INSIGHT REPORT

Operationalizing XM
THE SIX COMPETENCIES AND TWENTY SKILLS THAT DEFINE
EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT SUCCESS

By Bruce Temkin, CCXP

Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute

Aimee Lucas, CCXP

Principal XM Catalyst

Isabelle Zdatny, CCXP

XM Catalyst

July 2019


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An ever-increasing flow of information is shifting power from institutions to individuals,

while new technologies are redefining business models and shortening product
lifecycles. To succeed in this environment, organizations need to adopt a new approach
that focuses more on the experiences of human beings throughout their ecosystem.
How? By developing a discipline called Experience Management (XM). This report
introduces this new approach and provides details around:

< The XM Operating Framework, which is built on a combination of competency,

technology, and culture.

< The six XM Competencies—LEAD, REALIZE, ACTIVATE, ENLIGHTEN, RESPOND, and

DISRUPT—that organizations should focus on to improve their XM capabilities.

< The five stages of XM maturity that companies will progress through as they master
the six Competencies: 1) Investigate, 2) Initiate, 3) Mobilize, 4) Scale, and 5) Embed.
This report also includes an XM Competency & Maturity Assessment that
organizations can use to calculate their own maturity levels.

< The XM Diffusion path that companies should follow as they expand their XM efforts
across their entire enterprise.

EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT: COMBINING INTELLIGENCE & HUMANITY

The environment in which organizations operate is changing. The ever-increasing flow of

information is shifting power from institutions to individuals. At the same time, new
technologies are redefining business models and shortening product lifecycles. To compete
in this fast-changing environment, organizations need to build a new set of capabilities, one
that allows them to rapidly deliver on what people really care about – their experiences. We
call this approach Experience Management (XM) and define it as (see Figure 1):

The discipline of using both experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) to
measure and improve the four core experiences of business: customer, employee,
product and brand.

How can you enable this discipline within your organization? By focusing on three areas:

§ Competency. To gain value from XM, organizations need to alter how they operate,
developing new approaches for using insights. This will allow them to deliver highly
targeted experiences to the right audiences. Competencies are the skills and actions
that ultimately establish XM as a discipline. We’ve identified six XM Competencies:
LEAD, REALIZE, ACTIVATE, RESPOND, ENLIGHTEN, and DISRUPT.
§ Technology. To consistently master the competencies at scale, organizations need a
platform that is capable of collecting, analyzing, and distributing insights to the

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relevant people and processes (see Figure 2). This technology empowers everyone to
understand and – more importantly – take action on the insights generated from both
X-data and O-data.
§ Culture. For XM competencies to thrive, companies need to foster an environment
that instills XM-centric mindsets and behaviors in their leaders and employees (see
Figure 3). The culture of an organization can either accelerate or inhibit the spread of
XM competencies. A company’s culture, therefore, is ultimately what is going to allow
XM efforts to gain momentum and ensure that XM practices are happening
consistently across the organization, rather than just in isolated pockets.

XM Will Redefine the Delivery of All Experiences

Historically, organizations treated human beings—from suppliers to employees to partners

to customers—like robots who move mindlessly and emotionlessly from one interaction to
the next. In this new environment, however, companies can no longer afford to overlook
people’s needs and motivations (see Figure 4).

As organizations master XM, they will establish capabilities to continuously learn what people
are thinking and feeling, propagate insights across their ecosystem, and rapidly adapt based
on the most important findings. These new competencies will enable companies to
dramatically improve the four core experiences (see Figure 5):

§ Customer Experience. Companies will be able to thoughtfully tailor experiences for

different customer segments and will rapidly identify and respond to any problems or
opportunities with individual customers or segments. An airline’s X-data may show a
periodic steep decline in customers’ satisfaction with the lost luggage experience, and
their O-data may reveal that this drop tends to happen when two or more international
flights arrive within 20 minutes of each other. The airline could act on this information
by dynamically adjusting its staffing model based on flight schedules. A B2B
manufacturer’s O-data may show that its customers are delaying their renewals,
triggering it to collect X-data, which reveals that a key competitor is more aggressively
discounting products with a specific set of customers.
§ Employee Experience. Companies will know how employees feel about the company
throughout their entire employment lifecycle – from application to resignation. If a
company’s X-data uncovers that its employees are feeling less connected to the
mission of the company, it could then use O-data to discover that the problem lies
mainly with recent hires from a single region who went through a new, abbreviated on-
boarding training. And when the company needs to make decisions about
compensation and benefit options, it can tap into X- and O-data to identify which
combinations will resonate most strongly with different groups of employees.
§ Brand Experience. Companies will understand how different segments of customers
and prospects view their brand and will quickly recognize if there’s a meaningful
change in that perception. Following several highly publicized data breaches in its
industry, a financial services company may collect X-data to monitor how people view
the relative importance of data security updates, and it may view that information
alongside O-data – such as demographic information and account type – to ensure
that its marketing communications are effectively addressing the topics that are most
important to target segments.

