Why You Should Prioritise Your Total Experience Strategy in 2024 and Beyond - Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the concept of Total Experience (TX) and the value in addressing both Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) in an organisations digital strategy. In the second part of this series I talked about how the balance between CX and EX strategies is vital to ensure that the needs of both audiences are met and that the organisation achieves the highest return on a TX strategy.

In the third part of the series I'll be discussing two aspects of the Total Experience strategy - Prioritisation and Impact.

Prioritising Total Experience

Firstly, Prioritisation focuses on the key deliverables that provide value to the Employee and Customer sides of TX. This can be easily summarised as delivering capabilities that provide employee focus on collaborative process and engagement and capabilities for customers that deliver service excellence as per the following diagram:

TX: Multi-Experience Ecosystem

Key to the delivery of a Total Experience (TX) capability is the ability to provide consistent and seamless engagement for customers, suppliers (partners) and employees. TX must provide an OmniChannel capability supporting secure browser and mobile-application engagement that delivers collaborative engagement AND service excellence securely and reliably.

TX: Employee (+Supplier) Experience

Effective Employee and Supplier experience is delivered through collaborative engagement capabilities through any channel on any device. The digitisation of processes that deliver traditional skilled-based outcomes through an easy to consume, connected user experiences enable the right information to be accessible to the right people at the right time. Collaboration between the organisation and its employees and suppliers/business-partners through guided experiences and processes drives consistency and predictability leading to increased value and outcomes - revenue, retention, growth, loyalty etc.

TX: Customer Experience

The recent global pandemic dramatically accelerated digital customer engagement and expectations for the ways that interactions take place. The rapid development of digital processes and services during the pandemic led to less need for physical interaction - replaced by online capabilities. Whilst the pandemic is firmly behind us, organisations continue to double-down on digital engagement for a variety of reasons however - much of the work done during the pandemic is being revisited. The primary reasons for this include accessibility and complexity in the way that digitisation was achieved - many processes developed were only accessible by a subset of the customer base who were not ready (and remain) for the accelerated migration from physical to virtual processes.

Customer Experience (CX) needs to deliver simple, helpful, respectful and transparent processes to be effective. Access to information and processes should be easy and clear, complexity should not be a component of the CX digital channels. For customers to make the right decision to do business with a supplier - the right content needs to be available and the customer needs to be able to trust what they read. Guides and FAQ's as well as digital ChatBots take the place of traditional/physical interactions so need to be current and contextual to customer enquiries. Processes need to be delivered via 'guided-experiences' that clearly explain the purpose and outcome to be expected, capture information from the customer seamlessly and without duplication - leveraging information already known about the customer where available.

The Total Experience Impact on Digital Services

Getting Total Experience (TX) right across Customer, Employee and Supplier Experiences is not an easy task but when done right - leads to valuable positive impacts as per the following table:

Ultimately, successful delivery of a TX capability reduces complexity in doing business internally or externally. Effective collaboration and engagement coupled with service excellence results in positive impact on Employee, Supplier and Customer experiences delivered by the organisation through its digital channels. People are able to achieve more with less effort, complexity is reduced, contextual guidance ensures that processes are delivered and followed easily - Self-Service through digital channels becomes a standard operational outcome.

Organisations that are not focusing on Total Experience will struggle in the modern digital marketplace whilst those that do focus will succeed and become dominant market leaders.