The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and McorpCX unveiled joint research findings that reveal the pivotal role of customer experience (CX) education in driving greater customer-centricity and customer experience maturity across industries and company size.

SAN FRANCISCO, -- The report titled "The Pivotal Role of CX Education and Upskilling in Accelerating Customer Centricity Leadership" represents the perspectives of approximately 500 global CX leaders and practitioners. All participants were asked to rate their organizations' CX maturity using the best-practices-based McorpCX Maturity Model.

Key findings include:

• Eighty-two percent of companies rated the top strategic outcome they expect from CX as shifting organizational mindsets to consider the customer's perspective in how they operate.

• Nearly a third of companies, 30 percent, consider their organizations very mature, boasting customer experience maturity at either stage 4 (systematic) or stage 5 (embedded).

• Organizations prioritizing enterprise-wide CX learning are up to 3 times as likely to have high CX maturity than those that don't.

• Although 87 percent of executives recognize CX's strategic importance[1], only 27 percent prioritize CX knowledge building as a priority or engage in it.

• Customer insight and understanding (72 percent of respondents) is rated as the top area employees need to learn to drive the greatest business value, followed by customer centricity (62 percent).

"It seems intuitive that higher levels of investment in customer experience education and upskilling would lead to higher levels of CX maturity and based on CXPA data and myriad other studies, greater business value. I'm gratified to see our research validate this," said Greg Melia, CAE, CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). "It is my hope that this research reinforces the business case for investing in well-structured CX education as a key part of achieving better customer experience outcomes for customers, employees and organizations" he concluded.

Based on analysis of the data and the best practices of the CXPA and McorpCX, the research whitepaper[2] provides a series of recommendations to help organizations at different stages of CX maturity determine the best training, the audiences for that training, and the content needed to drive customer centricity across an organization.

Michael Hinshaw, President of McorpCX, stated, "Both in this research and in our experience, we have seen the virtuous cycle of CX learning driving CX maturity and business value creation. Ironically, CX education is required to achieve greater maturity, but only more mature organizations appear to prioritize CX learning and upskilling. The equation is simple: to be more customer-centric, prioritize educating your people on what it means, how they will benefit, and the tools they can employ to make it real every day."