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§ Product Experience. Companies will understand which features are most valued by
different customers and will swiftly determine if any product issues are serious
enough to cause significant sales or renewal problems. An electronics manufacturer’s
O-data may reveal a lag in the purchase and adoption of a specific accessory
component to one of its primary pieces of equipment, and X-data may reveal that both
internal teams, like sales and support, and customers are unclear about the
accessory’s benefits or its value proposition. This understanding could lead the
company to develop new internal training programs and external marketing
campaigns.

SIX XM COMPETENCIES AND TWENTY XM SKILLS

XM is not a set of activities that companies can simply add on to their existing to-do list. It is
a discipline, which means that to achieve the most value from their efforts, organizations
must incorporate XM into every facet of their business. How exactly should a company go
about developing its XM capabilities? By building six XM Competencies and 20 XM Skills (see
Figures 6 and 7):

§ Lead. To effectively adopt XM, an organization will need to maintain a systematic

focus on growing its capabilities over multiple years. This competency is about
architecting, aligning, and sustaining successful XM efforts.
§ Realize. For XM efforts to have a lasting positive impact, they must align with the
overall priorities of the organization. This competency is about tracking and ensuring
that XM efforts achieve well-defined business objectives, which often requires a clear
set of XM metrics.
§ Activate. People generally gravitate towards the status quo, so XM efforts must help
overcome this natural inertia. This competency is about making sure that people at
the organization – including employees, leaders, and partners – have the appropriate
skills, support, and motivation to achieve desired XM results.
§ Enlighten. To improve the experiences it delivers, an organization must be capable of
collecting and processing a constant flow of X-data and O-data and then transforming
it into useful information. This competency is about providing actionable insights
across an organization.
§ Respond. Gathering and distributing insights is all well and good, but ultimately, an
organization needs to act on what it learns. This competency is about prioritizing and
driving improvements based on insights.
§ Disrupt. While finding and fixing problems is necessary, it alone is not sufficient for
capturing people’s hearts and minds. This competency is about identifying and
creating experiences that differentiate the organization.

XM Competency: LEAD

The LEAD Competency is about architecting, aligning, and sustaining successful XM efforts.
We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

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§ XM Strategy: To keep their XM activities all aligned, organizations must develop,

share, and maintain a clear vision for their XM efforts. A strong program follows a well-
defined XM strategy that ties to business and brand objectives.
§ XM Roadmap: As XM success requires companies to coordinate across a number of
different teams and projects over a long period of time, firms must develop and track
their progress against a plan with well-defined streams of effort. This roadmap should
identify which experiences, segments, journeys, products, and services the
organization considers the key areas of focus and plans to tackle first.
§ XM Governance: Since XM affects almost the entire organization, it requires
companies to coordinate their efforts across a number of different teams, projects,
and departments. To manage all these activities, companies need to establish and
maintain organizational governance structures that provide the appropriate decision-
making, alignment, accountability, and conflict resolution. A strong governance
structure will, for example, have a member of top management as an executive
sponsor who’s responsible for supporting and advocating for the XM program among
his or her peers.

XM Competency: REALIZE
The REALIZE Competency is about tracking and ensuring that XM efforts achieve well-
defined business objectives. We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

§ Value Planning. Organizations should start their XM journeys with a clear definition
of what they want their efforts to achieve. This involves forecasting the specific
business value of XM efforts and defining how exactly this value will be tracked. One
way companies can predict expected value is by creating a model that shows how
changes in key XM metrics, like NPS, employee engagement, or brand perception, will
deliver desired business results, like improving customer retention, lowering staff
turnover, or reducing cost to serve.
§ Value Delivery. The context in which organizations deliver experiences is constantly
changing – people’s expectations change, competitors change, business strategy
changes – which means companies need to continuously track the value they are
creating and make ongoing adjustments to the experiences. One of the keys to
successful Value Delivery is instituting a regular cadence of examining, and potentially
resetting, business goals.
§ Metrics Management. A strong XM program identifies key metrics using X- and O-
data and then uses those metrics to drive operational priorities. The metrics program
must define realistic targets for its core XM metric as well as all its key driver metrics
based on how they influence desired business outcomes.

