of these areas.
Leading
Customer service must continuously anticipate fast-changing customer expectations and deliver them in order to have future success, which requires a new operating model. Leading CX heads are adapting their business model—and their costs—to reflect a more customer-centric operation. They intimately understand their customers, recognizing that their needs change quickly, and deliver an intentional, anticipatory, personalized, empathetic, and integrated CX experience.
Armed with more information than ever before, today’s customers are reshaping how they buy, and as an extension, demanding changes in sales processes. Their expectations have shifted and companies must revisit and adapt their strategies to deliver purposeful, personalized and simplified customer experiences. Succeeding in this environment calls for a fully transformed sales organization. The future of sales rests upon their ability to enable their organization to continuously anticipate and deliver on the fast-changing expectations of their customers.
