“When you look forward two years and think about your aspirations for your consumer digital experiences, what will inhibit you from reaching those goals?”

Dozens of digital business and experience executives across numerous industries and geographies shared their thoughts with us about digital experience’s current state, emerging tech, priorities, and inhibitors. I’ve summarized the findings in my Digital Experience Executive Conversations series.

What is this series about? Across four reports, I outline executives’ responses by sector, including banking, insurance, retail, travel, and product and services firms. Here is a snapshot of my findings:

  • What is the state of digital experience? Few executives interviewed are satisfied with their companies’ digital experiences. The combination of emerging technology and evolving customer expectations constantly changes what is possible — and therefore what they need to do to win, serve, and retain their customers. These executives strive to smooth bumpy customer journeys by exploring what customers do as they cross channels and focusing on anticipating customer needs to serve them proactively. Most executives focused on gaps rather than their accomplishments, but each industry had a different focus that captured their attention.
  • What are the top digital experience priorities? All executives are focused on improving experiences for their customers, helping them achieve outcomes, and making daily tasks easier. Over the next two years, they want to shore up the basics and develop systems of insight and engagement that deliver more personalized and dynamic experiences in the right moments.
  • What are the primary inhibitors to achieving consumer digital experience goals? Across industries, executives noted culture, leadership, and budget as primary inhibitors to achieving their aspirations. Culture rose to the top in part because executives felt the least empowered and skilled to drive change in this area at the scale needed.

Tell us what you think! Forrester is launching its latest executive survey to explore how enterprises are using mobile devices, platforms, channels, and interfaces to deliver digital experiences to its consumers — including notifications, chat, voice, apps, and more. It also dives into companies’ current and planned ability to deliver today’s and tomorrow’s digital experiences. To show our gratitude for completing the survey, Forrester will provide each participant with a one-page scorecard summarizing their relative maturity across industries with a qualitative assessment of how they’re doing within their own industry.