XM Competency: ACTIVATE

The ACTIVATE Competency is about equipping the organization with the appropriate skills,
support, and motivation to achieve desired XM results. We’ve defined three XM Skills under
this Competency:

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§ Ecosystem Communications. People are more likely to stay aligned with

transformation efforts when they understand why things are changing, so XM
programs must keep employees and partners informed about the value and progress
of their efforts. To be effective, communications should define key messages and
cascade them through management layers and across teams, reaching all levels of
the organization.
§ Expertise Building. Since XM requires people to learn a new set of behaviors and
practices, organizations will need to build, proliferate, and enhance key XM skills. One
way that companies can build expertise is by using Centers of Excellence, a set of
people who develop and maintain mastery of critical skills, to enhance key XM
capabilities and share best practices across the organization.
§ Role-Based Enablement. Companies must ensure that their employees and partners
have the skills, training, tools, and motivation to successfully adopt XM-centric
behaviors. Since positive reinforcement is key to changing behaviors, organizations
should recognize and celebrate the individuals and teams who demonstrate desired
XM practices.

XM Competency: ENLIGHTEN
The ENLIGHTEN Competency is about providing actionable insights across an organization.
We’ve defined four XM Skills under this Competency:

§ X- and O-Data Integration. Companies can generate actionable insights by

combining O-data – such as segment profiles, product ownership, work history, and
previous interactions – together with X-data in a single system (see Figure 8). Bringing
these disparate data sources together will facilitate the use of advanced analytics and
ultimately yield richer insights.
§ Experience Monitoring. XM programs must identify and capture the appropriate
signals from the appropriate audiences at the appropriate times. One activity that’s
crucial to mastering this skill is oversampling feedback from key customer and
employee segments during interactions where the resulting insights will be most
valuable to the organization.
§ Insights Discovery. XM efforts must constantly analyze X- and O-data to uncover
meaningful insights and identify which actions to prioritize. Companies can generate
deeper, richer insights when they analyze the data by customer and employee
segments and when they blend together quantitative and qualitative feedback.
§ Insights Distribution. XM truly becomes valuable when companies share X- and O-
data insights in the right form, at the right time, and tailored to the people best
equipped to act on the information. This skill includes creating customized alerts and
dashboards that are synchronized to the operational and decision-making cadences
of internal stakeholders.

XM Competency: RESPOND

The RESPOND Competency is about prioritizing and driving improvements based on insights.
We’ve defined four XM Skills under this Competency:

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§ Immediate Response. Any successful XM effort must include the capability to

systematically follow up with people who are affected by an experience – as indicated
by their feedback or discovered through analytics – and fix the problems that are
uncovered. To master this skill, companies should automate and manage a closed-loop
process using tools such as ticket management, status updating, and tracking.
§ Continuous Improvement. Organizations need to make ongoing changes to
operational processes based on a continuous flow of X- and O-data insights. This skill
often includes a well-defined process for diagnosing and prioritizing potential areas of
improvement depending on how they would impact experiences and business results.
§ Strategic Decision-Making. Organizations should use insights from X- and O-data to
make strategic decisions. A good starting point for this skill is to develop XM goals and
targets for the executive team and then thoughtfully cascade those objectives
throughout the rest of the organization.
§ Process Integration. In addition to making decisions based on insights, organizations
should infuse those insights into key operating processes and systems. For instance,
organizations should use employee feedback to tailor the curriculum and content of
their leadership development program.

XM Competency: DISRUPT

The DISRUPT Competency is about identifying and creating experiences that differentiate
the organization. We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

§ Experience Visioning. The foundation of this skill is uncovering opportunities for

disruptive new experiences. One of the ways companies can implement this capability
is by creating journey maps, which will allow them to both understand customer needs
and perceptions and uncover potential opportunities for improvement.
§ Experience Design. Once companies have identified a potential opportunity, they
need to apply human-centric approaches to create or improve that experience. To do
this, organizations should consider involving customers and employees in the design
process through co-creation sessions and ongoing testing.
§ Experience Integration. It’s not enough to just design new experiences. Strong XM
requires organizations to develop the processes, systems, and training that will enable
them to deliver new experiences in a consistent fashion. For example, companies
must keep resources assigned to new experience deployments until they can
conclusively demonstrate that these experiences are creating the desired customer
or employee perceptions.

