Transform: CX strategy essential for digital maturity

Having a specific customer experience (CX) vision and strategy is key for organisations to integrate and streamline CX across the whole organisation, which will benefit the organisation.  This channel integration is central to the digital maturity of an organisation, concludes consulting firm Transform.

Digital and multi-channel consulting firm Transform recently released its fifth annual ‘Digital Maturity Index’ (DMI) in which it assesses the ‘digital maturity’ of organisations by evaluating different digital segments of these organisations. The research for DMI 2014 has been executed by market research company ActionPoint Marketing Solutions who interviewed 206 consumers and 150 business leaders from a range of industry sectors.

Customer Experience
Since the start of the DMI in 2010, organisations have moved their digital agenda beyond technology and channels to include the elements of strategy*, culture and customers. Especially the latter has gained increased focus, which is pointed out by Transform as the most significant change when comparing the DMI’s over the past years. The research shows that the majority of organisations are recognising the importance of the customer experience (CX) and are also actively using tools and techniques to deliver an improved digital experience. This change does not come to a surprise. As digital is becoming integral to organisations achieving their goals and the stakes too high to get it wrong, a well-executed CX will bring great rewards. According to a recent Harvard Business Review, consumers who have had great CX in the past spend 140% more than those with bad CX.

Using the CX to assess the capabilities of organisations has also increased over the years. Of the people surveyed for the DMI 2011, 59% working in the private sector and 80% in the public sector stated to have little or no understanding of the end to end CX within their organisation. Of the people surveyed for DMI 2014, 53% stated they assess the performance of their digital channels by measuring the happiness of their customer, and 66% are actually using a customer satisfaction index. Transform’s research shows that 50% of organisations currently ue four or more user experience (UX) techniques, of which User Surveys are used the most with 81%, followed by Customer Panels and UX Testing.

At the various organisations surveyed, only 22% of respondents stated to have a specific Customer Experience Director and 44% stated to have the responsibility split across several directors. Almost a quarter (22%) stated not to have any director explicitly responsible. Transform says that in the absence of a specific CX strategy, the CX will be formed by a combination of individual channel and service decisions across each different channel. Developing a specific customer experience strategy is key for the management team in setting the strategy for their organisation that will to enable the channel integration that is central to the digital maturity of an organisation.

* Related article: Transform: Digital mature firms share digital duty.