Total Experience (TX) bridges user, customer, and employee experience disciplines into one transformational experience. This experience unifies every customer touchpoint; aligns the brand across every channel; harmonises business functions; and establishes trust within every possible journey. A TX strategy is focused on the goal of creating stronger, holistic experiences for anyone who engages with your brand.
Establishing a framework is a great foundation for your TX strategy. Whether your business operates on B2B or B2C model, the same five elements are key to a winning TX strategy.
Evaluate
Every experience decision starts with a 360-degree view of the customer and the employee. Avoid guessing here. Take time to really understand your customers and how they perceive your brand. Define your current state, audit your current capabilities, and determine how, or even if, you’re delivering on your brand promise.
It is imperative that the information you assemble and utilise in this stage does not solely come from business intelligence. If you’re only talking to those close to your business processes, you’re getting a skewed picture of how your brand is perceived. Go straight to the customer. You will get useful insights into design process and ones that are going to fuel discussion.
The evaluation stage includes understanding how the business runs. As no single person fully understands the entire operating process, be sure to solicit input from all departments and levels. Use Voice of the Employee, Voice of Business, Voice of Market, and Voice of Process/Ops programs. By auditing and benchmarking, you’ll be better prepared to map, test, and refine the TX journey going forward.
Envision
Now your organisation has a shared understanding of the need, opportunity, and value for transformation. So, it’s time to ideate a scalable TX that will simultaneously drive growth and reduce costs.
To articulate your TX strategy and vision, use tools like persona development and customer journey mapping. The resulting blueprint should show the experience both from the perspective of the person receiving it (consumer) and from the person delivering it (employee or partner). Note where friction is being created.
Friction may be caused by the inability of a customer to switch communication channels when navigating an issue. Or, internal barriers between departments that results in duplicated efforts.
The strength of your operating model – including the structure and allocation of people, processes, information, and technology – is critical to success during this process. This model may need to shift to best support your evolving TX strategy. This includes the architecture of your organisation; how you measure success; your financial model; and your branding. These steps don’t all need to be taken overnight, but they do need to be planned for.
Execute
In this stage of the framework, you may be building new sales and service delivery models. In this stage, teams typically implement of design-thinking tools to create new value and eliminate friction across the enterprise or ecosystem.
To organise this program, it helps to think about execution in categories. Four that are often required include Sales/Service Experience, Operations Excellence, Digital Optimisation, and Analytics and Modelling. This is not an exhaustive list, however. The categories you use should be based on the unique vision, blueprint, and transition roadmap you laid out in the previous step.
Every category – and every initiative within those categories – should drive measurable results for your customers, employees, and/or business, and tie back to your overarching brand promise and experience strategy.
Engage
Your next move is the same as your first: Listen. Using your go-to VoC and VoE tools, in addition to business intelligence, to determine how well the experience is working.
- Are customers still experiencing pain points?
- What is the conversion rate for website visitors, and can it be improved?
- What tasks on the backend can be streamlined?
- What questions or concerns are constantly being raised by consumers or staff?
- Are your systems speaking to each other so you’re tapping into the full value of your analytics?
- Is your business growing with scale and stability?
By asking these questions, you can help ensure the experience is exactly what people need it to be – now just what leadership wants it to be. By consistently and clearly engaging your number-one business assets (your customers and employees), you’re building satisfaction, loyalty, and in turn revenue.
Evolve
Changes and behaviours shift, you will need to adapt the experience to continue to meet your customers’ and employees’ evolving expectations and needs. The feedback you gather during the Engage stage will inform and guide this continuous progression.
Once you have a foundational Total Experience and have captured your baseline results, you can begin implementing the next generation of TX improvements you dreamed up in the earlier stages. Pilot new strategies, explore new platforms, or test innovative ways of rewarding returning customers and efficient, effective, and customer-centric employees. You can always return to your baseline if needed. Continually evolving your Total Experience shows you’re listening and learning. It goes a long way toward engaging and delighting everyone who interacts with your brand.