FIVE STAGES OF XM MATURITY

As organizations build out and master these six XM Competencies, they will evolve through
five stages of maturity (see Figure 9):

• Stage 1: Investigate. The organization is not focused on XM as a strategic

opportunity. Companies in this stage should work on identifying the “best” first steps
and building buy-in with senior executives to acquire the resources needed for moving
forward.

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• Stage 2: Initiate. As leaders see the potential value in XM, they investigate how XM
can help their organization and kick off isolated pockets of XM activities. Companies
in this stage should work on building a broader understanding of and cross-functional
support for the XM strategy. They should also focus on delivering value from their
initial efforts so they can gain the next level of executive and organizational
commitment.
• Stage 3: Mobilize. Once executives view XM as a strategic priority, the organization
taps into full-time XM staff, who distribute insights and drive experience
improvements. Companies in this stage should work on developing XM programs that
drive action and improve pain points. They should also engage employees across the
organization in understanding and demonstrating good XM behaviors.
• Stage 4: Scale. With strong XM Competencies in place, the organization
systematically uses insights to identify and improve experiences and invests in
engaging the entire workforce in XM. Companies in this stage should use advanced
analytics and XM metrics to improve experiences targeted at narrower segments of
people, and design new processes that span multiple lines of business. They should
also reinforce good XM behaviors by deeply integrating XM into their HR processes.
• Stage 5: Embed. In the final stage of maturity, XM Skills are ingrained across the
organization and it is able to rapidly adapt to shifts in the marketplace. Mature XM
programs enable the organization to continuously listen, propagate insights, and
rapidly adapt to the needs and expectations of customers, employees, partners, and
suppliers.

Assessing Your XM Competency and Maturity

To help you gauge your organization’s progress on its XM journey, the Qualtrics XM Institute
has created the XM Competency & Maturity Assessment (see Figure 10). You can use this
tool in a number of different ways:

§ Self-assessments. Take the test yourself and identify your organization’s strengths
and weaknesses across each of the core experiences: CX, EX, PX, and BX. Just replace
“XM” with the specific experience you want to evaluate. You can also use the
evaluation for different departments or business units.
§ Group discussions. Have multiple people complete the self-assessment and then
review the results as a group. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses you’ve identified
as well as which areas you all agree on and which you disagree on.
§ Action planning. Develop plans for making progress towards mastering XM. You can
do this in one core experience or across multiple experiences.
§ Progress tracking. Repeat the self-test every six to 12 months to track your progress
and identify your key areas of focus. The goal is to drive an ongoing discussion and
continue prioritizing XM efforts.

THE XM DIFFUSION PATH

While it is no doubt essential that organizations increase their maturity across the XM
Competencies, for XM to truly flourish inside a company, it must also apply the XM discipline

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to an increasingly broad array of experiences. This process, which we call “XM Diffusion,” will
often spread across an organization in the following order:
§ Step 1: Isolated Experiences: Organizations will start practicing XM in one use case
or across a few tightly related use cases. For example, a company may kick off its XM
efforts by taking action based on the results of a relationship NPS survey and a
contact center post-transaction survey or by conducting an annual engagement study
and a quarterly employee pulse survey.
§ Step 2: Expanded Experiences. After building some XM maturity and seeing the
value in the initial use cases, organizations will expand into other similar areas or
enhance their existing capabilities. For instance, based on the results of its initial NPS
and post-transaction surveys, a company may increase the number of its listening
posts and add more advanced capabilities, such as text and predictive analytics.
§ Step 3: Adjacent Experiences. Once there are several use cases underway,
organizations will find that there are elements of other experiences that impact the
success of those use cases, so they will incorporate those experiences into their XM
program. After expanding XM across multiple CX use cases, for instance, companies
often recognize that they need to incorporate EX activities into those efforts to
achieve their CX goals. Or efforts might start with EX and then expand into BX after
the company recognizes that brand perception is a critical obstacle to attracting new
talent.
§ Step 4: Extended Experiences. Once organizations have applied XM to the major
experience areas (CX, EX, BX, and PX), they will look to apply XM to every new
experience they are creating, whether it’s redesigning their parking lot or rolling out a
new community fundraising event. They’ll also start to focus on experiences that are
outside of their control but within their sphere of influence, such as the EX delivered
by recruiting partners or the CX delivered by distributors.

