The benefit of a total experience strategy, not just looking at the individual pieces of customer, user, and employee experiences, is that you build stronger robust digital experiences.
The key business drivers behind most digital change initiatives are to improve customer experience and/or decrease operational costs.
Yet, unlike the often-whispered fear, decreasing operational costs doesn’t mean replacing employees. Instead, it is about making the employees job of serving the customer, easier to perform.
The best business outcomes happen through customers connecting with your employees, to solve their problems.
The best digital experiences are designed to make that easier, faster and with better outcomes. From both an external and internal perspective.
The best business outcomes with an integrated strategy that aims to benefit everyone.
Gartner coined a phrase that consider this full approach called, total experience (TX). It’s a strategic approach to business experience design that considers multiple disciplines of customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), employee experience (EX) among others.
When you create digital experiences with an integrated strategy of total experience in mind, they are more likely to achieve the business outcomes you desire. A higher chance than if take a siloed approach to change.
Create digital experiences that are total experiences
When planning for a digital change initiative it is key to consider a total experience strategy in all aspects of the project. When you plan for the change, enable your employees to work with it, and measure the impacts.
Even when the primary focus of a single change initiative might center on improvements in one experience discipline, there are always impacts to the others.
Let’s consider an example.
Based on customer complaints from customers about the length of wait times calling in on support lines, you implement a self-service portal that provides a triage of issues. Providing quick resolutions to common issues, and a means to opt-in for a call back if the problem is larger.
Customers are satisfied because they more quickly solve their issues, rather than spending dreaded time on hold. Users quickly find what they need in a well designed portal. Employees are more satisfied because they are dealing less often with repetitive simple requests. And because they are likely speaking with customers who aren’t irate about being on hold so long!
So, even when the reason for the change comes out of a need to transform one experience, it benefits from a strategy that considers a total experience approach. Deciding on what you might need to include from each approach.
A robust approach includes that when you change one discipline, you bake in changes to the others.
Digital enablement in all your change initiatives
Key to any digital change is not only the technical updates. It’s also employee enablement. I refer to this as digital enablement.
When you make a change consider what is required to get employees up to speed and working with the change.
It might be as simple as an information communique, letting people know about a change and how it might impact them. It might be identifying the tools they need to work within the change. Possibly additional training. It might be to update procedures and workflows, to address a change in engagement.
Understanding what employees need to work with the digital change, and providing that, helps to increase the long-term benefit of the tool.
Let’s take our previous example of a self-portal triage. If in the course of the triage its determined the customer does need to talk to a “real person”, to fully resolve their issue, then everyone benefits if the employee has the background.
Maybe that means that you capture the context of the problem, and automatically pass into a case file any info already collected.
There is nothing more annoying to both the customer and the employee when information gathering needs to be repeated, when they connect!
The change then isn’t only the outward digital change. It also requires a backend integration to a support tool. As well as training on the tool for the employee.
Measure all experiences in your digital reviews
Another area to consider in our total experience approach is in how you determine the desired benefits are realized.
In our measuring and monitoring activities of the change initiative. Before, after and likely on an ongoing basis. I refer to this as a digital review.
You want to include KPIs that are reflective of the business objectives you are striving for in the change.
Yet also include surveys and measurements that provide you with information about the total experience. Possibly quantitatively. Or expressed in metrics, such as customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
Or digital review benefits form having the full picture of the impact of the change from a total experience perspective.
In Summary
When designing digital experiences, our change initiatives benefit from taking a total experience approach that includes:
- regardless of the initial driver, consider the impacts to multiple disciplines, including CX, UX and EX.
- scope for digital enablement of your employees so they have what is required to work within the change.
- measure and monitor the impacts of the change to both customers and employees.
Digital experiences help to further the business goals of improving customer experience and decreasing operational costs, including improving employee experience.
The benefit of a total experience strategy, not just looking at the individual pieces of customer, user, and employee experiences, is that you build stronger robust digital experiences.
Experiences that lead to achieving the best business outcomes.
Which is the point after all.
