Executive Summary
In today’s B2B landscape, where lengthy sales cycles and multiple stakeholders are the norm, delivering a differentiated and scalable customer experience (CX) is crucial for success. This article introduces a new framework designed to automate and scale the customer journey while ensuring a consistently exceptional CX.
By adopting this new framework, B2B companies can optimize both the customer journey and experience, positioning themselves to retain clients, earn referrals, and drive sustainable growth. This approach ensures that as companies scale, they continue to deliver the high-quality experiences that set them apart in the marketplace.
Table of Contents
A
mid-sized mortgage company faced significant challenges in its sales and approval process. The company offered a variety of mortgage products, including conventional, FHA, VA, and jumbo loans. The process of approving these mortgages was complex and involved multiple steps, extensive documentation, and coordination among various departments such as lending, underwriting, compliance, and settlement. While the company built its reputation on exceptional service, it found that its customer experience was not keeping pace with the increasingly higher expectations of its clients as it grew.
The approval process took an average of 45 days and resulted in customer dissatisfaction and lost opportunities. Manual data entry and documentation errors led to delays and increased the regulatory risk of non-compliance. Customers experienced inconsistent communication and updates throughout the approval process. Employees spent significant time on repetitive tasks and relied on heroic personal interactions to offset process shortcomings, which reduced their capacity to focus on differentiating customer services and more impactful tasks.
The company was encountering significant challenges typical of growth-minded firms with complex, high-touch sales cycles. It aimed to preserve its hard-earned reputation for exceptional service—a key brand differentiator—while achieving economies of scale for greater efficiency and cost reduction. However, despite its best efforts, the growing pains were becoming unavoidable, and maintaining the status quo was no longer viable. To continue thriving in an increasingly competitive market, the company needed to rethink its approach to both operational efficiency and customer experience. A new framework was necessary to refine its processes and identify the customer journey stages where experience was inferior.
A new framework was necessary to refine its processes and identify the customer journey stages where experience was inferior.
The Important Difference Between Automating the Customer Journey and Scaling Customer Experience
While the customer journey outlines the touchpoints a customer encounters—marketing campaigns, sales interactions, website visits, and customer support, the customer experience refers to the overall perception and feelings a customer has about their interactions with a company throughout this journey. CX is shaped by every interaction, whether it’s the quality of service, ease of use, or the emotional responses elicited during these engagements. Understanding the difference between the customer journey and customer experience is crucial for sustainable growth. As companies scale, the complexity of managing customer interactions increases, making it vital to not only map out the customer journey but also ensure that each stage delivers a positive and consistent experience.
Why You Should Care about Scaling Customer Experience: Understanding the Customer Journey and the Role of Customer Experience
For B2B companies with lengthy sales cycles that involve multiple stakeholders, the quality of the customer experience is critical to success. Understanding the distinction between customer journey and customer experience allows B2B firms to focus not just on guiding prospects through the sales process but on ensuring that each interaction strengthens the relationship and builds trust.
This distinction is particularly relevant in identifying and addressing pain points within the customer journey. By homing in on specific touchpoints where the customer experience may fall short, companies can make targeted improvements that lead to higher conversion rates, better client retention, and stronger loyalty.
In a competitive B2B environment, optimizing and scaling customer experience can be a key differentiator.
A recent McKinsey analysis shows that companies that are leaders of CX achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021. In addition, the study found that successful experience-led growth strategies can deliver a range of significant financial benefits. In particular, they can increase cross-sell rates by 15 to 25 percent, boost companies’ share of wallet by 5 to 10 percent, and improve customer satisfaction and engagement by 20 to 30 percent.
Moreover, as B2B companies grow, they must manage the scalability of both the customer journey and the customer experience. A well-mapped journey coupled with a consistently positive experience at each stage ensures that companies can expand without compromising the quality of service that sets them apart.
However, mapping and automating the customer journey does not ensure the desired results. Scalable, sustainable, and distinctive customer experiences are marked by:
Consistency and Reliability
• Availability
• Reduced Human Error
Efficiency and Scalability
• Scalability of Operations
• Faster Response Times
Customer Engagement
• Proactive Engagement
• Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities
A recent McKinsey analysis shows that companies that are leaders of CX achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021.