Four Productive Zones of XM Progress

Companies’ XM efforts have the potential to falter if they over-invest in maturing only a few
isolated experiences or if they spread their XM resources too thin across too many different
experiences. Organizations should therefore focus on maturing and diffusing their XM efforts
in tandem. When done correctly, companies will flow through four productive zones of XM
progress (see Figure 11):

§ Zone 1: Establishing XM. When an organization has a low level of XM maturity, it

should focus on Isolated or Expanded experience use cases. In this zone, a company
needs to focus on establishing a strong set of core XM Competencies upon which it
can build.
§ Zone 2: Capitalizing on XM. After it’s established a set of basic capabilities, the
organization should widen the scope of its XM efforts to encompass Adjacent
experiences while also building the skills necessary to reach the Mobilize stage of
maturity. In this zone, a company will start to see significant value—such as increased
customer loyalty, lower employee turnover, higher product retention rates, and
improved brand perceptions—from their XM efforts.

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§ Zone 3: Competing on XM. Once an organization hits the Scale level of maturity
across Adjacent experiences, the value created by its XM efforts will start to
accelerate and delivering high-quality experiences will be a key piece of its value
proposition. In this zone, nearly every aspect of a company’s operations is successful
at continuously learning, propagating insights, and rapidly adapting.
§ Zone 4: Differentiating through XM. When an organization reaches the highest level
of XM maturity across most of its experiences, it will be capable of delivering highly
tailored experiences to numerous different audiences. Additionally, because it is so
efficient at incorporating insights into its processes, it will be able to make decisions
too quickly for competitors to keep up.

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Figure 1

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Figure 2

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Figure 3

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Understanding Human Beings And Their Experiences

Six Key Attributes of Human Beings

These six characteristics of human beings need to be factored
into how you design and deploy experiences.

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL
Desire to make Remember experiences
connections with based on how they
other people made them feel

MOTIVATED INTUITIVE
Look for HUMAN Make most
opportunities to BEINGS decisions based on
satisfy intrinsic needs mental shortcuts

HOPEFUL SELF-CENTERED
Flourish when they View the world from
envision a positive future their own perspective

The Human Experience Cycle

This is a simplified view of how human beings process experiences:

Experience
EXPERIENCE

Perceptions
PERCEPTIONS Attitudes
ATTITUDES Behaviors
BEHAVIORS

E
Expectations
XPECTATIONS

§ Expectations: What people expect from an experience influences how they view it.
§ Perceptions: People subconsciously evaluate experiences based on three dimensions:
Success (can they accomplish their goal), Effort (how easy or hard is it for them), and
Emotion (how it makes them feel).
§ Attitudes: People form somewhat persistent viewpoints about an organization, such as
their likelihood to recommend.
§ Behaviors: People make decisions that lead them into new experiences.

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Figure 4

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Applying The Discipline Of XM Across Experiences

Examples of how organizations can apply the discipline of Experience

Management (XM) across the four core experiences:

Continuously Learn Propagate Insights Rapidly Adapt

Identify which Provide front-line teams, Improve a problematic

Customer experiences are driving customer success experience that is
customer loyalty or organizations, and affecting key customers
Experience
disloyalty by customer leaders with customized before many of them
(CX) segment and how these alerts about unhappy actually run into any
trends shift over time customers issues

Provide managers with a Change the benefits

Identify which parts of
scorecard of their package based on
Employee the employee lifecycle
employee-engagement conjoint analysis before
are driving employee
Experience scores along with discontent with existing
engagement and
(EX) customized plan causes retention
retention and how this
improvement problems with key
trend shifts over time
recommendations employees

Provide product
Identify which Establish an agile
managers with a list of
customers are process for continually
Product new features that’s
repurchasing or implementing new
prioritized based on
Experience renewing products, why features and
which ones will drive
(PX) they are making those improvements based on
new sales or renewals
decisions, and how this customer insights and
with target customer
trend shifts over time their impact on revenue
segments

Identify which parts of Provide leadership team Adjust external

Brand the marketing messages with early warning of messaging to amplify
are driving brand change in brand the advantages over the
Experience
preference with which perception after perceived flaws in
(BX) audiences and how this competitor launches competitor's new
trend shifts over time new product offering

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Six XM Competencies Translate Into 20 XM Skills

6 XM
20 XM Skills
Competencies
XM Strategy: Develop and maintain a clear and shared vision for XM efforts.
XM Program Roadmap: Develop and track progress against a plan with well-defined streams
LEAD of effort.
XM Governance: Establish and maintain organizational structures that provide appropriate
decision-making, alignment, accountability, and conflict resolution.

