Connect

Chapter 4How Does Your Organization Compare?

The best vision is insight.

—Malcolm Forbes

With more than 1,000 participants in our Customer Experience Maturity Assessment, we have gathered many insights on marketing maturity across industries and how marketing organizations use new technology capabilities, as well as their organizational maturity. What we found shocked us. Those marketing organizations that take advantage of these findings have the opportunity to leapfrog their competition.

The Time for Change Is Now

For too many years, too many marketing organizations have watched the digital transformation happening right outside their door. But they have not taken an active role in embracing technology, building knowledge, increasing staff that would help them move into data-driven marketing, or simply taking advantage of new technology to win market share.

Considering that we are at the beginning of a revolution, the findings from our research are scary. Our analysis shows that 85.4 percent of organizations are at the very beginning levels of customer experience maturity. They are in either the Initiate stage (67 percent) or the Radiate stage (18.4 percent), as shown in Figure 4.1. For many organizations, that means they need to focus on using their current stage to distribute content through the channels most used by customers and then move up to the next stage, Align. In the Align stage organizations align their digital goals to drive marketing objectives that achieve ...