Companies that excel in optimizing both the customer journey and customer experience are better positioned to retain clients, earn referrals, and drive sustainable growth.
As B2B companies grow, the complexity of managing the customer journey and scaling customer experience can become overwhelming. Automating the customer journey will streamline your processes, reduce manual effort, and drive consistency across touchpoints. However, automation is not a panacea on its own.
Automation tools can tailor content, offers, and communication to the customer journey. CRM systems can manage follow-ups, track interactions, and provide sales teams with insights into customer behavior to help them engage prospects more effectively. Automated systems can send follow-up emails, surveys, and support resources after purchase to ensure that customers continue to feel supported throughout their journey. These are great things to achieve scale, but they are not enough to ensure a differentiated customer experience.
Common Pitfalls in Automating the Customer Journey and Scaling Customer Experience
While automation offers significant benefits, many companies struggle to implement it effectively when scaling the customer experience. Automation can help B2B firms scale and maintain high service quality, but to reap its rewards, companies must avoid common pitfalls that can hinder strong customer relationships and sustainable growth. Common mistakes include:
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1. Over-Automation
Companies often try to automate too much, stripping away the human element that is essential in B2B relationships. Over-automation can lead to a lack of personalization and make interactions feel robotic or impersonal. Automation must be balanced with human interaction, especially in stages of the journey where personal touch is crucial, such as complex sales discussions or high-level customer support.
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2. Lack of Integration
When automation tools are not properly integrated across different stages of the customer journey, it can result in disjointed experiences. For example, if the marketing automation platform doesn't sync with the CRM, sales teams may miss out on critical context about a prospect's interactions. All automation tools must be integrated so data flows seamlessly between systems and provides a unified view of the customer journey.
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3. Ignoring the Human Element in CX
Automation can improve efficiency, but it can also create a disconnect if it fails to consider the emotional and relational aspects of customer experience. Automated responses that lack empathy or fail to resolve complex issues can frustrate customers. Automation must enhance, not replace, human interaction.
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4. Failing to Adapt Automation to Different Journey Stages
Applying a one-size-fits-all automation strategy across all stages of the customer journey can lead to ineffective or even detrimental outcomes. Each stage of the journey may require different levels of automation or different types of automated interactions to meet the specific needs and expectations of each stage in the customer journey.
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5. Neglecting Continuous Optimization
Often, companies fail to monitor and optimize automated systems. As customer needs evolve, static automation workflows can become outdated and less effective. Adjusting automated processes based on customer feedback, performance metrics, and changing market conditions is critical to ensure they remain relevant and effective.
The Hurdles to Achieving Scale
When we work with growing organizations trying to automate customer journeys and maintain differentiated customer experiences, we find similar issues holding them back:
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1. Inefficient processes
Bottlenecks halt growth and friction points create higher overhead costs and diminished marketing ROI.
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2. Lack of visibility
Limited resources mean that manpower spent on identifying inefficiencies and improvement opportunities are ironically routed to other parts of the organization.
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3. Improper technology
Inadequate and/or misused technology is exacerbating bottlenecks and inefficiencies, stunting the ability to scale with demand.
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4. Lack of standardization
Inconsistent processes and no standardization lead to lower rates of customer satisfaction and decreased productivity.
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5. Communication issues
Outdated and human-reliant processes strain channels of communication internally and externally, leading to delays.
Achieving CX scale—and its financial benefits—requires a structured approach that improves the current state before investing more in diminishing returns.
Through applied learning across 200+ clients, observing current trends, and evaluating emerging technologies, we’ve developed a framework that systematically evaluates each stage of the customer’s journey and the key elements that shape, drive, and differentiate CX—one-to-one and at scale.
The Operational Maturity and Experience Framework:
A Systematic Approach to Delivering Differentiated Customer Experience at Scale
Automating the customer journey is more challenging and meaningful than other business process automation because CX drives a critical cross-functional collaboration that allows each department to understand its impact on experience along the customer journey. So, the entire organization can work together to reduce friction across the whole value stream and customer journey.
