Maturing your Experience Management program

Your Experience Management (XM) program has the potential to transform the way you do business. Learn how to mature your program, expand your capabilities, and increase the economic and strategic value you deliver to your organization.

Your Experience Management (XM) program has the potential to transform the way you do business. But like any organizational change, it won’t happen overnight. As you advance your XM capabilities, your program will deliver increasing economic and strategic value for your organization.

Today, most organizations try to improve experiences reactively, fixing isolated problems as they emerge in different parts of the business. While this type of fragmented approach may lead to some incremental improvements to some individual touchpoints, it doesn’t address any of the deeper, systemic issues that lead to poor experiences, such as misaligned incentives or fragmented operations. It also leads to problems like inconsistent experiences, wasted resources, and siloed insights.

For your business to move toward proactively designing and delivering the experiences that serve your customers’ and employees’ needs, leaders must rethink how their organizations operate by adopting a more flexible and human-centric approach to doing business and developing a new set of organizational capabilities, one that allows them to continuously sense, interpret, and respond to changes in their environment and deliver on what people actually care about – their experiences.

To facilitate this journey, XM Institute developed the XM Maturity Model, which is designed to guide organizations at every stage of their XM evolution. Rather than providing a rigid checklist of steps or tasks, this model offers a collection of guiding principles, frameworks, real-life examples, and recommendations — all based on over a decade of research with hundreds of organizations.

The blueprint for XM success

XM Institute created the XM Operating Framework, a blueprint organizations can follow to build the knowledge, skills, and practices to create a successful Experience Management program. This framework consists of three components:

• Competency: The skills and actions required to design and manage a successful XM program.
• Technology: The platform that allows XM practices to scale consistently across an organization.
• Culture: The mindsets and beliefs that encourage and nurture XM-centric behaviors across an organization.

To build a truly successful Experience Management program, you will need to advance all three components of the XM Operating Framework. While these components may develop at different rates, they must remain generally aligned to move forward. Although at certain points, one component may become the critical factor for advancement — like investing in technology to scale activities or securing buy-in from leadership to establish XM as a strategic priority.

A symphony orchestra is a great example of this concept in action. To deliver a magnificent performance, an orchestra needs three aligned elements: skilled musicians who work together harmoniously, mastery of musical technique, and quality instruments. While these elements can be developed independently, success depends on their seamless integration. The finest instruments are ineffective without skilled musicians to play them, just as virtuoso performers can't create beautiful music with poor-quality instruments. Moreover, even with exceptional musicians and instruments, if the orchestra members aren't working together as one unified ensemble, the performance will fall flat.

The path to program maturity

Like an orchestra, organizations don't achieve excellence in these three areas overnight. It takes time, investment, and ambition to develop and harmonize Competencies, Technology, and Culture. That's where the maturity model enters the equation.

The XM Maturity Model provides a roadmap organizations can follow to master the discipline of Experience Management by building their capabilities across the XM Operating Framework. Each of the three components has its own maturity framework, designed to help organizations identify and advance the specific elements needed in that particular element to achieve their overall XM program vision and goals. As organizations progress up the maturity curve, their program will move from scattered, reactive experience improvements to cross-functional, proactive experience orchestration until, ultimately, the entire organization competes on experience as its core differentiator. The more mature an XM program becomes, the more capable it is of delivering on the business value and transformative potential of Experience Management.

Maturity models are a useful tool for defining both a long-term vision and identifying the intermediate steps needed to get there. They offer a structured approach for evaluating current strengths and weaknesses and provide XM professionals with a communication tool they can use to build buy-in and alignment with stakeholders.

Building your competency levels

Competency refers to the skills and actions required to design and manage a successful XM program.

Although many organizations invest in improving customer and employee experiences, few are able to create lasting change. Why? Because they tend to tackle surface-level problems through disconnected projects, rather than addressing the fundamental issues that cause poor experiences in the first place.

To harness the true value of XM, organizations need a more systematic approach, embedding human-centric insights into everyday decision-making and operating processes across the business. While this approach will ultimately enable consistent, excellent experiences across every touchpoint and channel, getting there requires significant change. Organizations must reimagine how they operate across a number of different dimensions — from how they collect and use insights to how they design experiences and engage leaders and employees in these change efforts.

XM Institute has defined five Competency Levels that organizations typically progress through:

Assess your customer experience or employee experience program’s Competency levels to understand where you are today and make plans to mature your XM skills and practices.