Value Planning: Forecast the specific business value of XM efforts and define how it will be tracked.
Value Delivery: Track the value being created by XM efforts and make adjustments to
REALIZE ensure success.
Metrics Management: Identify metrics using experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-
data) and then use those metrics to drive operational priorities.

Ecosystem Communications: Keep employees and partners informed about the value and
progress of XM efforts.
Expertise Building: Create organizational mechanisms to build, proliferate, and enhance key
ACTIVATE
XM skills across the organization.
Role-Based Enablement: Ensure that employees and partners have the skills, training, tools, and
motivation to adopt XM-centric behaviors.

X- & O-Data Integration: Combine X-data and O-data in order to generate more actionable
insights.
Experience Monitoring: Identify and capture appropriate signals from the appropriate audiences
at the appropriate times.
ENLIGHTEN
Insights Discovery: Analyze X- and O-data to uncover meaningful insights and identify which
actions to prioritize.
Insights Distribution: Distribute insights in the right form at the right time and tailored to the people
best equipped take action on them.

Immediate Response: Systematically follow up with people who are affected by an experience,
as indicated by their feedback or insights, and fix problems that are uncovered.
Continuous Improvement: Make changes to operational processes based on ongoing X- and O-
RESPOND data insights.
Strategic Decision-Making: Use insights from X- and O-data to make strategic decisions.
Process Integration: Infuse X- and O-data insights into key operating processes and systems.

Experience Visioning: Uncover opportunities for disruptive new experiences.

Experience Design: Apply human-centric approaches to the creation or improvement
DISRUPT of experiences.
Experience Integration: Develop the processes, systems, and training to enable the organization
to deliver new experiences in a consistent fashion.

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XM Competencies, XM Skills, and XM Actions

XM Competencies and XM Skills apply across all experiences, but each experience may
have a different set of actions required to deliver on those Skills (see example):

XM COMPETENCY
XM SKILLS

X- & O-Data Experience Insights Insights

Integration Monitoring Discovery Distribution

XM Skills may
require different actions
across experiences

XM ACTIONS

Experience Monitoring/ Experience Monitoring/

Sample Customer Experience Actions
1. Applies robust market research
approaches to survey design and
feedback collection
2. Oversamples feedback from customer
segments and interactions where the
resulting insights will be most valuable
to the organization
3. Adjusts portfolio and design of listening
posts based on latest findings and
organizational priorities
4. Collects unsolicited and unstructured
customer feedback (e.g. social media,
contact centers) along with customer
behavioral data when it’s available
5. Uses a variety of survey types –
transactional, relationship, journey, and
ad hoc – to fully monitor the customer
experience
Sample Employee Experience Actions
1. Applies robust market research
approaches for survey design and
feedback collection
2. Has a combination of always-on
listening and point-in-time employee
surveys
3. Listening is context-aware when it
comes to both employee lifecycle
moments and location/format of
listening post
4. Adjusts portfolio and design of listening
posts based on latest findings and
organizational priorities
5. Combines solicited feedback with
unsolicited feedback (e.g. internal or
external social platforms) as well as
with behavioral data where possible

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Six Categories Of X- & O-Data Use Cases

Category CX Example EX Example

X Why O-data uncovers that customers are
O-data uncovers that employee
Find something delaying their renewals, and we find
attrition has jumped in the engineering
happening in O-data from the X-data that they are having a
department, and X-data explains that
and look for an problem with our new pricing model
engineers are losing faith in the product
explanation in the X- since a key competitor has just
roadmap.
data introduced streamlined pricing.

X-data uncovers that customers are

O Drivers periodically very unhappy with the lost
X-data uncovers that employees are
Find something feeling less connected with the mission
luggage experience, and we find from
happening in X-data O-data that it tends to happen when of the company, and O-data shows that
and look for the problem is mainly with new
we have two or more international
operational conditions employees in one region who went
flights showing up in the morning and
that are causing the through a new abbreviated on-boarding
the luggage office has less than three
situation training.
people on the shift.

