Sven Esser
3 min readJul 15, 2020

It’s not a secret, most of us agree that digitalization isn’t where it should be. The digital maturity of companies is often at the beginning and the speed of digitalization is low. How does it look like with the CX maturity?

Transformation is a new buzzword, it took place since thousand of years. It is a holistic topic which takes place bottom up. This means we need to pick single topics and have a look how to transform them . Business as usual is great for a short time, but that’s not where innovation will be born.

Digitalization and digital transformation are two entirely different topics. While digitalization is more about digital tooling or IoT, digital transformation is about adopting business models with the customer experience in it’s heart.

Let’s get back to the maturity of digitalization. Through the current Corona crisis we see each day how fast companies must transform and develop their digital maturity. They can’t do just one step after the other, they need to do 3, 4 or more steps at one. Why? Because they they slept for a long time and have been cautions with investments. This is now — where they must transform — a very difficult time.

Do we want to repeat this mistake? No? Ok, then let’s have a look into Customer Experience!

https://static.esser.me/2020/04/cx_s_experience_3.mp4

Thanks to Brian Solis for this great clip!

Brian is one of the very rare CX evangelists we have with an impressive broad mindset. Just a couple of days ago he joined Salesforce as the “Global Innovation Evangelist.

See his profile at LinkedIn & Twitter

This video shows us that there is a difference between “Customer Experience” and “Customer’s Experience”. Often we talk about CX and have our own classes on. Companies try to build up an experience into the mind of the customer. This is more or less Brand Experience and not Customer Experience. We need a hard shift in mindset if we talk about CX. Let’s give some examples.

  1. How can we as a company build Customer Experience if we are not Customer Centric? …and how can we be Customer Centric if our employees have corporate goals in their contracts or goals?
  2. If we want to be customer centric and build CX we need to re-org our company. No more sales, marketing,… departments, because they are also aligned on corporate goals What we need is a CX department which places the customer into the center and will be supported by back-office pole who are looking about things we have done in sales, marketing,…

The shift in mindset is important. If we don’t do it now we will fall into the same trap as we did it now during the Corona crisis with digitalization

So first of all the maturity of transformation is in our head. What we need then is to identify the key topics like CX and some other. Then we should build a maturity model for each of them as well as a clear plan and timeline how to grow in it step by step.

Stay healthy, be open-minded and keep on moving forward!

Sven Esser
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Passionate about Customer Experience & Digital Transformation