This 4-part series of articles is based on ideas from my book The Center of Experience, in which I explore the relationship between customer experience and employee experience, and how organizations can achieve transformative results by embracing a customer-centric culture.

I have worked with many types of organizations over the years to improve business results from experience and technology investments. While every organization that invests in experience wants to reap returns, how and where they start is dependent on their level of sophistication in a number of areas. Trying to undertake too complex an initiative could yield as bad of results as doing nothing at all, if the complex initiative is never able to truly get off the ground.

Thus, we need to assess a company’s experience maturity level in order to determine the best and most realistic starting point. To that end, the Center of Experience includes an experience maturity model to help organizations understand where they are in the experience journey and what needs to happen to accelerate getting better business results out of customer experience and employee experience initiatives.

The experience maturity model

Performing an experience maturity assessment at the beginning of an experience initiative ensures you are taking the right approaches across the different areas it measures. The assessment asks participating groups to rate an organization’s maturity across different areas of both customer and employee experience. It’s always an eye-opener to see the results of this assessment, as it can highlight things such as a clear weakness in a company, or even a lack of communication in certain areas where solutions exist but have not been widely shared.

Let’s explore the experience maturity model now in more detail.

The 5 stages of the maturity model

Figure : The Center of Experience maturity model

The improvement of a company’s experience maturity is identified based on five stages that measure across both customer and employee experience:

1. Analyze

2. Experiment

3. Influence

4. Impact

5. Transform

Each stage is named for the relationship between customer and/or employee experience and how the company is implementing it. As the organization progresses in its experience maturity, CX and EX play a greater role in its operations.

In the next article in this series, we’re going to explore the 5 stages of experience maturity in more depth.

This 4-part series of articles is based on ideas from my book The Center of Experience, in which I explore the relationship between customer experience and employee experience, and how organizations can achieve transformative results by embracing a customer-centric culture.