In the last chapter of this series, we explored the meaning and importance of understanding your digital maturity. This time we’ll explore digital experience maturity, the stages of it, and how you can work out yours.
What is digital experience maturity?
Digital experience maturity is a measure of an organization's ability to provide a seamless, engaging, and personalized digital experience to its customers across various touchpoints and channels.
A digitally mature organization will have the following characteristics related to its digital experience capabilities:
- Customer centricity: It prioritizes the customer experience and uses digital technology to offer personalized experiences.
- Omnichannel experience: It delivers a seamless and consistent customer experience across various touchpoints and channels, including web, mobile, social media, and in-store.
- Personalization: It uses data and analytics to personalize the digital experience based on individual customer preferences and behaviors.
- Continuous improvement: It continuously monitors and improves the digital experience it delivers based on customer feedback and behavior and evolving market trends.
Organizations can improve their digital experience maturity by investing in digital technology and talent that enables them to provide a seamless and personalized digital experience to their customers. They can also develop a culture of experimentation and innovation, where they continuously test and iterate their digital experience to ensure that it meets the evolving needs and expectations of their customers.
What are the stages of digital experience maturity?
Organizations just starting their digital transformation journey will have basic digital capabilities. They may have a website and social media presence, but their digital experience is not yet fully integrated and may not be consistent across different channels.
As they develop, they invest in digital technologies and talent that helps them improve their digital experience. They may implement a content management system (CMS) to manage their website and social media channels and might be working to improve their user experience (UX) design. However, their digital experience is likely still lacking personalization and may not be fully integrated across different channels.
During the mature stage, organizations will have developed a fully integrated and personalized digital experience that delivers consistent and engaging experiences across different touchpoints and channels. With the help of a digital experience platform (DXP), they are using data and analytics to personalize the digital experience and use implemented tools and processes to continuously monitor and improve it.
Organizations at the forefront of digital experience maturity will be setting new standards for the industry. They are using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver highly personalized and predictive digital experiences. They have a culture of innovation and experimentation and are continuously pushing the boundaries of what's possible in digital experience.
It's important to note that digital experience maturity is a continuous spectrum, and organizations can move back and forth between stages depending on their digital transformation initiatives, market conditions, and customer expectations.
Knowing where you are currently at in your digital experience maturity will be key to helping you improve it. You can’t skip steps by buying the best and brightest software on the market—it may well swallow you whole, both in terms of cost and complexity. It is essential that you’re taking the size of step in your maturity journey your company and teams can handle well.
After all, it's not about having technology that enables industry-leading maturity, it’s about your ability to effectively leverage digital technologies to achieve your specific business goals.
How can you work out your digital experience maturity?
Working out your digital experience maturity involves assessing your organization's current level of digital maturity across several key dimensions, such as strategy, organization, customer experience, technology, and data. The following are some steps you can take to work out your digital experience maturity:
- Conduct a digital maturity assessment: Evaluate your organization's current level of digital maturity across various dimensions.
- Review your customer journey: Examine your customer journey to identify areas where digital tools can be used to improve the customer experience. This includes understanding how customers interact with your business across all touchpoints, such as social media, mobile apps, website, and in-person interactions.
- Assess your technology stack: Evaluate the technology stack you are using to support your digital initiatives. This includes assessing your website, content management system (CMS) or digital experience platform (DXP), customer relationship management (CRM) software, marketing automation tools, and other digital tools.
- Evaluate your data strategy: Assess how you collect, store, and use customer data. This includes examining how you use customer data to drive personalization, improve customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions.
- Identify gaps and develop a roadmap: Based on your assessments, identify areas where you need to improve and develop a roadmap to achieve your desired level of digital experience maturity. This roadmap should outline specific initiatives, milestones, and timelines to guide your digital transformation journey.
At Kentico, we wanted to make assessing one’s digital experience maturity easier and so developed two invaluable resources to help you to work out your level of digital experience maturity.
With our Digital Experience Maturity Calculator, you'll be led through our Digital Experience Maturity Model and its specific criteria one step at a time.
- You'll be asked 13 questions that cover various aspects of your business, such as the extent of your use of analytical tools, your approach to content design, and the size of your marketing team.
- You'll receive a customized evaluation of your business, outlining your unique digital experience maturity level and its implications.
- You'll also discover the best path for digital growth and how to start implementing it immediately.
Our Digital Experience Maturity Model is available in our free downloadable ebook, “Your digital transformation roadmap,” where you’ll discover:
- how to use the digital experience maturity model to assess your business’s digital sophistication
- why a correctly established level of digital experience maturity will boost your business results
- the recommended next steps on your journey to a successful digital transformation
- valuable tips and tricks to get closer to your audiences
Digital maturity points you in the right direction
A digitally mature organization has a clear strategic vision, prioritizes the customer experience, has an agile culture of innovation and experimentation, uses data and analytics to make informed business decisions, has a robust digital infrastructure, and a skilled workforce.
But knowing your destination isn’t enough. If you don’t know where you’re traveling from, your path is likely to be inefficient and haphazard at best, and at worst... wildly off-target and eye-wateringly expensive.
By understanding your current level of digital maturity, you can add your starting point to the map, and suddenly... the path to success is clear.
In our next chapter, we’ll explore how digital experience maturity is directly related to the kind of customer experience you can deliver and why improving this should be a top priority.
