These days, successful companies are investing in digital user experience and because they are doing so, they are becoming more and more successful day after day. According to a recent study by Primitive Logic where they looked at the performance of companies over the past ten years, they found one group was able to achieve exceptional results when compared with other companies.

This group that they referred to as Digital Experience Leaders excel at delivering high quality digital experiences and because of that, have been able to achieve superior financial results, beating the market soundly year-after-year. When comparing these Digital Experience Leaders performance against the S&P 500 index over a 10-year time period, the Digital Experience Leaders grew 276% more than the S&P 500 index.

Looking at how these companies were able to achieve these results, certain key factors stand out.

Customer Empathy

What makes Digital Experience Leaders different? The most valuable insight that came the research is that these companies observe and empathizing with users. Understanding how people live their lives and how people work, do business or go to their day jobs daily and how people engage with products they are interacting with, they gather valuable information. Using this, they are able to empathize and create experiences no one ever expected.

According to Sharon Carmichael, Sr. Design Manager at Intuit, "We have created a culture of empathy with customers across the company. Everyone, from product managers to designers is actively encouraged to observe customers in their environment."

End to End View of the Journey

Out of the research it was very obvious that brands with poor user experiences lacked cross-organizational collaboration. They often treat different customer touchpoints as separate entities, rather than seeing a continuous customer journey. Because of this, these companies are unable to present a unified front to their consumers.

"Companies that succeed in delivering holistic user experiences encourage stakeholders from all business units to collaborate on mapping the user journey" according to Linda Sum, Senior UX Manager at American Express.

Digital Experience Leaders have a high level of collaboration between different groups within the organization. Many even have employees with dedicated roles studying full customer journey and how to improve it. Your business will want to meet to discuss your digital projects and how the impact the overall customer experience. Looking at your customers' user experience in its entirety will enable you to see a more seamless user experiences can be created.