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CXperts’ very own UX Maturity Assessment is now live!
The UX Maturity Assessment is 5 questions and takes about 3 minutes. If your results reveal some gaps, that’s where we come in!
Before you jump in, we want to share a little backstory on what brought us to a UX Maturity Model, because this one has been a long time coming.
How we got here
You might remember earlier this year, we turned our research skills inward and ran a “meta” study on ourselves with our own clients. Through 12 in-depth interviews, we learned why clients come to us, how they see our strengths, and how we could better serve our users.
One unexpected outcome of this work was our development of a UX maturity model to help us better serve our clients where they are. But the model didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the answer to a common question we ask ourselves every time, for every client: What is the next step to take in improving their CX journey?
Why verticalizing never quite worked for us
Many agencies pick a vertical to specialize in. It’s a clear way to say “this is who we’re for, this is where we specialize”. Over the years, we’ve thought about our clients in a few different ways:
- By industry: retail, healthcare, manufacturing
- By business model: ecomm, lead gen, SaaS
- By company size: small lean teams, large enterprises
- By ecosystem: clients who come to us with technology like Fullstory, Optimizely, Wingify (formerly AB Tasty and VWO)
None of these categories really hold together for long. That’s because what CXperts does is horizontal in nature. We help brands to better connect, understand and empathize with customers. Understanding customers is a job that cuts across any business in every category or vertical. And the services we offer to build that understanding (CRO, UX research, analytics, design) shouldn’t stay in one lane; we believe they must actually integrate together to be maximally effective.
This left us with a bit of a squishy answer to the “what’s your ICP” question. So if our clients didn’t sort neatly by vertical or category, what do they actually have in common?
What we noticed instead
Across seven years and hundreds of projects, the pattern that kept emerging came down to one question: “Where are you in your CX journey?” Consistently, we found clients who are just getting started, and others who have been at it for years.
Internally, we started looking at our clients in three stages of “CX progress”:
- CX Launch: just starting out; learning and acquiring new tools to understand and diagnose
- CX Insights: starting to understand users with multiple methods; maybe quant data and/or voice of customer research
- CX Optimization: improving experiences with iterative changes; CRO programs based on user data to iterate, test, and scale
If those sound familiar, they should. They’re the backbone of our three service lines: CX Launch, CX Insights, and CX Optimization.
These stages are a great way to think about CX progress, but they aren’t exactly linear. CX progress depends on a lot of factors. A team might have a great tech stack and still make decisions based on executive opinion. Another might have a strong research culture but struggle to ship changes quickly. Three stages alone can’t capture that.
That’s where our meta study came back in. Hearing directly from our clients helped us untangle those factors and build them into something more complete.
Our UX Maturity Model
The CXperts UX Maturity Model takes into account more than just industry, company size, or how many CX insight reports you build per month. It relies on a framework of five dimensions:
- People & Culture: Who owns CX, and how supported are they?
- Execution Velocity: How quickly and reliably can your team ship updates?
- Decision Framework: How do you decide what to build next?
- CX Tech Stack: What tools do you have, and do they talk to each other?
- ROI Visibility & Accountability: Can you put a dollar value on your digital experience evolution?
Each of these dimensions runs across five levels: 0. Constrained, 1. Emergent / Tactical, 2. Maturing, 3. Integrated, and 4. Decision Intelligence.
Most organizations don’t land on the same level across the board, and that’s exactly what makes this useful. Each dimension addresses a different aspect of an organization.
For example, marketing might invest in analytics tools while engineering is still working through technical debt, or leadership might champion CX before the processes are in place to back it up. Seeing where you’re strong and where you’re stuck shows you where to focus next.
To give you a score, our assessment asks one question per dimension and places you at one of the five levels.
Find out where you stand
Our job is to meet you where you are, understand your challenges and opportunities, and then draw up a clear roadmap to follow. The first step is knowing where you’re starting from.
Take our 3-minute UX Maturity Assessment and get your results immediately.
If you have questions about your results or want help mapping steps to your next level, reach out to us at hello@cxperts.io and we’d be happy to help!
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