How to Assess Your Customer Centricity Maturity
By: Jeanne Jones, Marketing Leader
Why did we build a Customer Centricity Assessment?
We founded the Customer Data Professionals Alliance (The CDPa) with the goal of bringing thought leaders together to advance the responsible use of customer insights and data to drive customer-centric growth. We want to do this by establishing best practices as well as create and share resources for the broader community. When thinking about which themes and topics to focus on first, we determined that organizations would need help in three primary areas when transitioning to a customer centric way of doing business:
- Change management
- Executive alignment
- Technology and solutions barriers
Using these goals and focus areas as our guiding light, we began working on our first playbook: “The Customer Centricity Maturity Assessment,” created by a core group of our founding members. These people have led organizations through customer-centric change, written books on the topic, and executed the programs to support this change. A big thank you to our council members that contributed to this work.
"As part of the assessment, you can review each stage and the associated criteria, and place your organization at the right maturity stage."
Why are we doing this, and who is it for?
So what does the Customer Centricity Maturity Assessment solve for, and who is it created for? First of all, we should define what customer centricity means. According to professor Peter Fader, author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage:
“Customer centricity is a strategy that aligns a company’s development/delivery of its products/services around the current and future needs of a select set of customers in order to maximize their long-term financial value to the firm.”
Following this, our assessment will give you the foundation to start applying customer centricity in your business, ensure you start in the right place, and make the right investments — all tailored toward your organization. The assessment is intended for those with the decision-making power and the resources to drive change in your organization. You are a senior leader (or influencing a senior leader), and likely work in analytics, marketing, or digital, and you’re ready to shift your organization to using a customer-centric approach.
What is the Customer Centricity Maturity Model?
There are five stages of organizational maturity when it comes to being a customer-centric company. The maturity levels are informed by how a company has integrated customer-centric behaviors, systems, and processes within its organization, with its people, and with its technology. As part of the assessment, you can review each stage and the associated criteria, and place your organization at the right maturity stage. This will give you a framework in which to identify opportunities, investments needed, and outcomes to expect.
Adapted from Analytics at Work, Tom Davenport (2017)
What’s next?
Establishing where your organization currently lies on the maturity model is the first step in getting started, and that’s what this Customer Centricity Maturity Assessment will help you with. Following very soon, we’ll be publishing tools to help you identify your distinct opportunities to help your business transform and become more customer centric. These tools will help you identify which business units and what use cases you can deliver on first. We’ll also be providing a guide to help with measuring your impact both with customer-centric KPIs as well as more traditional KPIs. Be sure to subscribe to be a part of the CDPa so you’re the first to know when we publish and host talks.
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