Optimize your DXP capabilities

As COVID-19 forced lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing, organizations found themselves scrambling to pivot on several fronts: reorganizing their workforces, strategizing to mitigate revenue losses, and deciphering how best to hang on to and grow their customer base. It is the nimble, savvy operators who prioritized the value of customer experience (CX)—and leveraged technologies to improve their CX capabilities—that are emerging from this unprecedented upheaval on an upward trajectory.

60% of CEOs leading the most financially successful organizations from the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) 2021 CEO study list “delivering better customer experiences” among their highest priorities in the next 2 to 3 years. These chief executives pay close attention to customer feedback. It propels the business decisions and technical strategies that enhance experiences and engagement. Data-driven, actionable insights that enable organizations to make CX decisions with foresight, not hindsight, have the potential to improve customer relationships exponentially.

Organizations’ #1 DXP challenge? Reconciling business units’ different requirements.

As businesses emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, gaining market share and customer trust is mission critical. This urgency has magnified the need for organizations to rethink their focus and investments to provide positive experiences and efficiencies for customers, largely through digital engagement. Forward-thinking organizations are transforming their digital solutions with the contextual personalization, productivity, scale, and speed needed to respond competitively to rising customer demands.

To better understand which digital transformation approaches could offer the biggest impact, the IBV surveyed 400 US-based executives and line-of-business leaders across multiple industries who work with their organization’s digital experience platforms or DXPs. For the purposes of this study, respondents were all using Adobe customer experience capabilities.

The power of prioritizing CX

Our data demonstrates a strong correlation between organizations in which digital transformation of CX is a formal business priority and financial outperformance. We call this group the “Experience Leaders.” These organizations report three times higher revenue growth for the last two fiscal years (3.6%) compared to other organizations in our survey (1.2%). More Experience Leaders also outperform their peers in innovation and customer satisfaction.

When organizations elevate an initiative to a formal business priority, they typically assign owners, budgets, resources, KPIs, and targets. And they hold program leaders accountable for results.

Experience Leaders report 3x higher revenue growth over the past 2 years than businesses that place less emphasis on CX enhancements.

This is an important distinction. Improving CX through digital means is not a hollow promise for Experience Leaders. They are investing their money, talent, and time to transform their organizations; and while our data indicates correlation, not causation, their performance outshines the other organizations in our sample—the Nonleaders— defined as those that have not raised this effort to priority status. Among Nonleaders, 70% say digital transformation of their CX is “important to their business,” but it doesn’t carry the weight of a formal business priority. And as many as 30% of Nonleaders say digital transformation to enhance CX is only “somewhat important,” and they “make improvements to it when they can.”

Organizations’ willingness to make the necessary ongoing investments in essential technologies and tools, such as DXPs, is one way they signal the extent of their commitment to improving customer centricity. DXPs, of course, are not new. Most organizations have deployed multiple DXPs from one or more vendors, including Adobe, for some time. But many organizations have been slow to leverage their DXPs to their fullest potential, which hinders their ability to make the CX enhancements they need.

5 levels of DXP maturity: More Experience Leaders have already reached the Mature phase.

In addition to identifying which approaches distinguish Experience Leaders, this report addresses the challenges that organizations face as they attempt to expand their DXPs and steps they can take to create truly differentiating capabilities and customer experiences that can drive more value.