For businesses to succeed today, they have to be attuned to their customers. Key business objectives need to be shaped by customers’ own goals and desires. But when it comes to making strategic decisions through the lens of customer experience, a CX assessment is a useful exercise.

What Is a CX Assessment?

A CX assessment is a thorough, detailed analysis of the customer experience. It looks at both the qualitative elements — how a customer feels when interacting with a business through its various channels — and the quantitative ones — KPIs like customer satisfaction score, Net Promoter Score, and customer lifetime value.

A CX assessment is a valuable tool for businesses determining which technologies to adopt and which strategies to prioritize. It identifies areas where a business’s approach to customer experience needs to change and suggests how to make those changes.

How Does a CX Assessment Work?

There are a few key things to do when starting a CX assessment.

• Begin at the end. Start your assessment with a “working backward” approach. By first identifying the outcome(s) you seek, you can build your initiatives in a way that positively impacts your customer — rather than coming up with a list of ideas you view as good and then simply hoping the customer will like them, too.
• Write an internal press release. One helpful way to “begin at the end” is to compose a press release, imagining your new customer experience offerings launching publicly. By envisioning the “final product,” so to speak, and describing its qualities and the pain points it solves, you can show yourself how to give your customers what they need and want most.
• Assess your key business objectives. The value of the press release doesn’t stop there. You can use it as a measurement of how well the business objectives you’ve defined actually serve your customer. What deliverables do you need to keep your experience relevant and meaningful to customers? A clear definition of business objectives will allow you to perform a more holistic CX measurement in the end.
• Communicate your goals and obtain buy-in. Getting buy-in is incredibly important for the success of your assessment because many different people and departments — from compliance to legal to finance to developers— are responsible for customer happiness. It takes cross-organizational alignment for the project to succeed.

How Can USAN Turn a CX Assessment Into a Tech Roadmap?

USAN has helped a number of businesses conduct CX assessments. We start by performing a needs assessment, which gives a picture of how customers currently interact with the company and how they might prefer to interact instead. This gives the company an idea of what CX technologies to implement in order to achieve their goals and strengthen their CX overall.

We can then create a tech roadmap based on the assessment. From here, CX initiatives are planned and ideated, offering direction on the business case, proof of concept, and ROI metrics.

Ultimately, USAN has the expertise and experience to help businesses evaluate and define their business objectives and then achieve them.

If your business is building or rebuilding its customer experience strategy, conducting a CX assessment is a great place to start. To get started and learn more about USAN’s cloud contact center solutions, reach out to USAN today.

Download our whitepaper on CX Assessments and Cloud Migrations.