Employee experience joins CX for total enterprise view

One of the many impacts of the Covid pandemic was to accelerate a nascent trend among progressive organisations towards adopting the discipline of so-called “total experience”.

As to what total experience (TX) is and why it is important, Joana de Quintanilha, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, defines it as “understanding customers’ lived reality, and adjusting your people, processes and technology to deliver a coherent brand experience across all touch points and silos that makes sense from a customer point of view”.

To do so requires recognising, and catering to, customer needs and goals, but also understanding the wider context in which they experience the company’s products or services. This means being aware of the entire customer journey from end to end, which includes any components provided by third parties, such as partners or outsourcing suppliers.

But Bruce Temkin, head of the Qualtrics XM (Experience Management) Institute, takes the definition a step further. He sees TX as a discipline consisting of four pieces of a puzzle: customer (CX), employee (EX), brand (BX) and product experience (PX).

They are all made up of particular competencies that need to be mastered, but they also require a suitable culture to support them organisationally and software platforms to automate relevant processes and collate applicable data from across the business.

In implementation terms, maturity in the CX area to date is “moderate” as it has been around for a good number of years now, says Temkin, although the practice is generally further advanced in the UK and Europe than in the US. The last couple of years have also seen EX uptake accelerate, but its progress is still much less advanced than its older cousin.

PX, which is more closely related to CX, meanwhile, is mostly very early in the adoption cycle, while BX, which is closer to EX, “still looks the same as it did a decade ago”, with the focus mainly being on monitoring rather than taking effective action, says Temkin.

But, in practice, taking effective action is a core consideration in getting TX initiatives right as it is one of the three core components of the discipline. These are:

• Continuous learning – This involves understanding what the people you care about – customers, employees, partners and prospects – think and feel on an ongoing basis.
• Propagating insights – This entails sharing these concerns, interests and requirements across the organisation so that each staff member is aware of them and is primed to do something about them.
• Adapting rapidly – This chunk requires the most work because it is about implementing the changes the company needs to make in order to act on the insights it has received as effectively as possible.

Temkin says this methodology should be applied consistently to each piece of the TX puzzle, with a particular focus on CX and EX, at least initially, as they make up the biggest chunk of the whole.

“TX comes in when you look at CX and EX together, and it’s particularly important in areas with front-line employees, such as banks, retailers, hospitality and travel, especially in contact centres,” he says. “But while a lot of companies believe they offer a good EX, for example, because they periodically survey employees, they don’t treat it as a discipline.”

While Temkin estimates that 40-50% are doing “some level of good CX – although it tends to be in pockets, rather than across the board”, the figure drops to more like 20% in EX terms. This means that, although work on a combination of the two is seeing “rapid adoption”, TX implementation overall is still “very low across most organisations”.

De Quintanilha agrees, but says the pandemic accelerated interest in the area as many organisations “experienced how drastically customer behaviour could change”.

This led them to appreciate the benefits of being able to see and understand what was happening in both CX and EX terms, enabling them to identify opportunities and risks, prioritise, focus resources, and adapt. The same dynamics are likely to be true if the widely predicted global recession takes hold, despite straitened budgets, she says.

“We’re seeing an acceleration in terms of companies investing in things like customer journey analytics or orchestrating teams to deliver on TX, which is a sign that interest is growing,” says de Quintanilha. “But it requires a total organisational transformation, so it won’t happen overnight. These are very new ways of organising, but there are some pioneers leading the way.”

The first step on the journey, says Temkin, is to develop a clear vision of “how delivering better CX and EX is going to help you differentiate yourself and succeed”. He adds: “It takes time and energy and thinking about the future of the business, so, like any change, it requires effort.”

It also requires creating a (small) cross-discipline team to bring about change. Temkin recommends identifying “people in the organisation that are already driving change in different areas and have connections across the company”.

But as Ash Finnegan, digital transformation officer at consultancy Conga, points out, it is also important to take a “crawl, walk, run” iterative approach, focusing on one prioritised business area at a time, rather than trying to do everything at once – not least because of the significant amount of culture change required.

What typically slows people down most, she says, is “not knowing where to start as they don’t ask the right questions from a business perspective and not including others in the conversation”. Possible useful questions here include what are customers’ pain points, what isn’t working and what does good look like.

Another key challenge is that most companies’ organisational structures are based on individual functions, rather than being focused on supporting the customer journey, which leads to silos and gaps in CX terms. Even when cross-discipline teams are established, they often simply “become an overlay on traditional working practices, which means things like targets are still based on old metrics and processes”, says de Quintanilha.

A key problem here, she says, is that “companies don’t always embrace a bold enough vision or understand the amount of change management required to work cross-functionally like a well-oiled machine”.

But to get it right, de Quintanilha acknowledges that employees have to “work in a very different way”. As a result, understanding and optimising the EX is also vital. Two employers that have gone down this route are Recognise Bank and Experian.