Our simple, yet powerful, framework, called the Operational Maturity and Experience Framework (OMEF), enables organizations to objectively assess the health of Customer Experience (customer perception and feelings) and Operational Maturity (ability to scale customer experience) across the whole value stream. You can see where friction lives in your value stream, where inefficiencies bog you down, and where you should prioritize improvements.
The OMEF provides a blueprint for systematically enhancing customer experience at every phase of a scaled customer journey. It dissects and elevates the core aspects of customer interactions. This approach improves customer touchpoints and enables businesses to consistently deliver outstanding experiences that meet evolving customer expectations.
Our framework calculates an operational maturity score, a snapshot of how efficient, standardized, and adaptable the processes & workflows are at each buying stage. The more effective an organization is in these areas, the higher the operational maturity score. Low scores indicate more manual inputs and/or ineffective processes and highlight opportunities to increase operational efficiency.
Stages: Building Commitment Along The Buyer’s Journey
Across the X-axis, we outline the stages of the buyer’s journey. We categorize the buyer’s journey for any organization into 5 Stages: Awareness, Consideration, Purchasing, Retention, and Advocacy.
There are many buyer journey models, but we chose these stages because they:
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Are clearly defined by separate and distinct goals for both the buyer and cross-functional goals within an organization.
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Delineate escalating buyer “commitment” points to the organization/product/service.
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Apply to both B2B and B2C organizations. While both B2C and B2B customer journeys involve understanding and meeting customer needs, B2B journeys are typically more complex, involve multiple stakeholders, and require a higher degree of personalization and strategic engagement compared to B2C.
While looking at the customer experience of many organizations over the past decade, we have found one simple truth. Every prospect/customer commits multiple times and to differing degrees to an organization throughout the buying journey. Each stage reflects critical milestones of increasing commitment that impact other stages, not only for a given customer but others to whom he/she may advocate for your product, service, or company. This also impacts how an organization should shape and drive each component because each stage has specific buyer goals, success measures, and friction points.
Understanding and Meeting Customer Needs at Every Step
Awareness
The goal is to get the attention of your ideal potential customer and to propel as many of them as possible into the next stage - Consideration.
Consideration
The goal is to educate, inform, and provide a clear path for your customers to purchase. Efficient and effective processes should filter out any leads that are not a good fit and retain the attention of those who are. In this stage, it is critical to communicate your value propositions, have proper positioning of your solutions and/or products, and differentiate your organization from competitors.
Purchasing
The goal is to provide as frictionless an experience as possible for people to purchase, ensuring a seamless handoff and smooth fulfillment process.
Retention
The goal is to deliver on all expectations set in the previous stages and drive value to continually increase Average Lifetime Value (ALTV).
Advocacy
The goal is to activate a customer or prospect (READ: Buyer Commitment's Role in CX Process Design) network that drives a consistent stream of ideal clients via referrals. Advocacy, if done right, reduces your organization's reliance on greater marketing budgets to drive the same results.
Awareness
The goal is to get the attention of your ideal potential customer and to propel as many of them into the next stage
Consideration
The goal is to educate, inform, and provide a clear path for your customers to purchase. Efficient and effective processes should weed out any leads that are not a good fit and keep the attention of those who are. In this stage, it is critical to communicate your value propositions clearly, have proper positioning of your solutions and/or products, and differentiate from competitors.
Purchasing
The goal is to provide as frictionless an experience as possible for people to purchase, and have a seamless handoff and smooth fulfillment process.
Retention
The goal is to deliver on all expectations set in the previous stages and drive value to continually increase Average Lifetime Value (ALTV).
Advocacy
The goal is to activate a customer or prospect (READ: Buyer Commitment's Role in CX Process Design) network that drives a consistent stream of ideal clients via referrals. Advocacy, if done right, reduces your organization's reliance on greater marketing budgets to drive the same results.
Components: Building Blocks That Shape, Drive, and Differentiate Customer Experience
Down the Y-axis, we have identified 5 key Components. Each Stage of the customer journey is composed of the same fundamental Components: Foundations, Structures, Tools, Methods, and Experience.
These are the building blocks that shape, drive, and scale customer experience in high-performing companies. The components play a part in the overall maturity and degree of friction at any given Stage. Each Component also contributes to the overall maturity and performance at any stage. Assessing both stages and components together, enables us to rate the current state of customer experience and operational maturity and prescribe initiatives to improve the performance of both.
