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Chapter 6Stage 1—Initiate, and Stage 2—Radiate

Don't treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.

—Chris Brogan

In the Initiate stage, organizations use a “brochure site” presence on the web with email campaign capabilities and web analytics (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™—Initiate and Radiate Stages

In the Radiate stage, organizations focus on distributing content across channels starting with the customer's most used channels. Examples include establishing a mobile site and sharing content on social networks (see Figure 6.1).

The Initiate and Radiate Stages

The Initiate stage is almost a rite of passage for any organization. As you learned in Chapter 4, 85.4 percent of organizations surveyed with the Customer Experience Maturity Assessment are still in Stage 1 or Stage 2. The vast majority are here because they aren't sure how to progress and they have trouble building a business case for the resources to improve.

The initial website in Stage 1, Initiate, is almost always oriented around the organization's products and services rather than having a customer-centric or problem/solution orientation. That happens because the website is usually created by a marketing department or agency that has little experience with the digital customer experience so they pour printed marketing material into a new online format. The ...