To proceed up the levels of Guest Experience maturity without mishaps, you need to understand your starting point. Specifically, you need a realistic assessment of your current adoption level of reach of the Guest experience disciplines.

You can think of adoption levels this way: the phases of maturity (Improve, Transform, Sustain, Reinvent) are like grade levels in school. Guest experience disciplines are like the courses you have to master in order to advance to the next grade, and adoption levels are like the marks you get for each of those courses.

It’s a rough analogy because your adoption level is a measure of how consistently you perform each discipline, not necessarily how well you perform it. To gauge how consistently your organization performs each practice on a continuum from not at all to all of the time, you’ll need to determine whether each discipline is Missing, Ad Hoc, Repeatable, or Systematic.

• Missing – your organization doesn’t perform this discipline at all. If a practice is at this level it’s either because not enough people considered it important enough to do or no one thought of doing it in the first place. Regardless – it’s just not happening.
• Ad Hoc – your organization performs this discipline sporadically. There is no defined process that specifies when it should be performed, how, or by whom. If you see the discipline performed, it’s because some people realize that it’s important enough to do at least some of the time.
• Repeatable – your organization has a defined process that specifies when this discipline should be performed, how, and by whom. Your organization even follows the process most of the time. That means that people in your organization could perform the discipline consistently all of the time – they just don’t.
• Systematic – your organization has a defined process that specifies when this practice should be performed, how, and by whom. The organization follows that process all of the time. There are some things that organizations do the same way every time to produce consistently high-quality results – just not very often in the realm of Guest experiences. You can get to this level with your Guest experience disciplines – you just have to want it badly enough.

Once you understand the four levels above, you need to establish your baseline level of adoption for each of the six disciplines. You’ve got two options for determining your adoption levels. You can take a top-down approach by conducting interviews and fact-finding workshops with the people who should be performing the disciplines. Or you can take a bottom-up approach by surveying your organization and asking their opinions on adoption levels. The top-down approach will give you more actionable results, but will also cost you more in time and money (assuming you use outside help – which you should).

Ultimately you want your entire organization to perform the same disciplines, the same way, every time. But when you first “grade” your adoption level you should do it by function – and when you get the results, expect to find that different areas of your organization will be at different levels of maturity.

Whatever you find when you determine your baseline levels of adoption, you’ll be able to set your priorities for moving forward – which is what the next post is all about.

Part 8 of a multi-part series based on the book Outside In

These posts “translate” the world of customer experience to the language and setting of Guest Experiences in the church.

>> Part 7