Total experience is a philosophy that ties together customer experience, employee experience, user experience, and multi-experience.
In big businesses, such thinking goes against the grain. After all, traditionally, they operate in a highly fragmented fashion.
Sure, customer experience is becoming more of a team sport. But, HR is still principally in charge of caring for employees and product teams dictate the user experience. Moreover, IT teams often lead multi-experience projects, detached from the customers that switch between digital touchpoints.
Such siloes resulted in progress in one part of the experience, undermining another.
A classic example is a company adding a digital channel to further the customer experience. Yet, in doing so, they unwittingly open the business up to a new audience, increasing contact volumes and employee workloads.
Furthermore, the channel may operate independently. So, when customers switch between them, the multi-experience breaks down.
This scenario emphasizes how each experience is so delicately intertwined, and when one is out of sync, a domino effect pushes down the others.
Total Experience to the Rescue
By 2024, organizations providing a total experience will outperform competitors by 25 percent in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX – according to Gartner.
Such forecasts emphasize the value of total experience, connecting all four experiences to power better customer, employee, and business outcomes.
Yet, this does not happen by magic. Total experience must sit deeply within an organization’s culture, so each department takes a holistic view when making significant decisions that impact various experiences.
As such, they consider more than just one audience but the intertwining intersections of multiple audiences. By doing so, businesses avoid unexpected issues when adapting experiences and spend much less time firefighting.
Absolutely, it may add more time to experience design processes, but it wins this back by negating unexpected issues that impact mission-critical outcomes.
As a result, teams grow more aware of how their actions influence others, processes become slicker, and everyone gets happier by the day.
At least, that is the theory; executing is always more tricky. Thankfully, Quantiphi has established three pillars for total experience transformation.
Three Pillars of Total Experience Transformation
1. Modernization Strategy
Total experience is not something an organization can buy its way into. It requires a modernization strategy, which first ensures that various functions understand what each experience means.
This starts by getting to grips with each of the following definitions, as put forward by Gartner:
- Customer Experience: Understand several dimensions of customers: their wants, needs, expectations, beliefs, feelings, and past experiences.
- Employee Experience: Increase employee satisfaction, retention, skill level, and productivity.
- Multi-experience: Interact across multiple touchpoints, mobile apps, web augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), and wearables with a combination of approaches: voice, touch, vision, etc.
- User Experience: Combine business objectives and user needs, and design best practices to optimize digital products.
Some may combine various experiences already. Indeed, CX design teams may already consider MX and UX. But, without tying it to EX, they fail to create a “moment of truth” where they consider how their decision-making impacts each experience and critical outcomes.
Voice of the customer and employee research is helpful, so each function understands the drivers of positive experiences across the board. Thereafter, businesses can set objectives across each experience, share a unified view of the total experience, and measure their progress.
In doing so, various functions can see the true impact of their actions, gain a more holistic view of performance, and collaborate to meet mutual goals.
2. Technology Stack
With total experience, everybody is connected. Technology takes this beyond a philosophy, ensuring every function understands how it impacts each experience.
As such, it opens up a view of the entire business forest for different departments, so they go beyond looking and analyzing the individual leaves on the trees.
Yet, which technologies supplement this composable enterprise mindset?
As the contact center collates most insights across each experience, a CCaaS solution that connects data across the front and back office is critical.
Within this, channels will ideally interlink within an omnichannel environment, so data passes between them and no precious experience insights get stuck in siloes.
A business intelligence solution can run these insights across various departments, combine other relevant data sources, and deliver a unified view of the “business forest”. With such technology, companies can ensure total experience becomes a team sport.
Of course, many other central solutions bolster a total experience strategy. CRM, ERP, and various other data applications are excellent examples.
3. Solution Vendors
As businesses build a platform for total experience modernization, they often uncover a need to implement new solutions, integrate channels, and connect departments.
Such a prospect is challenging for those attempting to reduce complexity and limit costs.
As a result, many will implement native solutions from single enterprise vendors. Yet, in doing so, businesses often miss out on the benefits of combining best-of-breed technologies.
A better and smarter approach to this modernization challenge would be to partner with solution vendors who have the necessary expertise in contact center automation and enterprise change management. Such vendors not only come with the right technical know-how but also provide benefitting business strategies for adopting new technology in a sustainable fashion.
Contact Center solution vendors like Quantiphi are among many in the market that provides business advisory services and technical development support for achieving total experience transformation.
Indeed, their newly launched Experience Management Platform – Qollective.CX is a targeted offering that solves many of the enterprise experience modernization challenges using AI.
Final Thoughts
Moving forward, the Total Experience approach is expected to become the industry norm for elevating experiences from the inside out for enterprises.
The right strategy, technology, and advisory will be of paramount importance in bringing about this much-needed transformation.
As organizations explore solution providers, it is advisable to look for vendors and solution partners that have proven contact center capabilities.
At the end, valuing all experiences in an organization will prove instrumental in improving each experience at the granular level.
