Architecting a total experience

Recently, analyst firm Gartner introduced a new concept called total experience (TX), which they define as “superior interlinked experiences for customers and employees.” It’s a strategy driving digital transformations that unify enterprise tech, break down silos, and create seamless, intuitive experiences for customers, employees, and end users. Given the service gaps and challenges created in the past year, refocusing energy and resources on improving experiences is a timely strategy right now.

Identifying gaps and opportunities

These last 14 months were an anomaly for businesses and customers. Operations were disrupted, slowed, or came to a complete halt. Supply chains were fractured. Many employees were relocated, had their jobs redefined, or unfortunately furloughed. Customer anxiety and frustration rose. Call centers experienced wait times that stretched across days, not just hours or minutes. Businesses were doing their best to connect their on-premises and cloud systems to support customer and employee needs through newly implemented and highly distributed networks. However, service during this time was often the minimum necessary to just keep business going. Few businesses had the time or resources to optimize operations or deliver wow-factor experiences.

Now, as businesses begin to emerge from the disruption of the pandemic, many are accelerating investments in new cloud-based systems and online channels to make their enterprise architecture more flexible, scalable, and responsive. In fact, one study by McKinsey & Company suggests businesses are digitalizing and transforming at a pace that is seven years ahead of where they would have been. But leaders should be thinking beyond simply adding more digital channels, virtual phone systems, or cloud storage to extend operations and deliver better service experiences. To create truly transformative experiences – and transform operations – you need to have a holistic vision of change across your customer’s entire journey from end to end. This includes thinking about the way channels, data, systems, processes, and employees work in concert to make it easy to find the right information, initiate the best action, or deliver the right message at the right time in an intuitive and seamless way. 

Understanding the why

Providing differentiated and connected experiences requires a shift in thinking – away from the app-first, device-first, channel-first, and campaign-first approaches that seem to have become the norm over the past decade. Instead of basing decisions on what is technologically possible, you first need to understand the why. Define the specific, meaningful outcomes you want for your customers and your business. Perhaps the why is you want to increase conversion rates by better matching offers to your customers’ needs, or maybe you simply want to make it easier for a customer to change their own address online.

Whatever your goals, defining their purpose by focusing on the customer outcome will help you determine the optimal ways of achieving those goals – the journeys and microjourneys your customers will take; the interactions your employees will provide; the workflows required; and the technology necessary to deliver those wow-factor total experiences.

Rebuilding from the center out

To bring these experiences to life, you’ll need two critical components at the center of your enterprise technology stack:

• Real-time intelligence that sits at the center of your operations and can perceive what is needed for each interaction.
• Process automation capable of organizing all the disparate stages and steps needed to deliver on your defined outcomes. 

These combined capabilities make seamless employee and customer experiences possible – such as predicting why a customer is contacting you and proactively presenting relevant information and guidance to your employee; prioritizing and assigning work to the right people at the right time; suggesting the next best action for a customer based on their individual history and sentiment in that moment; or triggering an automated message based on defined criteria.

In this type of center-out business architecture, APIs connect the information and processes essential for operations – the data and events at the edge of your network and your databases, mainframes, ERP systems, and cloud-based systems – to the real-time intelligence that sits at the center. Architecting your enterprise system this way reduces friction, improves agility, and enables you to construct seamless experiences. 

Everyone is talking about the new normal. For businesses, it means adapting to an increasingly distributed way of working and growing customer preference for digital and mobile-centric interactions. The next big challenge is creating personalized customer relationships in a tech-saturated environment and helping your employees navigate all the systems and information. By starting at the end, with outcomes, and operating from the center out, you can orchestrate your operations to deliver timely, personalized, relevant actions that are immediate, intuitive, and effortless – the type of total end-to-end experiences that surprise and delight customers, make work enjoyable for your employees, and build brand loyalty.

Note: This article originally appeared in Forbes France.