“The CX Audit: Breaking Down Customer Experience Management” – Katherine N. Lemon, Peter C. Verhoef and Jon Dome
Managing your customer’s experience, or customer journey is one of the most complex strategic marketing challenges marketers face.
Customer experience is at the heart of effective marketing. In fact, major firms like KPMG, Amazon, and Google now have chief customer experience officers, customer experience vice presidents, or customer experience managers responsible for creating and managing their complicated customer experiences.
Even the definition of customer experience is complicated. Here’s the one we use: Customer experience is the multidimensional combination of:
- What customers are thinking
- Customers’ emotions
- Customers’ behavior
- What customers are sensing—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling
- The social meaning and context of what customers are doing
Getting all these components right is even more complicated than the definition. Fortunately, the key inputs to customer experience have been well-studied going back to the 1960’s with the seminal Theory of Buyer Behaviorby John Howard and Jag Sheth and the well-known Marketing Managementtextbook by Phillip Kotler. (For an analysis and review of what’s been learned about customer experience, please refer to our article, “Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey,” Journal of Marketing: November 2016, Vol. 80, No. 6, pp. 69-96.)
The CX Audit
We’ve broken down customer experience management into 10 CX essentials. Use the following three steps to identify how to improve your CX.
Step 1
Take this 10 question self-audit to see how your firm stacks up:
The CX Audit Tool
Step 2
Add up your total ratings and see which range you are in:
Summary CX Score
Step 3
Select one area of improvement that is most important to focus on next.
Innovation Is Your Imperative
No matter what level you are at—novice to expert—you need to continuously innovate. Look for the anomalies in your customer experiences—the things that shouldn’t be but are (and visa versa) and address them. They are clues to the unknown, unmet needs that may prove to be breakthrough innovations.
