Forrester recently surveyed 148 technology, marketing, and business professionals with decision-making roles in digital experience (DX) delivery technologies, and asked them about their strategies for the coming 12 months. In our recently published report, one of the more interesting trends we found was the “people” issues remain top of mind for most organizations. Our qualitative and inquiry data backs this up, as we often here that people, process, and cultural issues (not technology issues) have stifled progress towards delivering great digital customer experiences.

Our survey found that organizations were concerned about people issues such as:

  • Dividing up work between different groups. Digital experience has moved from a purely marketing centric function, to a decidedly cross business issue that touches everyone in the organization. This includes technology management, business, marketing, and sales groups. But this cross-business shift toward digital experience delivery presents significant challenges around coordinating work between various groups. Accordingly, this was the number one people-related pain point: 60% of respondents said dividing roles and responsibilities between marketing, technology management, and the business was their top challenge.
  • Finding the right talent to implement and deliver experiences. Many technology management organizations focus on back-end systems like enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. But the world of digital experience delivery places a premium on new techniques, and many application development and technology management groups lack these skill sets and have difficulty hiring for them. Only 3% claimed it was easy to staff for their digital experience delivery roles. Specific skillsets that were challenging for our survey respondents to hire for included UX development, data scientists, application developers, and business analysts.  
  • Choosing the right services firm. Delivering digital experiences is complex, requiring support for strategy, design, technology implementation, and measurement (among other things). Organizations rarely can do everything themselves: only 6% of our survey respondents said they did it all themselves. But it’s not always easy for organizations to find the right services firms. Our survey showed it was hardest for firms to find services firms with deep expertise in things like customer experience strategy and planning, technology implementation, UX design and development, and systems integration.  

Our latest report details many more of the findings, including data around key technology priorities, digital experience technology decision makers, organizational models, technical barriers to success, and outsourcing models. Check it out, and as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.