Lessons Learned From Leaders About Digital Experience Maturity

Today’s digital interactions are so embedded in every aspect of our lives that it’s hard to tell where our digital experiences stop and our physical lives start. Digital experiences include all the ways we interact electronically with products and services, and they can make or break the way we perceive a brand’s value and determine our loyalty.

Digital experiences are more critical to your business than ever, but great experiences don’t happen by accident. Every day, we talk to customers hungry for a winning formula for digital experience excellence.

What separates companies delivering seamless, memorable digital experiences from those just getting by? Digital experience maturity—a goal state when an organization consistently delivers exceptional digital experiences that keep customers coming back. Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving digital experience maturity, there are standard practices among companies crushing the digital experience game across strategy, culture, operations, and technology.

To better understand the characteristics of digital experience leaders and others, we turned to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. We’re thrilled to share a new report, Moving Up the Digital Experience Maturity Curve.

This report provides insights on digital experience maturity gathered from a survey of 503 members of the Harvard Business Review global audience who are involved in decision making about digital experiences at their organization and first-hand interviews with executives from Quillbot, Unity, and Wahi Realty.

You can access a free copy of the full Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report here, but we also want to share some key findings from this new research.

Drivers of change

In today’s digital-first world, listening to your customers better than your competitors is the surest way to outpace them. Whoever can best listen to and interpret their customers’ actions to design and deliver compelling digital experiences will win the race for customer loyalty and market growth.

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research finds that organizations recognize the imperative to uplevel their digital experiences: 83% of respondents cite building engaging digital experiences as “very important.” As such, many companies are taking deliberate action to improve these critical experiences.

Seventy-eight percent cite evolving customer expectations as a key motivator for changing their approach to digital experiences, with increased competition (61%) coming in second. This is unsurprising, given that consumer personalization expectations continue to soar, and the struggle to attract and keep your customers is more intense than ever.

Organizations recognize that upleveling their digital experiences is no longer a nice to have—it’s a strategic imperative.

Companies recognize that crafting unforgettable digital experiences is no longer a “nice to have,” and leaders realize it takes more than good technology to design and deliver these experiences.

After working with thousands of organizations, at Amplitude, we’ve found that delivering memorable experiences is about aligning your teams, building a data-driven culture, and setting up processes to achieve long-lasting growth. It involves a proactive combination of strategy, culture, operations, and technology to create the foundation for digital experience maturity.

• Strategic alignment: Involves getting alignment—top-down and side-to-side. It’s ensuring you have a shared vision of success, cross-functional key performance indicators, and performance tracking strategies to help deliver better experiences.
• Organizational readiness: This is all about people and culture. Ensure your employees understand the value of improving digital experiences and can share their learnings across the entire customer lifecycle—under the guidance of a strong sponsor.
• Operational readiness: This relates to having systems and processes in place that empower individuals to use self-service analytics, understand and interpret data, make decisions more quickly, and act on new insights without delays.
• Technology readiness: This involves having a solid data foundation that drives data integration, accessibility, governance, trustworthiness, and security—using tools that illuminate customer behavior and enable experimentation, personalization, and customer activation.

Though it’s tempting to consider your digital experience maturity as “pass or fail,” it’s best to think of it on a sliding scale or curve. You have some level of digital experience maturity—the question is to what degree and how your team can progress to the next level. The goal is to sustain and improve performance across these four key areas in a continuous process.

Three key research takeaways

It’s not often you get direct insight into how business leaders think about their digital experiences, and even less often you get their unfettered opinions about where they need to improve. That’s why if you’re a digital or CX leader like me, you’ll be like a kid in a candy store once you access the full report. Here’s a sneak peek into my top three takeaways.

1. Digital experiences are critical, but there’s room for improvement

As mentioned, 83% of respondents say creating engaging digital experiences is “very important.” Not surprising. But the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research found that only 32% feel their organizations are “very effective” at it.

Ouch! That’s an enormous chasm between goal and reality.

Only 32% of respondents indicate that their organization is very effective at creating engaging digital experiences, which are defined here as leaders. The majority of respondents identify their organization as somewhat effective or not effective, which are defined here as followers and laggards.

Though we can’t attribute this gap to any single factor, we can assert that it’s partly due to a lack of resources, best practices, and tools for organizations seeking to improve their digital experiences. As such, many flounder, guessing about what their customers want and need rather than making intentional, data-driven decisions.

2. AI as a digital experience game-changer

You can’t throw a stick these days without hitting AI. So it’s no surprise that it was a topic of discussion in the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research.

Seventy-one percent of leaders use AI to personalize customer interactions, compared to just 33% of laggards. This highlights the competitive edge of technology adoption. The top ways these leaders use AI include analyzing customer feedback, reviews, and other data, personalizing feature and content recommendations, and providing recommendations on product and service features.

Though most organizations are just scratching the surface of how AI can reshape their digital experiences, we believe the gap between leaders and laggards will only continue to deepen if the latter doesn’t take action to adopt AI as part of a greater technology readiness strategy.

Unsurprisingly, laggards and followers have not adopted AI to improve their digital experiences as much as leaders.

3. Data quality and access drive success

Behind every digital experience is data—and a whole lot of it. Each digital interaction generates powerful customer behavioral data that you can turn into actionable insights to improve engagement and satisfaction. But having data and thoughtfully using it to improve your digital experiences aren’t the same thing.

Leading organizations have systems, processes, and tools to effectively harness and unlock their data’s power. This includes ensuring data is reliable, trustworthy, and accessible to more people as they do their jobs.

According to the research, 54% of leaders say their entire organization has access to high-quality customer data, compared to only 20% of laggards. This finding supports our belief that data integration and democratization are key to winning digital experiences. By enabling individuals with systems and processes to access data—without relying on analysts—you can empower them to make better decisions for your customers, creating shared ownership of your customers’ experiences.

Leaders have more access to high-quality data than followers and laggards.

Improve your digital experience maturity

Whether your organization is a digital experience leader, follower, or laggard, we’re confident that this new research has wisdom and inspiration to accelerate your journey to digital experience excellence.

We hope its insights set you on a journey of introspection, innovation, and, most importantly, action. It’s time to stop guessing and start building digital experiences that matter.