Conversational CX Maturity: The benchmark report
It’s becoming widely accepted that in order for a brand to stand out among their competition, having a unique product or service simply isn’t enough.
Brick and mortar stores have transformed into online shops, banking services are just a tap away, even your wallet is just another app on your phone. When nearly everything has been digitalized, purchasing choices seem to be endless, and there’s an app for everything – how do you get your brand to stand out to your customers and keep them coming back?
The biggest digital challenges businesses face
Interestingly, as digitally advanced as our everyday lives have become, brands still struggle with digital business challenges:
54%
have a hard time engaging with customers
51%
have fragmented tools that are not aligned or synced
50%
have overloaded call centers with long wait times
48%
have trouble organizing data collected from customers
37%
generalize marketing messages and campaigns
32%
do not use digital tools to for sales communications
Digital engagement and conversations are staggered, and data can be overwhelming and unorganized. To top it off, tech stacks tend to be fragmented and out of sync – 23% of brands named tech issues their number one problem with digital interactions.
At the heart of resolving these challenges is Conversational Customer Experience (CX) Maturity. It has risen as a key differentiator between brands that offer stellar digital experiences and are focused on being customer centric, and those that still lag on adopting this game-changing mind set.
This report will examine a survey of 206 business leadership stakeholders from four different industries:
- Retail
- Finance
- Healthcare
- Telcos
We will provide insights on what CX Maturity is, how it is calculated, and why a higher level of maturity can bring about efficient digital interactions and greater business results.
This benchmark report will help brands determine how their digital interactions compare with the industry average and what actions can be taken to improve maturity and gain a competitive advantage.
What is Conversational CX Maturity?
Conversational CX Maturity reflects an organization’s ability to masterfully deliver outstanding conversational customer experiences with precision and consistency.
It’s a powerful framework that enables businesses to evaluate how effectively they understand, design, and optimize every customer interaction across critical touchpoints—whether in marketing, sales, or support.
By continuously refining these interactions, businesses not only meet but consistently exceed customer expectations, driving deeper loyalty, long-term success and greater maturity.
THE QUADRANT
So, how do you measure Conversational CX Maturity?
Conversational CX Maturity is mapped out on a quadrant scale that features two important variables:
- Journey scoring: This consists of a mixture of channels used to communicate with customers as well as what use cases are being automated over these channels
- Sophistication scoring: This analyzes a brand’s approach to integration of tools, platforms and tech used, and communication strategy in marketing and support, and how they analyze data
These factors tell us a lot about a brand’s ability to meet customer expectations, how organized their strategy is, and how advanced their tech stack and integrations are.
The most mature brands will fall in the upper right quadrant, with a highly mature approach to building digital journeys through channels and use cases, and a highly sophisticated approach to integration, software and tech.
The central piece to attaining a high CX Maturity is offering conversational, human-like experiences through automated digital interactions. Thankfully, Conversational Experience as a Service can make it simple. Brands can build meaningful journeys with the right channels and use cases, on a unified tech platform. With the right integration of tools and data, building experiences is made simple and convenient. Think of it as all encompassing tool to build up conversational maturity.
The majority of brands have yet to adopt a unified conversational platform to build experiences, making it harder for them to mature their interactions.
Let’s breakdown the benchmark maturity score of each industry, with a deep dive into what the scores mean, to help you gauge how your brand compares to the competition.
The journey score
Get an inside look at how the average brand builds and designs customer journeys.
Channel usage
How many messaging channels are brands using?
Channel usage plays a major role in a brand’s maturity. A well-developed and tailored journey will take into account what messaging channel is most effective with the audience. In many cases, using various channels in a journey is necessary to give users the best experience. Therefore, brands that have a strong and strategic channel mix of traditional channels like email and SMS as well as digital channels like Instagram, RCS, and WhatsApp will have a higher CX Maturity than the average.
Use cases
Which use cases are automated?
