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.