Advancing your technological capabilities

Technology refers to the platform that allows XM practices to scale consistently across an organization.

Just as organizations rely on enterprise applications to manage their core operational functions — like finance, HR, and sales — they need a dedicated XM solution to manage people’s experiences at scale. This Platform should monitor and streamline XM data and activities, making insights available to every person and integrating them with processes across the business. Without this comprehensive technical foundation, an organizations’ understanding of experiences will remain fragmented and delayed, making it difficult to scale and sustain XM-centric skills, behaviors, and processes across the business.

An XM solution serves as the central nervous system for Experience Management, enabling the organization to continuously sense and respond to signals from its environment. It acts as a unified hub, consolidating diverse XM data – regardless of its form or source – into a single, accessible repository. Through powerful analytics and AI capabilities, it transforms this raw data into actionable intelligence and then delivers those insights in tailored formats to the right people and processes at the right time. This intelligence powers both human decision-making and automated workflows for real-time experience optimization. To fully unlock these competitive advantages, the XM solution must seamlessly connect with the organization's existing enterprise systems, such as CRM/HCM platforms, data warehouses/lakes, and workflow management tools.

XM Institute has defined five levels of XM Technology maturity, which organizations evolve through as their capabilities become progressively more sophisticated and integrated:

Reach out to your Qualtrics point of contact to understand your current XM Technology Maturity score based on your utilization of the Qualtrics® platform.

Cultivating an XM-centric culture

Culture refers to the mindsets and beliefs that encourage and nurture XM-centric behaviors across an organization.

To embed XM into the operating motions of the business — and thus realize it’s full economic and strategic value — organizations need to foster an environment that instills XM-centric mindsets and behaviors in their leaders and employees. That’s why culture is so important to XM success – it can either accelerate or inhibit the spread of XM practices and activities. It’s an organization’s culture that ultimately determines whether XM efforts gain momentum or fizzle out, and whether XM actions happen consistently across the organization or only occur in isolated pockets.

Culture represents a set of norms that synchronizes how groups of people behave – even when no one is looking. There is no perfect recipe for a single, ideal culture, as culture can look completely different across organizations. So it’s important to examine it across a couple of different dimensions. The first dimension of culture is its attributes, which are the nature of the shared thoughts, beliefs, and actions that happen across an organization, like sales-oriented or mission-driven. The second dimension is cultural intensity. This is the strength and consistency of the attribute across the individuals in the group. At the low-end of intensity, cultural attributes have little impact on employee behavior and end up as just “words on the wall.” At the high-end of intensity, the attributes are deeply rooted in the minds of employees and modeled at every level of the organization.

To help organizations nurture an XM-centric culture, XM Institute identified four attributes that are important for XM success. While every company’s cultural values should be unique, there are common attributes that we have observed among strong XM cultures. These attributes can complement an organization’s existing cultural values, map (directly or indirectly) to these values, or fill existing cultural gaps that are preventing people from truly embracing XM mindsets and behaviors:

• Purpose-Led: The organization operates consistently with a clear direction and a well-understood set of values.
• Human-Centric: The organization demonstrates empathy for its customers and employees.
• Change-Minded: The organization regularly makes improvements without significant internal resistance.
• Evidence-Minded: The organization relies on data and analysis to make key decisions.

Assess your organization’s culture to understand how it may help — or hinder — your XM success.

The XM program maturity model: putting it all together

While we've examined Competency, Technology, and Culture as individual components, true XM success requires advancing all three in concert. Each component reinforces and enables the others — Technology scales Competency, Competency shape Culture, and Culture sustains both technology adoption and skill development. As organizations mature their XM program, these components must evolve together to drive increasing levels of XM capability and value.

Let's examine how these elements typically progress through different stages of maturity. Remember, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to Experience Management. Every organization is unique. Use these stages as a guide, adapting them to fit your organization's specific needs and goals.

Stage 1: Getting Started

In the earliest stage of XM maturity, the organization takes an ad hoc approach to experiences, without any systematic focus on managing or improving them. The landscape is characterized by disconnected activities and technologies: individual teams might conduct surveys, track metrics, or design interactions, but they don't recognize these as part of a broader customer or employee experience management strategy. Each team uses its own basic tools to capture and analyze data — typically simple surveys with manual analysis shared through static reports. This fragmented approach means insights remain trapped in silos, making it impossible to develop a complete understanding of experiences or scale improvements across the organization.

