In this first stage of maturity, the organization is not focused on XM as a strategic opportunity yet, although it may be supporting essential customer service or product development functions and may be investing in brand measurement, employee engagement, or other similar surveys.

As leaders begin to see the potential value in XM, they start to investigate how XM can help their organization and, consequently, assign an existing or newly created group responsibility for exploring what the organization needs to focus on to improve the experiences it delivers.

Once executives view XM as a strategic priority, the organization taps into full-time XM staff who guide efforts to mature and augment their insights programs, begin sharing role-based insights with a wider audience, and work cross-functionally to improve discrete experience pain points.

With robust XM practices in place, the organization systematically uses insights to identify and improve experiences and infuses XM into its overall strategic priorities, operational processes, and work routines.

In this final stage of maturity, XM skills are ingrained across the organization, and insights are captured across multiple, integrated touchpoints. The entire business is aligned around the value of XM.

Organizations often start applying the XM discipline in one area of their business or across a few tightly related areas. For example, a company may kick off its XM efforts by taking action based on the results of a relationship NPS survey and a contact center post-transaction survey or by conducting an annual engagement study and a quarterly employee pulse survey.

After building some XM maturity and seeing the value in the initial use cases, organizations will expand into other similar areas or enhance their existing capabilities. For instance, based on the results of its initial NPS and post-transaction surveys, a company may increase the number of its listening posts and add more advanced capabilities, such as text and predictive analytics.

Once there are several use cases underway, organizations move on to other experiences that impact the success of those activities. After expanding XM across multiple CX use cases, for instance, companies often recognize that they need to incorporate EX or BX activities into their efforts to achieve their CX goals.

After applying XM to several experience areas, people across the organization will have a sincere appreciation for how XM leads to better business performance by helping it continuously learn, propagate insights, and rapidly adapt. Consequently, they will look to apply XM to each new experience they create, whether it’s launching a new product or rolling out a new community fundraising event. They’ll also start to focus on experiences that are outside of their control but within their spheres of influence, such as the EX delivered by recruiting partners or the CX delivered by distributors or other channel partners.