What does it mean to be CX Ready? Is your product or service ready to provide the best Customer Experience? How do you know? How does your company track tasks related to CX Readiness?

Whether your organization has 1, 10, or 1000 employees, customer experience readiness principles apply to all organzations. 

Being CX Ready means your entire organization is prepared and willing to provide the best possible Customer Experience to your customer base. In order to ensure your product or service is ready to provide the best Customer Experience, you need to be able to track the progress on areas that can have an impact to the Customer Experience. While these areas will depend on the product or service you are offering, there are many common pieces that every product or service will need to be aware of in order to be CX Ready.

1. Orientation – When introducing a new product or service make sure all teams involved are aware of the project and its impact to the Customer Experience. Assigning an employee to manage the CX Readiness tasks from the beginning will help prevent needing to rework a project at the end and make compromises that will affect the Customer Experience.
   
   
2. Support Strategy – Does your product or service require your customers to contact you for assistance? How will your customer’s know where to go for help? How will this be handled? Who will handle it?
   
   
3. Operations – Is your existing infrastructure equipped to handle the desired Customer Experience? Review your staffing needs. Are your phones, websites, and other communication tools up to the task?
   
   
4. Pre Go-Live Tasks–Evaluation – How do you plan on evaluating the delivered Customer Experience against the original desired Customer Experience? Do you have procedures and tools in place to be able to accurately track the success or short comings of the overall Customer Experience?
   1. External/Alpha/Beta/Limited Release – How are you verifying your desired customer experience will match what is actually being delivered before rolling out your product/service to your customer base?
   2. Deliverables – Review customer facing documentation and release communications.
   3. Document known issues in the customer experience – How will you document, track, communicate (internally and externally) and review issues found in the customer experience both pre and post go-live?
   4. Training – is there internal or external training needed?
5. Evaluation – How do you plan on evaluating the delivered Customer Experience against the original desired Customer Experience?  Do you have procedures and tools in place to be able to accurately track the success or short comings of the overall Customer Experience?
   
   
6. Feedback Loop – Your product and/or service has been delivered to your customer base and you have evaluated the effect to the Customer Experience. How do you take this information and roll it into the existing product and/or service offering to improve the Customer Experience? How will you use these findings to roll them into your next offering?

Using this guide as a starting point will help your organization be ready and to succeed at delivering the best possible Customer Experience to your customer base. Keeping CX Readiness in mind during the entire lifecycle of your product or service is crucial to ensuring your customers continue to be evangelists for your organization.