We use a combination of O-data, like

X&O Predict We use a combination of O-data, like
job categories, tenure, and past
Build segmentation product ownership and service
attrition rates, and X-data, like
models based on a contacts, and X-data, like NPS, to employee engagement scores, to
combination of X&O predict loyalty across the organization
predict future attrition at the employee
data and forecast future business results.
level.

X&O Personalize If a valuable customer (O-data) has Company provides individualized

Adjust how you treat shown negative trend in attitude (X- training for retail employees based on
people based on a data), we route their call to a higher O-data, like product sales in the store,
combination of X&O skilled agent who do not use typical and X-data, like feedback from both
data upsell scripts customers and employees.

X&O Alert CEO sets up an alert to receive CHRO sets up an alert to receive
Send alerts and other customized account information customized report whenever there’s a
information to people whenever there’s negative feedback negative comment on external
across the ecosystem (X-data) from one of the top 100 websites (X-data) from someone in one
based on a accounts that is up for renewal (O- of the regions that has considerably
combination of X&O data). above average turnover rates (O-Data).
data

X&O Value We calculate the value of improving the

We calculate the value of improving a
Measure the value of onboarding experience by measuring
portion of the support experience by
improving experiences the degree to which new employees
measuring the degree to which who are more satisfied with the
by examining the customers who are more satisfied with
impact that those experience (X-data) end up with higher
the experience (X-data) purchase more
changes have on performance results and longer tenure
products in the future (O-data).
business metrics (O-data).

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XM Competency & Maturity Assessment

To what degree has your organization widely adopted these skills (“1” to “5”)?
1: Missing: Demonstrates almost none of the required behaviors at an effective level
2: Emerging: Demonstrates a small amount of the required behaviors at an effective level
3: Developing: Demonstrates many of the required behaviors at an effective level
4: Established: Demonstrates almost all of the required behaviors at an effective level
5: Ingrained: Demonstrates all of the required behaviors at a very effective level
1. Develops and maintains a clear and shared vision for XM efforts.
2. Develops and tracks progress against a plan with well-defined streams of effort.
3. Establishes and maintains organizational structures that provide appropriate decision-making,
alignment, accountability, and conflict resolution.
LEAD average
4. Forecasts the specific business value of XM efforts and defines how that value will be tracked.
5. Tracks the value being created by XM efforts and makes adjustments to ensure success.
6. Identifies metrics using experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) and then uses those
metrics to drive operational priorities.
REALIZE average
7. Keeps employees and partners informed about the value and progress of XM efforts.
8. Creates organizational mechanisms to build, proliferate, and enhance key XM skills across the
organization.
9. Ensures that employees and partners have the skills, training, tools, and motivation to adopt XM-centric
behaviors.
ACTIVATE average
10. Combines X-data and O-data in order to generate more actionable insights.
11. Identifies and captures appropriate signals from the appropriate audiences at the appropriate times.

12. Analyzes X- and O-data to uncover meaningful insights and identifies which actions to prioritize.
13. Distributes insights in the right form at the right time and tailored to the people best equipped to take
action on them.
ENLIGHTEN average
14. Systematically follows up with people who are affected by an experience – as indicated by their
feedback or insights – and fixes problems that are uncovered.
15. Makes changes to operational processes based on ongoing X- and O-data insights.
16. Uses insights from X- and O-data to make strategic decisions.
17. Infuses X- and O-data insights into key operating processes and systems.
RESPOND average
18. Uncovers opportunities for disruptive new experiences.
19. Applies human-centric approaches to the creation or improvement of experiences.
20. Develops the processes, systems, and training to enable the organization to deliver new experiences in
a consistent fashion.
Evaluate the results: DISRUPT average
OVERALL total
XM Competencies (average scores) Maturity Stage (overall total)
Less than 2.60: Very Weak 6 to 14: Stage 1: Investigate
2.60 to 3.29: Weak 15 to 18: Stage 2: Initiate
3.30 to 3.89: Adequate 19 to 22: Stage 3: Mobilize
3.90 to 4.49: Strong 23 to 26: Stage 4: Scale
4.50 to 5.00: Very Strong 27 to 30: Stage 5: Embed

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