What is total experience and why does it matter?

In their ebook “top strategic technology trends” for 2022, Gartner forecast that by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use “total experience (TX)” to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels (i.e. eagerness to promote the brand).

By “total experience” is meant an integrated and unified focus on the four main stakeholder experience facets or disciplines of a business: the experience of the customer (CX), that of the user (UX), that of the employee (EX), and the multi-experience (MX): technologies that span many devices and touchpoints.

Ultimately, these facets are strengthened and enhanced separately before integrating them into a holistic overall experience for everyone that engages with the brand.

Where does the total experience (TX) concept come from?

Most businesses have – until recently – believed that customer experience (CX) is the essential factor that drives business success. This was largely achieved through keeping tabs on – and responding to - customer sentiment, customer satisfaction, and similar metrics, in order to build a solid base of repeat business.

The underlying rationale is that repeat customers drive down marketing-related costs, while at the same time driving up sales; in short, a more profitable brand.

Some enterprises, however, also realized that a key – more fundamental - element is missing: employee experience (EX). In the words of Techtarget, if an employee failed to deliver a good customer experience (CX), it was “typically related to some obstacle in an employee’s workflow, in our processes or the technology keeping employees from delivering a good customer experience”. In other words, a good customer experience (CX) often feeds off good employee experiences (EX).

From there on it was a small step to realize that “interlinking the four disciplines (CX, EX, UX, MX) in a comprehensive business strategy provides exponential value compared to addressing each individually in a vacuum since the impact of the experience and influence each other”.

Total experience (TX) was born; and it matters, in short, because a more comprehensive and powerful picture can be strategized for a brand by leveraging the individual experience disciplines off each other.

How much does total experience matter?

While the need to integrate the four disciplines is easy to understand, one is left to wonder how misaligned the disciplines can be with each other.

TechTarget quotes a Zendesk survey to quantify the need: “Nearly half the consumers surveyed said helpful and emphatic agents are what matters most during a customer service issue, but more than 68% of respondents felt agents need more training”.

Seen from the other side, only 20% of the surveyed agents felt the quality of training was sufficient for delivering positive experiences, and 82% of the support teams were overwhelmed.

More indicative of the misalignment between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) in this case, one notes that the enterprise turnover “has become a big problem and a potential roadblock for CX success”.

In opposition to this, and citing a number of case studies of similar instances where total experience (TX ) was successfully engineered, Gartner comes to the conclusion that when “customers and employees operate from the same set of data, there's minimum chance for confusion or disruption".

User experience (UX) and multi-experience (MX)

The two lesser-known disciplines – user experience (UX) and multi-experience (MX) - have assumed growing importance since the drive towards digital transformation commenced, for the reason that the experience of digital modalities is something of an unknown quantity – even in 2022.

As such, they represent two relatively under-explored forces with the potential to contribute massively to total experience (TX) and deliver more comprehensive powerful brand strategies.

In fact, total experience (TX) would be all but meaningless in the digital age without taking user experience (UX) and multi-experience (MX) into consideration.

User experience (UX) deals with how a product is experienced by the user – especially in the digital realm. In order to clearly distinguish UX from MX, one should note that typically UX is the user experience of a brand on the user’s journey in a single channel (let us say a training app on a website), with potentially multiple touchpoints or interfaces.

Since an enterprise may offer several channels (all with several user interfaces – a physical training modality in workshop and training formats, in this case), it stands to reason that a good user experience (UX) needs to be created and optimized for all channels; taking it one step further, a good user experience needs to be unified across multi-channels.

Multi-experience (MX), on the other hand, deals with the enhanced delivery of an experience across multiple devices (e.g. mobile apps, websites), modalities (touch, gesture, voice), and touchpoints – simultaneously. Here the concept of channels is more or less ignored, while the focus shifts to creating and optimizing multi-touchpoint engagements and harmonizing the experience.

In the words of Gartner, multi-experience (MX) “replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology. It moves the burden of translating intent from the user to the computer”.

In conclusion: the pandemic – making total experience (TX) matter more

TechTarget makes the following observation: “While elevating customer experience has been in the works at companies for some time, the focus on total experience management from both a customer and employee perspective is relatively new, amplified these past couple of years by pandemic-sparked market shifts and employment trends”.

They continue by pointing out that it is well documented that consumers “have a desire for more personalized and streamlined digital interactions like they experience with Amazon and Netflix for everything from common retail and hospitality experiences to engage with healthcare and other service providers”.

But the matter does not end there. The pandemic has also changed the way workers think about their work experience after long stints working remotely from home – and now have the expectation of the same frictionless working environment after returning to the office again (often also harboring the expectation of fewer office hours).

In essence, this re-calibration of the workforce manifests itself as expectations of a better life/work balance, as well as skills and toolsets that enable more productivity with less input – all of which can only be achieved through working on a business strategy informed by the total experience.

REFERENCES:

Gartner (2022). Top strategic technology trends ebook.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Why-you-need-a-total-experience-strategy-to-unify-CX-and-EX