Pawan Vadapalli is corporate vice president and global head, digital business services of HCLTech.
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The customer always comes first. But that's not the only important factor in running a successful business. Businesses must reconsider how they prioritize experience and adopt a systematic approach to managing experiences by recognizing the interconnectivity of all stakeholder interactions across channels, leading to better outcomes, growth, and market competitiveness.
That’s where the idea of total experience (TX) comes into play. This holistic business strategy brings together employee experience (EX), customer experience (CX), user experience (UX) and multi-experience (MX).
These principles of experience have traditionally operated in silos, with distinct organizational units drawing on disparate sets of data and pursuing different business objectives. By unifying the diverse experience aspects within a business, TX breaks down barriers between departments, eliminates unnecessary technology spending and provides valuable insights into customer loyalty and employee engagement. It also boosts business. In our recent report, we found that leaders who embrace TX to create personalized, value-driven experiences see up to a 57% return on their experience investment, almost 20 times that of beginners.
Every Kind Of Experience
The building blocks of TX start with the end user. CX encompasses a customer’s entire experience with a brand, including loyalty and satisfaction, and is enhanced by responsive support and personalized marketing. UX involves how customers interact with brands through functional interfaces such as apps, websites, products or services. Good UX means higher satisfaction and engagement; bad UX means a customer downloads a different app or heads to a competitor’s website.
The MX approach aims to deliver seamless and consistent customer experiences across different channels and devices, whether that’s through chatbots, AR devices or game consoles. Good MX lets users transition between these mediums and devices without disruption. Finally, EX is all about building a positive work environment and growth opportunities for employees. A positive EX enhances job satisfaction and productivity and reduces turnover.
Benefits Of The TX Approach
While TX strategies are still emerging, organizations are already seeing its potential to boost employee productivity, acquire and keep customers and gain a technological edge. A TX focus helps provide a seamless and consistent experience for customers, employees and users, allowing them to move smoothly between different channels without disruption.
TX helps ensure that brand identity, values and messaging are conveyed consistently across all interactions. By delivering a cohesive experience, organizations can foster stronger emotional connections with customers, leading to increased loyalty and higher retention rates.
By encouraging cross-functional communication, TX breaks down traditional silos that often exist between departments such as marketing, sales, customer service and IT. It can help identify and eliminate redundant or inefficient processes and enable better-informed decision-making through improved data sharing and collaboration.
Making TX Work
It can be a challenge to align multiple experiences across different departments, teams and touchpoints, especially for large organizations. A dedicated TX team or council can lay the groundwork for effective cross-functional collaboration and alignment. A clear change management strategy and comprehensive TX roadmap will help outline the specific steps for implementation. This enables the democratization of innovation and helps build a culture of continuous learning and adaptation.
From the top down, executive leadership should communicate this vision to teams while funding cross-functional initiatives aligned with high-impact value streams. At the same time, they should institute tactical roadmaps aimed at upskilling staff and enable cross-functional team collaboration—creating a cohesive experience that evolves with shifting customer needs.
TX is very data-heavy. Integrating customer, employee and operational data across multiple systems and platforms without compromising security and privacy makes it critical to invest in robust data management and integration technologies. This can include enterprise data warehouses, data lakes and data integration platforms. It’s also important to put strict data governance policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Putting a sweeping strategy like TX into action can require a fundamental shift in an organization’s culture and mindset. Employees may resist at first, particularly when a business has deeply entrenched silos or traditional ways of operating. To ease this transition, leaders should demonstrate a strong commitment to TX initiatives, clearly communicating their benefits to both customers and employees. Comprehensive training and education programs will help employees understand the concept and develop the skills to make it work.
Companies seeking to personalize and scale experience face a major challenge: the lack of metrics for measuring experience performance. Since this becomes a larger obstacle as firms advance in experience solutions, it’s crucial to assign performance measurement metrics up front, including customer satisfaction scores, employee turnover and productivity indicators.
Implementing a TX strategy involves technology, but it’s also a cultural shift that prioritizes a holistic approach. Most businesses already have the necessary technologies to implement it. By considering not just the end-user's journey but also the experiences of all parties involved in crafting that journey, we can foster loyalty, boost engagement and gain a competitive edge.
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