CX Maturity: What Do We Believe – and What Does Reality Reveal?

Is it strategy that determines whether a company is good at customer experience? Are large companies better placed than small ones? Most CX managers have a clear expectation.

Loyalty Group interviewed 203 CX managers on how they work with customer experience and tested nine widespread assumptions about CX maturity against their answers. Most of them do not hold up.

Based on the answers, the companies can be divided into three groups according to how maturely they work with CX. Maturity is measured across six areas: strategy, measurement, execution, leadership, employee involvement and impact documentation*. 13% score high in all six. 54% are in the middle, strong in some areas and weak in others. 33% are early in their efforts and score low in all six areas.

The mature group is small, so only large differences – typically 30–40 percentage points – can be considered statistically reliable. With that caveat in mind, we have tested several widespread assumptions about what drives CX maturity against the data. Some held true, but most were disproved.

Execution beats strategy

A widespread assumption is that a clear CX strategy is what drives results. The data shows something different. 32% of companies score higher on strategy than on systematic improvement work. In other words, they have a plan they do not follow through on in practice.

When strategy and execution are tested against business results at the same time, only execution affects revenue growth, profit growth, employee retention and perceived business impact. Strategy makes no independent contribution to any of them. This is confirmed by the companies that score low on strategy but high on execution: they perform best of all on revenue growth – better than companies that score high on both. A plan without consistent follow-through does not deliver measurable results.

Structure matters more than size

Do large companies find it easier to become CX-mature because they have more resources? The data says no. Size makes no difference to how CX-mature a company is. In fact, the share of companies with more than 1,000 employees is lowest in the most CX-mature group.

What makes the difference is whether the work is structured. 72% of CX-mature companies already have a structured approach to CX, compared with 34% in the middle group and only 12% in the least CX-mature group. A systematic way of working therefore explains far more than company size.

Lack of management support, not silos, is the real obstacle

Silos between departments are the challenge most CX managers point to: 58% mention it. It is a picture many will recognise: departments each fighting their own battle, while no one owns the customer’s overall experience. But the difference between the groups – 70% in the least CX-mature versus 48% in the most CX-mature – is not large enough to be statistically reliable. So it does not explain why some companies make progress and others do not.

What really separates the mature from the immature is management support. 52% in the least CX-mature group lack sufficient support from management, compared with only 12% in the most CX-mature group. The same pattern applies to making the case for long-term CX investments: 58% in the least CX-mature group see this as a challenge, compared with 28% in the most CX-mature. Silos, then, are a symptom most companies live with. The real difference lies in whether management backs the work.

The way you measure impact changes the perceived link

Companies that use business metrics such as churn rate, repeat purchases and customer value over time experience a stronger link between their CX work and business results than companies that only measure satisfaction and willingness to recommend. The latter capture what customers think of the experience, but not what it means for the business. This may explain why some CX managers struggle to document the business value of their work internally: they are measuring the wrong things.

The ability to calculate financial impact is itself clearly linked to CX maturity. 75% in the least CX-mature group do not calculate the impact of their CX work at all, compared with 16% in the most CX-mature. The ability is also linked to how much impact companies experience: among companies that estimate the financial gain from all their CX initiatives, 87% say the work largely affects business results. Among those that never calculate the impact, the figure is only 47%. However, actual reported revenue growth is almost the same in the two groups. Companies that calculate the impact are therefore more convinced that their CX work pays off, without growing more. This suggests that impact calculations are used as much to convince internally as to measure.

AI intent says more than AI use

Most studies of AI in CX look at how much companies use AI. Data from this study points in a different direction: what really separates CX-mature from CX-immature companies is why they use AI.

Among the most CX-mature companies, 55% say they use AI to create new forms of customer value, relationships or loyalty. In the least CX-mature group, the figure is only 4%. Here, AI is more often used to reduce costs and workload: 37% compared with 14% in the most CX-mature group. The level of use itself tells you less: isolated AI experiments are most common in the least CX-mature group. It is the shift from scattered experiments to integrated use that follows CX maturity. The intent behind the use therefore explains the difference better than how much AI is used.

Skills needs follow CX maturity, but AI is an exception

The least CX-mature companies most often ask for the basics: turning numbers into action, building internal motivation for CX and managing the change that CX work requires. The most CX-mature are more likely to ask for technical skills: data analysis and CX technology. Only one of the differences is large enough to be statistically reliable: the wish to move from numbers to action. 59% in the least CX-mature group ask for this, compared with 28% in the most CX-mature.

AI stands out as the one area where the need is the same across the board: between 63% and 72% in all three groups want more knowledge about AI. AI skills are therefore a need companies have, regardless of how CX-mature they are.

Employee loyalty lifts the CX-immature, but gives the CX-mature no extra gain

There is a clear link between structured work with employee loyalty and structured work with customer loyalty. Of the companies that score highest on the former, half also score highest on the latter. Among those that score low on employee loyalty, this applies to only 2%. And companies that are strong on employee loyalty are far more often among the most CX-mature overall.

However, a widespread assumption is that combining high customer loyalty with high employee loyalty delivers better business results than high customer loyalty alone. That is not the case. The stronger a company already is on customer loyalty, the less extra it gains from working on employee loyalty. This applies to revenue growth, profit growth and employee retention alike. Employee loyalty therefore appears to be a lever for companies that are not yet mature in CX. For companies that are already strong on customer experience, an extra focus on employee loyalty gives no measurable additional gain.

The overall picture

Across the nine assumptions, one pattern recurs. What separates CX-mature companies from immature ones is whether the work is structured, whether management backs it, and whether impact is measured in a way that shows up in the business. This also applies to new technology such as AI: in CX-mature companies, it is used to create new value for customers.

* The six dimension CX maturity score is developed by Norwegian company Customer C.