Report: The State of the CX Management, 2015

We just published a Temkin Group report, The State of the CX Management, 2015. This is the sixth annual benchmark of CX activities, competencies, and maturity levels.  Here’s the executive summary:

For the sixth straight year, Temkin Group surveyed nearly 200 large companies to evaluate the state of their Customer Experience (CX) management. This year we found an abundance of CX ambition and activity. Most companies have a CX executive leading the charge, a central team coordinating significant CX activities, and a staff of six to 10 full-time CX professionals. Using Temkin Group’s CX competency and maturity assessment, we found that 32% of companies have reached the highest three levels of customer experience, and while this isn’t very high, it’s still a significant increase from last year. Companies have also achieved the best scores we’ve seen for two of our four core competencies, Employee Engagement and Customer Connectedness. We additionally compared CX laggards with CX leaders and discovered that the leaders have stronger financial results, have more customer-centric cultures, focus more on internal communications, are stronger at customer insights and change management, and are better at digital interactions. Executives in companies with stronger CX competencies also tend to focus more on building a customer-centric culture and less on cutting costs. This report also includes an assessment that companies can use to benchmark their CX efforts and capabilities.

Download report for $195

The research revealed significant ambitions for improvement. While only 7% of companies believe that their organization currently delivers industry-leading customer experience, 55% have a goal to be an industry-leader within three years.

The research also shows that customer experience maturity correlates to financial results. Seventy-seven percent of companies with above average customer experience maturity levels reported that their financial results in 2014 were better than their competitors, compared with only 55% of those with below average customer experience maturity.

Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Maturity Model uses six stages of CX maturity based on the four customer experience core competencies. Here’s what we found when 199 companies completed the assessment:

Here are some additional findings:

• Senior executives in companies with higher customer experience maturity levels are more likely to focus on the company’s culture and less likely to focus on cutting costs.
• Sixty-three percent of large organizations have a senior executive in charge of their customer experience efforts.
• Thirty-seven percent of large organizations have more than 10 full-time customer experience professionals
• Only 7% of large companies rate their mobile phone experiences as being very good and only 3% of those firms feel that way about experiences that cut across multiple channels.
• Companies identified “other competing priorities” as the top obstacle to improving customer experience.

Download report for $195