The 4 stages of contact center maturity and how to use them

More than 60% of customers are extremely willing or very willing to switch brands to have a better customer service experience. Customer experience (CX) is critical to retaining and driving business and the mandate to improve it is constant.

If your CX isn’t building brand love and loyalty, it’s time to transform your CX strategy to align with your company’s business goals and impact the bottom line. To develop a transformation strategy, look beyond traditional contact center key performance indicators (KPIs) and instead use a holistic view of your CX to evaluate, prioritize and enhance areas in need of improvement.

Evaluating core areas and mapping the stages of CX maturity

At Talkdesk, we’ve engaged with thousands of CX leaders and learned that every brand falls into a defined CX maturity level. Based on this experience, we have developed the Talkdesk CX Maturity Model™ to help brands understand their current maturity, set a vision for their ideal future state and create a roadmap to get there.

The Talkdesk CX Maturity Model evaluates CX based on nine core areas: 

• CX Philosophy: How a company identifies and adheres to a customer-first support model—often guided by a brand’s values—that informs contact center behavior, processes and resources.
• Routing & Queueing: How a company matches and prioritizes customer context and intent with the skills of an agent and the resources available, across all channels.
• Workforce Management: How an organization assigns the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the right time to meet demand.
• Personalization: How an organization tailors a customer’s experience based on the customer’s profile and objective.
• Account & Interaction Management: How an organization integrates enterprise systems to collect, maintain and distribute customer information.
• Knowledge Management: How information is curated, maintained and distributed across systems, taking into account searchability for agents and customers to find accurate information.
• Quality Assurance: How an organization ensures their CX meets their goals and aligns with guiding principles by evaluating agent-customer interactions, identifying areas of improvement and providing feedback or training for remediation.
• Feedback: How an organization delivers customer surveys, collects responses, and analyzes and implements changes based on results.
• Reporting & Analytics: How an organization analyzes real-time and historical data to drive decisions and generate better business outcomes.

We ask organizations to begin with a self-assessment, scoring themselves across these nine areas. From this data, we can map an organization’s CX maturity into one of four stages:

1. Beginning: Contact centers in Stage 1 are establishing customer support within their organization and are most interested in efficiency to assist their clients while maintaining low costs.
2. Developing: The Stage 2 contact center is focused on problem solving rather than relationship building and typically aligned to touchstones like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), so the organization can more easily track their progress and has a measurable benchmark against others in their market.
3. Maturing: Organizations who see the contact center as an opportunity to generate profits, while still controlling costs and being efficient, fall into Stage 3.
4. Optimizing: Stage 4 contact centers have a strong cross-functional strategy bringing in CX leaders and stakeholders from the entire enterprise who will use the contact center to drive organizational goals for CX innovation.

These maturity stages give a clear indication of a company’s current CX maturity status and areas for targeted improvement, from which the Talkdesk team generates a roadmap to get there.

With a CX transformation strategy in place, organizations can move up the maturity scale at their own pace to become more customer-centric. The more strategic the contact center becomes in delivering sophisticated CX, the higher its visibility within the organization as it contributes more to business outcomes and success.

If you are interested in learning more about the four stages of contact center maturity and how Talkdesk is uniquely positioned to support you along every step of your CX transformation journey, download the Define Your Vision for CX Greatness white paper or watch The First Step Is the Hardest: Assess Your Maturity for CX Evolution webinar with principal analyst, Sheila McGee-Smith.