Experience: The Result of Delivering Differentiated Service
Experience is a slightly different component from the rest. It is impacted by each one of the other components directly or indirectly. It also informs the other components.
A metaphor is useful at this point.
The emotion one feels in the Chartres Cathedral, Taj Mahal, Fallingwater, or the Guggenheim Museum isn’t about the blueprints, materials, construction methods, or tools. It’s the result of these combined elements creating art. Similarly, components are not customer experience; they are the elements that create it.
Experience reflects the goals of a particular stage of the customer experience. Without setting and measuring them, your organization will have disjointed, weak, and tough-to-scale systems & processes.
Like Methods, which we will get to next, Experience goals are a moving target. One day you might be hitting all of the goals in a stage and within a year be failing to deliver on one or many of these goals. Entropic forces degrade your organizational performance of these goals. So, a culture of continuous improvement must be in place to make sure that the “Methods” used to improve are systematically and regularly applied.
Foundations: The Building Blocks of Differentiation
Foundations are the core strategies, approaches, and processes that ensure the integrity of all other components. They significantly impact the ability to achieve experience goals at any stage and are essential for operational maturity.
Foundations guide the appropriate Structures, Tools, and Methods at each stage of the customer experience. Without clear and well-defined Foundations, you risk creating fragile and inflexible customer experiences that require excessive human intervention and are unable to adapt over time.
Example: Awareness Stage
In the Awareness Stage, the goal is to capture attention and establish a connection with prospects to guide them into the Consideration Stage. Key Foundations for this stage include:
- Qualification criteria
- Buyer personas and profiles
- Clear and detailed marketing strategy and go-to-market (GTM) plans
- Clear marketing goals
- Clear problem-/solution matrix
Organizations lacking strong Foundations in any buyer journey stage often rely on assumptions and subjectivity in decision-making. This approach can lead to inconsistent results and sub-optimal marketing performance.
Without clear goals, initiatives may not align, leading to contradictions and inefficiencies. Even with some Foundations in place, if they are based on assumptions rather than proper planning, there is a high level of uncertainty. This can result in inconsistent outcomes, bottlenecks, and frequent need for manual intervention.
Weak Foundations lead to a weak customer experience, with higher friction and inefficiency at every stage.
Structures: The Visible Difference
Structures are the processes and workflows that shape the Experience of a stage.
Using our metaphor, Structures are the walls, fixtures, windows, layout, etc. They are the outward and tangible things that someone experiences. Structures are what the prospect/customer sees and experiences and what is taken at face value. Independently, these Structures do not achieve the goals set out in a stage, but together they create the overall experience.
Without a strong Foundation on which to build, a Structure’s integrity is weakened. For example, if no clear Experience goals are set, you will have a Structure with an illogical and haphazard layout –rooms painted with incongruent colors and themes, or misshaped windows.
Tools: Implements to Deliver Differentiation
Tools are a fairly straightforward component. They are the pieces of software, job aides, manuals, etc. used to automate customer journeys and facilitate customer experience at any given stage.
Without the appropriate Tools to build the Structures envisioned in their complete and most optimized form, you’ll end up with Structures that are subpar. Without the proper Tools, you’re unable to install the proper windows or paint walls the color you’ve chosen. This indirectly impacts the overall customer experience at a given stage and also directly affects the operational maturity of an organization.
Methods: The Operating Discipline of Differentiation
Methods are the strategies and approaches used to make sure that continuous improvement of Structures is happening most effectively. One of the biggest mistakes we see in organizations when setting up processes and workflows, aside from making assumptions about the customer experience, is that they are “one-and-done” efforts.
Methods are important in future-proofing your business and in making sure that your organization is changing where it needs to as consumer needs, wants, and expectations change. Without the proper Methods to improve the Structures when something falls apart, you pull out your electrical tape to fix a plumbing leak, patch walls but never repaint them, or put a rug over broken tiles.
If key structural pieces are missing from any stage, we weaken the integrity of the overall Experience. Structures are deeply rooted in the Foundations of a level, they are products of the Tools that are used to build them and they are strengthened by the Methods that you employ to improve them or weakened over time if you fail to use the right “Methods” or fail to prioritize any appropriate Methods altogether.
