Companies in recent years have realised that it is more profitable to retain a customer than attract a new one. These days customers can conduct their own research into a brand/company or product to make decisions. With a lot of customers being tech savvy, they now have expected the same from businesses they interact with. The first impression that most customers get is through the website, if a website loads slowly or their mobile accessibility isn’t great then the customer would not come back again because they had a bad experience with the brand.  The Customer Experience Maturity Model helps businesses determine which stage their customers fall into. The model is defined by three levels of customer maturity – attract, convert, and advocate, and seven strategic values – initiate, radiate, align, optimise, nurture, engage, and lifetime customers.

Attract

The first phase is to attract and build relationships with potential customers.

• Initiate – The company has a digital presence, email campaign, and web analytics in place.

• Radiate – Distribute content across channels and establish a mobile site and sharing content on social media.

• Align – Aligning digital initiatives with strategic objectives where the digital focus shifts towards achieving strategic goals.

Convert

The company has gained potential customers but now to convert those customers into a sale.

• Optimise – Using analytics to find actionable insights to optimise digital initiatives that would help to achieve the strategic objective.

• Nurture – Focusing on the customer to build a strong relationship through customers’ preferred channels.

Advocate

The final phase is to forge a long-lasting relationship with the customer, build customer loyalty, and encourage return visits.

• Engage – Establish a central data infrastructure that connects online and offline data in a central data hub that will allow customer profiles to be accessed and used in real time dialogue across channels.

• Life Customers – Using knowledge and prediction to optimise cross channel experience by anticipating the needs of the customer.

Summary

Consumers these days have so many choices to choose from but have a high expectation on the level of service they require, which means that companies may find it difficult to keep loyal customers as they require more interactions than a traditional company would. The Customer Experience Maturity Model will allow you and your company to see where they are at and see what is the next step in customer experience.