Without coordinated XM competencies or technologies, teams can only react to obvious problems within their domain rather than address root causes or coordinate improvements across journeys. For example, the customer service team might track satisfaction scores using one survey tool while the digital team uses another platform to gather website feedback. Neither team can easily share insights with the other, leading to duplicated efforts and missed opportunities to identify broader experience patterns.

Your priorities at this stage:

• Just get started educating yourself and executives
• Review data that’s already been collected
• Focus on a few key listening points
• Share insights in a tailored format with select people
• Demonstrate value with quick wins
• Assess your organization's cultural readiness for XM
• Identify and leverage any existing cultural attributes that could support XM success

Stage 2: Establishing Your XM Program

As leaders begin recognizing XM's potential value, different areas of the organization start formalizing their approach to Experience Management. While activities remain siloed within departments, there's a shift from completely ad hoc efforts to more structured programs. This typically begins with appointing individuals or working groups to guide XM efforts — usually in addition to their existing roles.

Within these departmental silos, teams begin adopting dedicated XM solutions and establishing more consistent approaches to gathering and acting on feedback. For example, a customer service department might implement regular post-support surveys across email and SMS channels, while a digital team sets up website feedback mechanisms. These platforms enable basic analytics and trending, with insights shared through static dashboards to a limited set of users. While basic workflows exist to notify teams of issues, they're primarily designed for awareness rather than coordinated action.

This foundation-building stage also marks the beginning of cultural transformation. As frontline employees start receiving regular XM insights — even through basic dashboards — they begin developing more evidence-based mindsets. Teams that consistently use data to identify and fix common pain points demonstrate early signs of becoming more change-minded. However, these cultural shifts, like the technical and operational changes, remain isolated within departments rather than spreading across the organization.

This stage brings both progress and challenges. While departments can now centralize their listening activities and begin closing the loop on key issues, their efforts remain disconnected from other parts of the organization. Data silos persist, analysis stays surface-level, and improvements tend to address obvious pain points rather than systemic issues. Teams might use the same XM solution, but they're still operating independently — missing opportunities to understand end-to-end journeys or drive cross-functional improvements.

Your priorities at this stage:

• Establish basic XM governance structure and a strategic roadmap
• Launch targeted listening programs in high-impact areas
• Identify and act on quick-win improvement opportunities
• Build executive support through demonstrated ROI
• Connect XM efforts to existing cultural strengths
• Establish closed-loop processes for key touchpoints

Stage 3: Advancing Your Program

In this stage, the organization’s executives have elevated Experience Management to a strategic priority, and thus created a full-time XM team with the mandate to drive coordinated improvements across the business. This core team becomes the central force for XM transformation, orchestrating multiple critical developments.

First, the team establishes enterprise-wide XM governance, including a clear vision and strategy aligned with business objectives. This helps create a more Purpose-Led culture as employees connect XM to the organization's broader mission. The team also introduces standard methodologies, metrics, and tools, ensuring consistent practices across the company.

The team also helps consolidate the organization’s technology infrastructure, investing in a unified XM solution that serves as a single source of truth about experiences. By pulling together structured and unstructured feedback from multiple channels, the platform enables teams to shift from analyzing isolated interactions to understanding complete journeys. This comprehensive view, enhanced by advanced analytics and AI capabilities, helps teams identify Moments that Matter, uncover patterns across touchpoints, and predict future behaviors. With this holistic understanding, the organization can optimize XM investments across journeys, address root causes rather than symptoms, and deliver more consistent, on-brand experiences across all interactions.

The core team also starts focusing on employee engagement and activation, aligning teams across the organization around its XM vision and strategy. Through targeted communications, training programs, and recognition systems, they celebrate and encourage XM-centric behaviors, while deliberately nurturing cultural attributes that support XM success. This focused effort helps the XM message and mindset gain momentum throughout the business.

While the program drives significant improvements in this stage, several challenges remain. Teams often still focus on treating symptoms rather than systemic root causes, leading to improvements that, while valuable, can be uneven across the organization. Some groups excel at using XM insights and tools while others lag behind. The sudden wealth of data from the unified platform can overwhelm teams, making it difficult to identify and act on the most critical signals. And while the technology enables more sophisticated analysis and personalization, its capabilities remain constrained — AI and ML applications are still nascent, real-time adaptations are limited by static rules, and incomplete system integrations mean missed opportunities for automated actions and seamless experiences. Organizations might remain in this stage for some time as they work to overcome these challenges and build the foundation for more transformative change.