Use case automation is a crucial part in building digital customer journeys because it helps tailor the experience to specific customer needs. But automation varies in complexity depending on the use case:
- Tier one: simple automation, little technical support needed
- Tier two: mild complexity, some technical support needed
- Tier three: most complex, high level of technical support needed
The top five use cases automated by brands are a mix of both simple and complex use cases, suggesting that brands understand the importance of automating use cases even if they require more resources to design and launch.
The sophistication score
Find out how cohesive the tools and systems brands use to build customer interactions are and how they approach measuring communicative success.
Software management
How are brands using tools to better their communication?
Software management looks at the tools and technology brands are using to build interactions with customers. The software and how well it is integrated directly impacts the end-users’ conversational experience. Integrating a CDP and CRM to collect and unify important data, and syncing it with a journey builder or a GenAI chatbot to create personalized experiences enhances maturity.
By leveraging tools like AI and automation, brands can lower the load on live support agents and offer customers consistent and cohesive experiences. The more areas a brand strategically uses this technology, the more mature they are. For example, automating customer support is common, effective, and critical, but a brand that also automates marketing and sales interactions is more conversationally mature.
Support management
How do brands handle customer support and feedback?
Building off software management, communication management looks at how mature a brand’s support system is and how they use and capitalize on collecting feedback from customers through their interactions. Customer support usually makes up the majority of the two-way interactions brands have with customers. Offering fast, efficient, and easy to access customer support is critical to a brand’s maturity. Interestingly, under 30% of brands use a chatbot to handle most repetitive queries, leaving most brands to depend on live agents. This tends to lead to long wait queues, which is a major pain point for customers.
Additionally, how and when brands collect feedback from their support interactions impacts their maturity. A mature brand will ask for feedback after a support conversation has ended on the channel the customer used to resolve their issue – which accounts for 40% of brands on average.
Marketing management
How mature are marketing processes?
Marketing messages hold a lot of potential for brands to initiate conversations with customers, personalize interactions, and gently nudge users from initial interest to conversion. For these interactions to have an impact, brands must have a well-integrated system in place, where customer data can be collected and easily used to build tailored experiences for each customer. If a brand has well integrated tools and systems, they can efficiently manage marketing interactions with little technical support allowing for faster processes. Adding to maturity is how brands use customer data to improve marketing campaigns in the future – the more personalized and engaging the better.
Data management
How do brands measure conversational success?
Data is weaved into each area of conversational maturity. Without data, brands can’t personalize communication or offer better experiences to their customers, but they also cannot measure how effective their conversational experiences are. Brands that spend the time and effort to deep dive into business-related metrics like abandoned cart rates, conversion rates, re-purchase rates etc. will have greater insight into how effective their omnichannel conversational strategies have been.
Also, what actions brands take after analyzing these metrics influences maturity – making improvements to strategies, adjusting personalization, and reorganizing audience segmentation means that a brand understands their data and metrics and how to utilize them for better conversational experiences.
THE INDUSTRY BENCHMARK
CX Maturity benchmarks by industry
Retail, finance, healthcare, and telco brands all approach conversational experiences a little differently – and with reason.
How to improve your Conversational CX Maturity
The first step to improving your CX Maturity is understanding exactly where your brand falls on the CX scale. Getting an accurate scoring will help you properly identify where your brand struggles, where your strengths are, and how to plan a more mature path forward.
Simply adding more channels or adding more customer support use cases to your simple chatbot won’t do much to improve your maturity, as it won’t have a significant impact on your customers’ overall experience and satisfaction with your brand.
Investing in integration, tools, and streamlining processes over a single conversational platform will help your brand mature as it will enable you to have a more stable tech stack, and in turn make it easier to offer more complicated and impactful use cases on a self-serve basis, without the need for agent intervention.
Think you know how mature your interactions are?
Find out with our CX Maturity assessment tool to identify your starting point and receive detailed steps on how to progress to a higher maturity level.
