Experience based acronyms seem to be coined more often than cryptocurrencies, but customer experience, or CX may have outlived its usefulness. The term can no longer encapsulate the variety of strategies, tactics and tools that exist to deliver a unified, end-to-end experience for all stakeholders – from consumers to clients to employees to guests to patients.
So yet another term has been coined – Total Experience (TX)
What is Total Experience?
In a B2C context, the relationships and journeys are relatively simple. The concept of a customer and a brand are understood and the touchpoints have followed a predictable pattern. In the simplest of businesses, the customer experience considers how consumers feel at each part of the marketing funnel.
But most organisations are not so simple, and customers may be internal. More recently, the experience of employees (EX) as they perform their roles has become part of the experience strategy mix. In industries like healthcare – patient experience has different nuances to a more transactional B2C business. Many of the best CX practitioners don’t even consider B2B customer experience.
The Covid Pandemic focused attention on a conflict within organisations – who is more important? Customers or employees?
Total Experience (TX) seeks to provide a framework that works for the benefit of all through a holistic approach to all of these experiences – from CX to EX to Multi-Experience (MX) which will become more important as organisations move into the metaverse.
Just to throw another acronym into the experience alphabet soup – Multi-experience is more aligned with User Experience or UX – Gartner said in 2020 “Multiexperience replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology. It moves the burden of translating intent from the user to the computer.” But it’s hard to see where that has actually been applied with success.
Total Experience Strategy – A Cookie Cutter Template
The answer to the question – who is more important? Customers or employees is of course – both. So the Total Experience (TX) strategy is to see them as the same thing. The templated version of this strategy is as follows…
Employee Experience as Brand Building
Consumers care deeply about how corporations treat their employees and brands can be destroyed by putting efficiency and profit above the wellbeing of employees. Brands like Amazon and P&O Ferries have seen consumer backlash and boycotts, but it’s more basic than that. Employees that feel good about their jobs are more likely to be ambassadors. Happier employees leads to better customer interactions too.
An Organisation-wide Approach to Experience (Breaking down Silos)
Every person in the organisation, from C-suite to compliance, from finance to facilities management. This is especially so in a post-pandemic world where people are asking – why does it have to be done that way? And the answer ‘Because that’s the way its always been done‘ is not good enough.
Decisions made in offices on white-boards and design thinking workshops can have a massive impact on experience. The expensive work of marketing to acquire customers and build a brand can be shattered by not thinking about the impact of a decision on experience.
Total Experience Strategy Best Practise
Experience Benchmarking
Using the Total Experience Typology Assessment, organisations of all sizes can get a forward looking indicator for experience. Alongside metrics like CSAT, NPS and Customer Effort Scores (CES), the experience assessment identifies individuals, teams and organisational preferences and and attitudes towards experience.
Using Total Experience OKRs
Once you have measured where your organisation sits in relation to strengths and weaknesses pertaining to experience you can put in place measurable objectives using CX OKRs. Using a total experience platform, you can see the results of experience initiatives – from removing friction to empowering employees to training and development.