Your priorities at this stage:

• Expand XM listening portfolio to encompass a broader range of solicited and unsolicited sources
• Identify quick wins for AI use cases within existing XM tools and vendors
• Map XM efforts to business results through robust ROI modeling
• Establish systematic processes for prioritizing and tracking improvement initiatives
• Use human-centered design principles to improve end-to-end journeys
• Deepen systems integration to enable more automated, real-time actions
• Align recognition and rewards to encourage XM-centric behaviors

Stage 4: Modernizing Your XM Program

In this stage, Experience Management transitions from a separate initiative to becoming fully integrated into how the organization operates. XM insights, mindsets, and practices are embedded into the daily workflows of employees across the company, enabling everyone to deliver the right experiences at the right time.

This integration manifests in several ways. The Qualtrics XM Platform® now has bidirectional data flow with core business systems, delivering predictive and prescriptive insights directly within the applications where employees work. HR processes — from hiring and onboarding to performance management and compensation — reinforce XM principles. Operational processes are redesigned using customer and employee insights, with XM metrics reviewed alongside traditional business KPIs.

The program's structure reflects this integration. Instead of the core team driving most activities, the organization adopts a federated model where dedicated XM teams within business units lead their own initiatives while adhering to a centrally defined vision and standards. The core team shifts to a smaller, coordinating role, focusing on governance, best practices, and cross-functional alignment.

This deep integration nurtures a truly experience-centric culture. Decision-making at all levels becomes consistently evidence-based as teams have ready access to insights. Leaders actively champion XM principles and use metrics to drive accountability. Because XM insights are woven into daily workflows and processes, teams become naturally more change-minded — they can spot improvement opportunities faster, test new approaches more readily, and adapt their practices based on real-time feedback. The organization develops a rhythm of continuous improvement, treating experience data as a catalyst for positive change rather than a threat. While pockets of resistance may remain — typically among middle managers or in back-office functions — the organization largely operates with XM as a core capability rather than a separate initiative.

However, new challenges emerge at this level. Organizations must manage increasingly complex data integrations, ensure AI models remain interpretable and trustworthy, and overcome organizational barriers that might slow down innovation and adaptation. Success requires maintaining momentum while continuing to evolve capabilities and processes to deliver ever-better experiences.

Your priorities at this stage:

• Expand integrations between XM software and core business systems
• Integrate XM metrics and insights into core business and financial reviews
• Deploy predictive analytics that trigger automated closed-loop responses
• Enable real-time personalization through dynamic segmentation and AI
• Embed XM practices into key processes (e.g., hiring, product development, service delivery)
• Reinforce XM-centric behaviors through incentives and accountabilityAlign XM capabilities with strategic transformation efforts

Stage 5: The Future of XM

In this final stage, Experience Management becomes fully embedded in the organization's DNA. XM is no longer managed as a separate initiative but is simply how the business operates. Every employee — from frontline to C-suite — understands their role in delivering excellent experiences, and XM principles guide everyday decisions and practices across the organization.

To support this strategic focus, the Qualtrics XM Platform® evolves into a self-learning engine that continuously optimizes experiences in real-time. Through sophisticated AI capabilities, it not only predicts needs and automates responses but acts as a strategic advisor, simulating scenarios and recommending actions that drive innovation. Deep integration across all systems creates a unified ecosystem that enables the organization to sense and respond to changes with unprecedented agility.

This maturity enables the organization to continuously learn, rapidly adapt, and consistently exceed expectations — making experience excellence a sustainable competitive advantage. While few organizations have reached this level of maturity, it represents the ultimate vision of what's possible when XM capabilities are fully realized.

The path to XM maturity is a journey of continuous evolution. As you advance through these stages, your organization will develop increasingly sophisticated capabilities across Competency, Technology, and Culture. While every organization's path will look different, the end goal remains the same: to make Experience Management an integral part of how you operate, innovate, and compete. Use this model to understand where you are today, envision where you want to go, and plan the steps needed to realize the transformative potential of Experience Management.

Assess your customer experience or employee experience program’s Competency levels to understand where you are today and make plans to mature your XM skills and practices.