Meaningful business transformation through experience maturity, part 3: 10 elements of experience maturity

At each stage in the experience maturity model, we use specific categories to analyze and assess an organization’s capabilities and maturity across customer experience and employee experience.

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.

At each stage in the experience maturity model, we use specific categories to analyze and assess an organization’s capabilities and maturity across the two primary areas that combine to make brand experience: customer experience and employee experience. Thus, we measure acceleration across the entire organization using the 10 elements of experience:

1. Strategy

2. Ideation

3. Cohesion

4. Process

5. Culture

6. Environment

7. Intelligence

8. Technology

9. Compliance

10. Results

For an organization to achieve true brand experience, they need to pay attention to the 10 identified elements of experience. For the best results, it requires a well-balanced approach across these elements. An organization which is very mature in one area but lacking on others, will face issues. As such it is important for organizations to understand which element(s) they are strongest and weakest at, in order to create a plan to improve each. This often involves focusing on weaker elements, while having a more gradual plan to improve the elements in which they are already strong.

This will allow organizations to recognize where their weaknesses and strengths are when it comes to implementing experience initiatives. While we don’t cover all of the above in this book, we work with our clients to identify the relevant characteristics which come in unique variations for each organization.

We also acknowledge that some organizations are much more advanced in one area or another between customer and employee experience. Understanding the size of the gap between the maturity of CX and EX is another outcome of going through this exercise and can often help organizations determine where to focus some of their immediate efforts.

This means that the maturity measurement is a relative scale for each organization, based on several factors, including:

• Industry (factoring in competitors)

• Size (employees and revenue)

• Age (years in business)

• as well as a few other factors

To illustrate this point, let’s go back to the Hotjar 2019 CX study I referenced earlier. If you look at the proportion of companies that ranked as “mature” versus “novice,” there is a marked contrast between those with $500M+ in revenue and those below. Twenty-eight percent of mature companies were in that high revenue bracket, versus only 10% that were in the novice bracket.

In the next article in this series, we’re going to explore the 10 elements 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.