We live in a world where customers demand great experiences, flexibility and have more choice than ever before. They’re informed and they vote with their feet and their phones. They expect service, they want quality and they’re vocal when they don’t get it, or they just leave.

The pressure on organisations to do more with less continues to mount as economic uncertainties continue. To navigate the year ahead, many organisations need to radically transform in order to compete and stay relevant for their customers.

Organisations often turn to transformations to make big leaps. This is necessary, as are small incremental steps. Transformation done right has a number of benefits, especially when customer data is valued as an asset: Any good transformation aims to increase revenue, reduce costs, deliver efficiencies, lower risk, improve customer satisfaction and boost employee engagement.

This is where your customer data comes into play. Your customer data is an asset. The first step to boosting its value is via a customer data maturity assessment.

What is a customer data maturity assessment?

A customer data maturity assessment is the process by which an organisation is reviewed and rated against a series of important customer, data and business focused pillars. It provides the organisation with a picture of how customer data is utilised across a series of pillars. Each pillar is given a rating from zero (unaware) to 5 (highly optimised). To capture ratings across pillars, stakeholder interviews are undertaken.

A customer data maturity assessment provides your organisation with a picture of the landscape in which you operate and where customer data unlocks opportunity. It provides a start point for your transformation. It ensures the journey is built on strong foundations, and that you’re prepared with clarity of your strengths and weaknesses.

Why perform a customer data maturity assessment?

A customer data maturity assessment helps the organisation to know its start point on a transformation journey. It ensures a transformation is built on strong foundations and that preparations are done to ensure the journey is a success. In summary, it helps the organisation to see the landscape in which it needs to successfully navigate.

Strengths and weaknesses are identified and planned against to efficiently reach the desired destination. Clarity on the customer data ensures stakeholders are aligned to a common understanding. Opportunities to deliver objectives and key results are revealed and associated risks are mitigated. This is also an opportunity to break down organisation silos and inspire the organisation to aim for and work towards better customer experiences.

Most of all a customer data maturity assessment provides a view of transformation progress. It clarifies what you’ve been working on and where you’ve delivered customer impact. At a time when every pound or dollar is scrutinised, demonstrating value is critical. A customer data maturity assessment provides the framework to do just this.

Outcomes from a customer data maturity assessment range across the pillars measured.

Hexdon’s data maturity assessment pillars:

• Leadership: do business leaders understand and support your customer data initiatives and will they back you?
• Strategy: does your customer data strategy align to your business vision, mission and strategy?
• Governance: how effectively does your organisation govern shareholder requirements, the customer charter, employee needs, GDPR, diversity etc.
• Processes: does your organisation have appropriate frameworks in place to manage policies, operate technology, ensure people follow along guardrails.
• Roles & Responsibilities: are the right roles and responsibilities in place to manage customer data across the business.
• Skills: do teams in the business have the required skills to utilise customer data, technology, people and processes effectively to deliver brilliant customer experiences?
• Architecture: Is the information clearly understood across the organisation and who is accountable overall and for each area?
• Objectives and key results: does the business have a clear measurement framework to report results? Are the right customer KPI’s being measured and are they aligned to roles?
• Information Security: Can the business demonstrate that it’s addressed any risk concerns? Does it have the tools in place to mitigate risk?
• Policy: are the right policies in place to ensure the business is well run? Examples include privacy, security etc. Policies need to be accessible, specific, actionable and interconnected.
• Technology: is the CRM, CDP and MarTech well understood and is there a plan to optimise it?
• Insight: does the business value customer data and understand how it translates it into actionable insight? Is there a balance of data value and insight value?

A customer data maturity assessment is essential to business transformation

A customer data maturity is a great start point for a transformation. It’s an opportunity to put a marker down to say this is what’s important, this is where we are and let’s agree what the future state needs to look like in order to deliver our customer vision, mission and goals.

Done right, a customer data maturity assessment helps an organisation articulate what it’s been doing to improve the customer experience and where it can improvet. These are the foundations of any impactful business transformation and are essential elements to compete in an increasingly economically challenged world.

If you’re thinking of running a customer data maturity assessment, book a call with our team.

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