For large companies looking to undergo a digital transformation where their customer experience is concerned, the stakes have never been higher.

Digital disruption threatens to upend how legacy companies do business. Incumbents face competition from emerging players that have mastered the quickly evolving digital landscape. Customers now expect an effortless experience, and they want to be able to take advantage of the same digital channels they use to communicate with friends and family to speak to companies.

At Zendesk, we talk a lot about making customer experience better. This can be especially daunting for large companies that are just starting out on the path to digital transformation, with a diverse customer base, specialized teams scattered across the globe, and existing systems that have been layered on top of each other to compound complexity over time.

We designed this guide to help enterprise companies in the early stages of their digital transformation— organizations we’ll call Digital Transformers— understand the best next steps based on their unique profiles and to help them benchmark against their peers.

With data from the Zendesk Benchmark, our crowdsourced index of customer service interactions from more than 45,000 companies using Zendesk across the globe, we identified what separates customer experience leaders from the rest to pinpoint best practices for large companies starting down the path to modernize how they engage with customers.