The Road to Digital Experience Maturity

Ordering groceries, booking a flight, or even scheduling a doctor’s appointment—almost every aspect of our lives has become a digital experience. But what makes a truly great digital experience? It’s more than just a functional app or a visually appealing website. It’s about seamless journeys, personalized interactions, and natural value creation.

For today’s businesses, providing users with great digital experiences is the key to survival. The process of becoming more digitally mature is a proven way to help you outperform the competition. But designing and delivering these experiences doesn’t just happen—it involves alignment across the company, a data-driven culture, and processes primed for long-term growth.

At Amplitude, we’ve worked with thousands of organizations, giving us a front-row seat to the digital strategies that separate leaders from laggards. We’ve distilled these learnings into a Digital Maturity Model, a comprehensive digital experience framework.

What is digital experience maturity?

Digital experience maturity is a goal state when an organization consistently delivers exceptional digital experiences that keep customers coming back. But it’s not a finish line you cross once and stop thinking about. Rather, it’s a dynamic state that requires continuous adaptation and improvement. The journey to digital experience maturity comes with ups and downs as organizations evolve, learn, and grow to meet shifting customer needs.

Every organization has some level of digital maturity. The difference lies in how advanced they are across the key areas that matter most. In particular, we evaluate digital experience maturity related to four pillars:

1. Strategic alignment
2. Organizational readiness
3. Operational readiness
4. Technology readiness

Digital experience leaders sustain and improve performance over each of these pillars to achieve success.

Pillar 1: Strategic alignment

The first pillar involves having a clearly defined strategy and vision that your entire organization can get behind. High maturity in strategic alignment requires your C-suite to agree on your organization’s vision for success and internalize it in their teams’ day-to-day work. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are cross-functional and implemented across all departments.

In essence, it involves:

• A shared company vision
• Goals across teams that roll up to the shared vision
• A shared belief in the value of data
• Clearly defined use cases
• A customer-centric approach across teams

To achieve strategic alignment, we recommend the following best practices:

• Get the right leaders involved and aligned in designing digital experiences. This includes leaders in key roles like product, marketing, sales, customer success, data, operations, and even finance.
• Define the specific use cases or problems you’re looking to solve. Avoid the common mistake of looking at your data and determining which problems you can solve. Instead, define the use case and then gather the data you need.
• Get inspiration from industry success stories. For example, Evaneos transformed and consolidated their tech stack, resulting in a 20% increase in conversions. Or Unity, which rebuilt its culture around data—teams now collaborate across departments and can pull rich insights to inform their work.
• Don’t fear change. Instead, embrace what you’re planning to achieve in the future.
• Take your time. Strategic alignment is a slow process. You can’t expect to get all your leaders in a room one time and have immediate alignment. Get everyone on the same page and build a solid foundation for digital experience maturity.

Pillar 2: Organizational readiness

With leadership aligned, it’s now time to get the rest of your organization singing from the same songbook. Build a culture around delightful digital experiences and ensure your employees understand the value of using data to improve them. Organizational readiness requires employees to not only use data within their sphere of responsibility but also to share their insights across teams to improve the entire customer lifecycle.

A key aspect of this is building collaborative, cross-functional teams that work together, share insights and best practices, and strive toward continuous improvement. This doesn’t happen without strong and dedicated leadership to set the tone.

Take a look at some best practices to help you advance your organizational readiness:

1. Identify a passionate and influential sponsor. Create a digital experience council to be their hands and feet throughout the organization.
2. Align work to organizational impact. This means that everyone understands how their job directly contributes to the company’s vision and mission.
3. Create a data-driven mindset by backing up critical decisions with data. Share your decision-making process with the rest of the company to show how data informs better outcomes.
4. Celebrate small wins to drive motivation, or even add some healthy competition.
5. Customize employee learning and enablement to aid the adoption of new systems and processes. Back this up with hands-on help until employees are comfortable with them.

Pillar 3: Operational readiness

The next pillar focuses on providing systems and processes that empower your team to:

• Use self-service analytics
• Interpret data confidently
• Make swift, informed decisions based on real-time insights

As employees embrace automated systems and workflows, they’re equipped to act independently and efficiently. Democratized access to data and accelerated learning make decision making more fluid, driving continuous improvement across the organization.

Follow these four practices to achieve operational readiness for digital experience maturity:

1. Enable self-serve data across your organization. Data scientists are great, but over-relying on them can cause bottlenecks and hinder your teams’ ability to make timely decisions.
2. Encourage your teams to incorporate data into their existing processes to improve functionality. For example, you can improve your marketing team’s campaign proposal process by asking them to provide data behind their suggestions.
3. Embrace experimentation to make quicker, better decisions. The more experiments you run, the more data-backed decisions you make.
4. Create a culture where collaboration and communication are key and findings are widely shared. Digital analytics platforms like Amplitude have collaboration features that can help—such as team spaces to save and organize analyses, notebooks to communicate context and takeaways, and comments to facilitate discussion within a dashboard.

Pillar 4: Technology readiness

Technology readiness involves a solid data foundation built on effective data integration, accessibility, governance, trustworthiness, and security. The right tools are what make this foundation possible. Leading companies use tools that can unlock insights into customer behaviors and preferences while making it easy for their teams to experiment, personalize offerings, and engage customers.

Integrate your company’s tech stack to remove data silos, improve workflows, and make it easy to create better customer journeys. Check out the following best practices to help you achieve this:

1. Avoid “tool euphoria.” Organizations often fall into the trap of investing in a bunch of different tools, hoping they will solve all of their problems. In reality, this squanders resources and creates more technological issues than fixes.
2. Design a holistic digital experience stack. Use tools to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data, enabling you to test and optimize, predict trends, and personalize experiences.
3. Build a strong data foundation. Reliable, well-structured data enables your tech stack to work effectively.
4. Automate data governance with access controls and workflows that protect and maintain trust in your data.

Why digital experience maturity matters

Your company’s ability to deliver exceptional digital experiences can make or break your business. Digitally mature companies have a significant advantage. They’re not just keeping pace with customer expectations—they’re exceeding them. This translates to tangible business results. Digitally mature companies consistently outperform their competitors, achieving faster revenue growth, higher customer satisfaction, and improved brand loyalty.