Customer expectations are shifting to digital, and Optimized organizations make it a priority to adapt. This focus on delivering better digital customer experiences gives them a competitive advantage against their less digitally mature peers.
When asked about a preference for paper or digital forms, 86% of respondents said they prefer digital. In fact, the majority of people across all stages of digital maturity said they prefer digital.
Yet organizations lower on the digital maturity scale don’t connect this preference to their customers’ experience. The less digitally mature an organization is, the more likely it is to believe paper has no negative effect on the customer. We found this surprising, as paperwork consistently came up in write-in answers as a major frustration for workers. They told us that paper-based processes make their work cumbersome, repetitive, and error-prone.
But we also found that the least digitally mature organizations—those that rely on paper the most—struggle more than any other digital maturity stage to meet customer expectations. 30% of those in the Limited stage find it very challenging to meet customer expectations, compared to 19% in the Optimized stage.
It’s clear that people want digitization. So why do a majority of less digitally mature organizations report that paper has no negative effects on their customers? It may be because they aren’t focused on creating a better customer experience.
Optimized organizations put a much greater emphasis on enhancing the digital customer experience than their less digitally mature counterparts. 86% of those in the Optimized stage report improving the customer experience as a top priority, compared to only 40% of the Limited stage.
Optimized organizations understand the value of creating positive digital customer experiences, and they know digitization plays a role in this. We see that the more digitally mature an organization is, the more likely it is to use workflow automation to provide better experiences to its customers.
Leaders at more digitally mature organizations know these digitization efforts are creating better customer outcomes because they evaluate the customer experience. 67% of Optimized and Refined organizations analyze customer feedback and data, compared to 56% of Invested and only 29% of Limited. Thanks to this data, digitally mature organizations are able to identify how technology, workflows, and processes impact customer experience and satisfaction.
