Meaningful business transformation through experience maturity, part 4: exploring the 10 elements of experience maturity

Let’s now explore each of the elements in the experience maturity model 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.

Let’s now explore each of the elements in the experience maturity model in more depth:

Strategy

This refers to the executive/leadership’s directions towards optimization of experience and how it maps to organizational priorities and objectives. The more mature an organization is, the more realistic expectations at the leadership level are in terms of return on investment (ROI) timeframes, the level of investment that is required, as well as the level of improvement that can be achieved.

Ideation

This is the process to identify, plan and socialize experience initiatives that provide business impact and return on investment (ROI). The ideal roadmap extends beyond single teams and envisions a company-wide effort to optimize experience across the enterprise. It is a continuous process supported by the right tools and the required organizational commitments.

Cohesion

This describes the way experience initiatives are embedded/integrated in the organizational structure. Areas include:

• Business Collaboration

• Organizational Structure

• Roles & Responsibilities

• Training

When experience optimization is prioritized across several business units it indicates a more mature organization. In addition to using more advanced techniques within a single unit, the organization is often addressing more complex and cross-functional needs. Rather than being relegated to a single department or use case, experience optimization can be utilized in cost reduction, revenue increase, HR, finance, legal/risk, and many other areas.

This allows each part of an organization to more fully understand its data and leverage it to make better decisions. It also allows these experience-driven businesses to use data to make better decisions across the entire organization.

Culture

Work culture should be approached as the operating system it really is. It is comprised of the explicit and implicit behaviors and expectations that shape the workforce. Part of achieving brand experience maturity involves understanding and optimizing the drivers of on-brand versus off-brand behavior. Rather than focus on lagging indicators such as the results of ineffectual employee engagement surveys, a good experience practitioner sharpens their lens on leading indicators such as intrinsic motivators. This approach allows you to instantly map and “decode” what motivates the individual, a key building block to assembling a working Employee Experience (EX) model. Through cultural analytics tools, you can then map organization-wide behaviors that accelerate versus inhibit reaching business goals. From this process we are able to design meaningful action plans specifically tied to business objectives.

Keep in mind as well that although culture extends beyond employees, everything starts internally. Your employee culture will reflect outward to your customer culture. While they may not be the same, employee and customer culture are tied to one another. The same applies to partners and vendors.

Environment

The overall organizational environment must be one that is conducive to improvement. While this can be measured and managed in many ways, the physical (condition and design of employee and customer spaces), cultural, and digital environments must align to one that is designed to comprehensively enhance the experience of both employees and customers.

Organizations should also understand and embrace the need for virtual workspaces, whether those are remote workers, or as functionality such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) become more commonplace in work.

Intelligence

The future of work is a collaboration between people and artificial intelligence. How companies embrace this truth can often dictate their fate in the hands of competition that is rapidly adopting automation, machine learning, and other practices that heavily rely on data science.

Artificial intelligence and data science adoption and application provide a short-term competitive advantage and have longer-term benefits as the world moves toward a more automated workforce.

Technology

This is the technical foundation for experience, including the basis for the people, processes and technology to perform data science-related tasks and projects. Areas include:

• Infrastructure

• Data

• Integration (inputs, models, outputs)

• Supporting Tools

For an organization to mature with experience, there should be an IT environment and culture that supports making the improvement of experience for employees and customers as efficient as possible. This means access to the right tools and environments to train, as well as access to data and means to integrate AI models and other augmentations, even with business-critical applications. Of course, this has to be balanced with constraints in terms of security and costs.

Process

This refers to the process and procedures to initiate projects and provide results with experience optimization including:

• Preparation

• Modeling

• Testing

• Deployment

• Monitoring

Within this process, there is also a need for greater collaboration, and more mature organizations are already seeing the benefits here. When cross-functional teams are able to contribute to a continuous cycle of insights delivery, with reusable and shareable components utilized across the business, collaboration takes on a small, focused perspective as well as a broader, company-wide perspective.

This idea of collaboration extends to deployment as well. There is a stark difference in maturity between a company who simply embarks on siloed experience initiatives versus integrating these efforts with other programs throughout the business. Those businesses that augment decision-making with experience-driven solutions are able to move more quickly towards better results for both employees and customers. Process and methodology also refer to the way knowledge is captured and transcribed and includes things like IP protection and other related items.

Compliance

A comprehensive investment in experience requires ensuring legal and ethical compliance across a broad range of issues.

For customer experience, this includes addressing privacy concerns, such as those regulated by GDPR, or accessibility needs, as regulated by the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1975 (commonly referred to as “Section 508” after the part of the Act that deals with accessibility for the Web), or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including many other areas. 

For employee experience this ranges from HIPAA compliance, to other privacy requirements needed when dealing with personally identifiable information (PII), and many other laws and guidelines.

When referring to the application of artificial intelligence and data science, this refers to the way technical risks are managed. For instance, artificial intelligence has unique needs which can include:

• Explainable

• Ethical

• Non-biased

• Reproducible

• Auditable

• Secure

Results

Finally, any investment in experience must be measured to determine its success. This is the way EX and CX initiatives are measured and evaluated from a business perspective, and how they are measured against key organizational performance goals.

A mature organization will tie experience to its KPIs, and measuring the return on investment in its experience initiatives. We refer to this measurement as the Return on Experience (ROX).

Application of the experience maturity model

An organization that is investing in experience can use the Experience Maturity Model to guide its journey toward receiving true ROX.

The Center of Experience uses this model to assess an organization and determine the best and most appropriate course of action to take it successfully from its current state to the optimal “Transform” state, or the 5th stage in the model. Organizations receive a “report card” that visualizes where they are in overall maturity as well as maturity according to the 10 elements.

In addition to assessing where an organization currently stands, the assessment also identifies industry or competitor benchmarks as well as company targets along each of the elements.

This assessment is then used to help a company improve these individual aspects, often with a customized, agile-sprint-based plan to bring the organization to the next level of acceleration. This collaborative approach allows teams within the organization to contribute ideas and work to accelerate the organization’s experience initiatives.

Thanks for reading this series of articles on experience maturity. To learn more about how to assess your own organization, please contact me, or read more in my book, The Center of 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.