Preparing for Marketing in a Human Centric Future
August 25th ● Mark LavalleMost organizations struggle with digital transformation because their initiatives are traditionally focused on individual, customer, user, and employee experiences as separate disciplines.
Total Experience the idea that no experience operates in a vacuum. Employee experience impacts customer experience. User experience impacts employee experience, and so on.
Total Experience should not be confused with multichannel (or omnichannel), which seeks to unify an experience across different channels. In fact, Total Experience all but ignores the idea of channels completely. Instead, it aims to create or enhance multi-touchpoint engagements.
Gartner says that “Total Experience replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology. It moves the burden of translating intent from the user to the computer. “
Total Experience extends beyond perfecting the customer experience. It considers the employee and user experience and how this impacts the journeys your business offers. To effectively manage Total Experience, businesses will also need to close the loop of real-time feedback. Monitoring and responding to employee experiences in real-time will allow business decisions to be made with all data considered.
Total Experience asks us to reframe how we approach experience management altogether. But don’t worry! You don’t have to transform overnight. There are a couple ways to adopt a Total Experience approach now.
The trend towards Total Experience is a direct result of COVID-19 disruptions. Everything became very digital, very fast. And societal shifts had people rethinking their priorities. Suddenly, people started paying a lot more attention to how companies act in times of crisis, and how quickly they can adapt.
Before we go into how Total Experience can drive digital change in an organization, lets understand the 4 key elements.
What are the disciplines of the Total Experience?
Customer experience
Customer experience is defined as the sum total experiences a customer has throughout the process of purchasing from a brand or services.
Employee experience
Employee experience refers to the experience an employee has while delivering a product or services.
User Experience
User experience is defined as the experience a user has felt while dealing with a brand, product or services.
Multi experience
Multi experience includes all other intermediaries and their experiences except customers, users and the employees.
In earlier models, customer experience, user experience, and employee experience were treated and evaluated separately. Total Experience helps in interlinking these disciplines and gives the company a competitive advantage.
Total Experience helps to connect customers and employees by coupling their experiences and interaction, thus incorporating the complete business experience across all disciplines.
The Total Experience not only takes care of the customers but also provides a healthy environment for the employees too. This helps in building a company’s reputation and is responsible for the quality of its end services or product.
Once you have a complete map of your organization and what is needed for successful digital change, it’s time to create a hypothesis. Your hypothesis should be based on understanding what experience and process levers will drive the outcomes you want.
Here, it is important to distinguish these “levers” from specific capabilities or functionality, as we are looking to understand and map the desired actions of your customers.
These desired actions allow us to create a “business scaffolding” made up of levers—outcomes—that you can “hang” your experience design on. Now that we have this scaffolding, the user experience team can start to assign customer experiences that ”pull” these levers.
The goal is to align the individual value drivers to desired outcomes across your organization via the total experience.