Case Study
Let’s look at the OMEF scorecard for our mid-sized mortgage company mentioned earlier.
Each box’s number reflects the strength ( 5 = High, 1 = Low) of each component at that stage. Green boxes reflect strengths. Red and yellow boxes represent relative weaknesses and priority areas. We can see that the organization has some clear strengths and weaknesses in its value chain. The firm’s operational maturity scores are strong in the Purchasing and Retention stages. However, there are significant inefficiencies and friction in Awareness and Advocacy. Consideration falls in the middle.
Before we dig into detail on each stage, let’s highlight key takeaways:
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Marketing efforts have much room for optimization and there is a wealth of marketing ROI to recapture.
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Unclear positioning and messaging are detracting prospects from entering the Purchasing stage.
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Sales pipeline processes are in excellent shape. They are the most streamlined and standardized across the organization, but are at risk of deteriorating without a focus on continuous improvement.
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Customer retention is fair, but there is great potential to increase ALTV and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) across the board.
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No attempt has been made to activate referral channels and this stage offers a wealth of opportunity to capitalize on that.
Overall, it’s clear that additional operational improvement efforts in Purchasing or Retention will not be money well spent. While there are operational efficiencies to be achieved in these areas, they should not be prioritized given other area scores.
The glaring areas for operational improvement are in Awareness and Consideration because the greatest buying friction lies in these stages. Ideal clients are likely to drop out before they become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Those who are not Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are likely to waste sales resources making it into the Purchasing Stage at unacceptable rates.
If we were to prioritize initiatives by Stages, it would be in the following order: Awareness, Consideration, Advocacy, Retention, and Purchasing.
Let’s examine the Component scores in detail for each Stage.
Where and how should the company prioritize its improvement efforts to deliver a differentiated customer experience and lay the foundation to scale profitable growth?
Awareness: An Opportunity for Greater Marketing ROI
In Awareness, we determined that the firm had invested in strong Tools, including HubSpot, Agorapulse, and ManyChat. We determined that for this industry, these are leading tools, amongst others in their stack, that would allow them to streamline marketing processes and practices while at the same time being able to deliver segmented and personalized prospect experiences.
However, they were underutilized because of the missing components in other parts of this stage that would allow them to achieve greater operational efficiencies and experience overall.
Experience
During our assessment of this stage we realized that this firm had no clearly defined goals for their marketing campaigns when it came to prospect experience. Ultimately, this is the trickle-down result of things that are lacking in Foundations, Structure, and Methods. Without clear goals, it only made sense that we found the organization to have marketing campaigns with diminishing returns over the past year, with larger marketing spend.
Foundations
This firm lacked the proper Foundations to define and reach customer experience and operational efficiency goals. There was either a lack of, or outdated foundational pieces such as buyer personas, GTM strategies, segmentation criteria, and market research conducted before launching campaigns. It only makes sense that the other Components are weak.
Structures
Without the proper foundational pieces in place for this stage, it’s nearly impossible to craft and execute structural processes and workflows that effectively propel prospects into the next stage. While they did have Structures in place, such as A/B testing, lead capture, and retargeting, the Foundations on which they were built made them ineffective. For example, without solid buyer personas, it’s hard to make informed decisions on how to best A/B test or who should be retargeted. Before we prescribe any changes to the Structures here, we need to take a step back and reinforce Foundations.
Methods
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this firm scored low in this area. While they do have some Methods in place like marketing analytics tracking, content performance reviews, and A/B testing protocols, they are rendered fairly ineffective when it’s unclear what they are trying to improve. Methods are a reliable gauge of a department’s continuous improvement efforts. This score is an indicator that Foundations in their marketing department is lacking and that strategy should be revisited.
Consideration: A Need for Clarity and Direction
The firm’s Consideration Stage had an overall acceptable operational maturity score and was not leadership’s top priority. There is room for improvement here, however, Awareness should be prioritized first.
The firm could improve Experience in this Stage. Stakeholder interviews and a content audit summed up the overall customer sentiment as… “confused.” There was no clear differentiating language on their website, marketing assets, or communication developed for this stage that set them apart from the competition. Also, the lack of proper segmentation in the previous stage shows up here. We see that an overestimation of MQLs causes a steep dropoff when converting to SQLs.
