Your maturity result:

Your organization’s overall maturity rating is non-customer-obsessed.

Your score suggests your organization does not yet prioritize customer focus as a primary differentiator. This may also mean your company is slower than competitors to use omnichannel strategies to connect with customers in context.

To mature both your organization’s customer-centricity and omnichannel practices:

Listen to your organization’s customers. Establish formal and informal ways to hear what your organization’s customers need. When you act on customer insights, interpret them and monitor the results of your efforts to deliver value to your organization’s customers so you are better able to sense and respond to market circumstances. Doing this ensures customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and revenue growth in any economic climate.

• For example, business leaders understood and responded quickly to customers’ changing needs and behaviors during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic and retailers adapted to consumers’ needs for contactless shopping and payments.

Better leverage data. Data is the lifeblood of an organization. Having an established, fully documented, unified data model that can integrate data from multiple customer-facing sources will help your organization to better leverage data for personalization across channels, and it underpins listening to customer needs, identifying insights, and better anticipating customer needs.

• For example, having a 360-degree view of the customer is the first step toward cross-channel personalization. Why? Because personalization is deeply correlated with how effectively your organization understands its customer and what content is useful and relevant.

Partner to extend your organization’s capabilities. Marketers should also be asking questions to assess what they can do better. Partnering with tech vendors, agencies, and consultants can offer resources to fill needed gaps so your organization doesn’t delay scaling its omnichannel progress. This helps with constantly innovating and adapting to meet customer expectations.

• For example, brands that collaborate with partners that are purpose-built for the brands’ needs can elevate their omnichannel transformations. This can help your brand to work toward specific strategic and tactical goals while providing value-added experiences to meet the needs of the empowered customer.

Your organization’s overall maturity rating is customer-obsessed.

Your score suggests that your organization prioritizes value-for-customer as a competitive differentiator. Your organization makes its customers feel seen and appreciated by connecting with them through relevant omnichannel programs.

To sustain deep connections with your organization’s customers over time:

Embrace disruption. Uncertainty is certain. For many, it can breed anxiety that stunts productive work. But when uncertainty is viewed as an opportunity, it forces a new perspective, and that unlocks new possibilities.

• For example, having the inability to engage with customers in physical environments pushed organizations to provide in-store experiences online like experiential content through live-streaming or substituting in-store interactions with personalized virtual appointments.

Invest in agility. Stay in front of changing customer expectations by allowing for fast decision-making, structural flexibility, and real-time technologies.

• For example, the generation of real-time consumer insights can recalibrate business models and offerings to meet consumer expectations like launching a new delivery component or enhancing current click-and-collect capabilities to be more fluid and nuanced for the customer.

Continue to take action. Too many companies work hard to create a high level of omnichannel engagement and then grow weary of the effort required to sustain it. Prioritize personal accountability in order to stave off any “not my problem” deflection that can ruin your organization’s forward momentum.

• For example, self-service capabilities have largely proven inadequate as consumers still seek out live agents on the phone. Designing a digital customer-care strategy in which live agents handle complex requests, demonstrate empathy, and resolve issues quickly will have more engagement with that customer and give opportunity to further personalize their experiences.