Foundations
Since the firm isn’t clear on its segmentation strategy, it’s not able to create content or develop educational strategies that are truly effective at nurturing leads into the sales process.
While the firm can invest in better Tools to achieve its customer experience goals and build the proper Foundations for this stage, those efforts would not produce the strongest returns. Without addressing the deficiencies in both Foundations and Experience Components, it is unlikely that efforts to bolster Structures or implement better Methods will have much of a payoff.
Purchasing: The Operational Brightspot with Risks
The firm’s Purchasing Stage had both the highest operational maturity and Experience scores. Improvement efforts in this stage should be focused on risk mitigation. What risks? The natural deterioration in operational efficiency and customer experience. We flagged these in particular because of the lackluster Methods and lack of a culture of continuous improvement in the sales department. We regularly see similar positive Maturity and Experience scores when a department approaches systems, processes, and workflows with a “set it and forget it” attitude. Within a year or two, we see an undeniable and predictable dropoff in these critical areas.
In this case, there was little to no ongoing sales funnel analysis and a lack of any post-purchase feedback collection. Without implementing these practices, the sales department is blind to downward trends and how best to improve Structures here.
Retention: Opportunity for Improvement (But Not Yet)
Although the firm’s Retention stage had an overall great operational maturity score like Purchasing, it was not leadership’s top priority. The firm could improve Experience by focusing on new ways to reward loyalty and being more proactive in educating and surfacing additional opportunities to engage customers.
The firm lacked certain Structures that would support a more robust back-end sales process for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. We found that the Sales department often passed the baton to customer experience once the sale was complete. It was then the CX team’s responsibility to retain the client. We noticed cases in which the firm could have been increasing CLTV, but the disconnect between Sales and CX post-initial purchase prohibited it.
Advocacy: Nothing But Blue Skies
The firm’s Operational Maturity score in the Advocacy stage reflected the organization’s lack of activation in this part of the buyer’s journey. We rated the Experience as “No Attempt” because there was no strategy or conscious effort from leadership to define the desired customer experience or activate this stage.
You’ll notice ratings in other stage components. You might be scratching your head about how we could score something that had not been “activated.” They did indeed have some of these components implemented but for ulterior motives. For example, they have a customer testimonial collection process that they had set up and forgotten about. There is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback loop in place for CX and retention purposes. However, they focused solely on detractors for retention purposes and neglected to activate the attractors to refer to their business
This Stage’s score profile is common with organizations that have weak Experience in Awareness and Consideration. Investing effort in Advocacy seems like a “nice-to-have” when you’re struggling to just fill the top of the funnel and plug the holes. It makes sense.
If this firm had the resources to optimize all of these stages, they should. However, like most firms, they can only focus on one or two large operational initiatives. Rightly, those efforts need to be made in Awareness and Consideration. This does not mean Advocacy is not a priority. It has become a near-term goal in a larger continuous improvement strategy.
Conclusion
Operational maturity isn't just an ambition—it's a critical requirement for organizations striving to scale customer experience effectively. The OMEF provides a clear, systematic approach to identify and resolve inefficiencies that hinder your ability to deliver outstanding CX at scale. By focusing on refining processes, implementing the right tools, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, your organization can meet and exceed customer expectations, driving growth, customer loyalty, and significant financial returns.
This framework is built around five key stages of the buyer’s journey—Awareness, Consideration, Purchasing, Retention, and Advocacy—each of which represents a critical milestone in building customer commitment. At every stage, the framework evaluates five essential components—Experience, Foundations, Structures, Tools, and Methods—each contributing to the overall maturity and performance of your customer experience.
Each Component plays a pivotal role in achieving the ultimate outcome:
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Experience reflects the tangible results of CX efforts and creates the desired emotion that directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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Foundations ensures that your organization has the core principles and culture to support long-term success.
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Structures provides the necessary framework and governance to sustain scalable service delivery and growth.
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Tools enables efficiency and effectiveness. They allow for the seamless execution of CX strategies.
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Methods offers a consistent approach to applying best practices and continuous improvement.
