From shopping to medical consultations to conferences, the pandemic has accelerated our shift to the virtual world. Customer experience is evolving rapidly, and companies have to adjust to new customer attitudes and expectations. This is our quick guide to total experience within your business strategy.
With customer and employee interactions taking place via mobile, virtual, and distributed platforms, business must keep up. The way to do that, according to Gartner, is through total experience, or TX, which combines multi-experience (a whole experience across a variety of digital touchpoints) with customer, employee, and user experience.
According to Gartner, organisations that provide a TX will outperform competitors across key satisfaction metrics over the next three years, making it an integral part of business strategy.
The research firm explains that organisations need a TX strategy as interactions become more mobile, virtual and distributed, mainly due to COVID-19: “TX strives to improve the experiences of multiple constituents to achieve a transformed business outcome. These intersected experiences are key moments for businesses recovering from the pandemic that are looking to achieve differentiation via capitalising on new experiential disruptors.”
The goal of TX is to drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Looking to 2022, Gartner predicts that organisations will increase revenue and profit by achieving adaptive and resilient TX business outcomes.
TX involves more than just taking care of customers – it means providing an optimal environment for employees and users too – how companies treat their staff is recognised as a bigger factor in customer experience than ever before.
According to a McKinsey study: "One-fourth of consumers believe that a company’s treatment of its employees has increased in importance as a buying criterion since the crisis started. Companies’ actions in this [the pandemic] time, especially toward their consumers and employees, will be remembered for a long time and can lead to goodwill."
The impact of employee treatment on business reputation is set to be a differentiator when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, and therefore customers too. That is why excelling at TX means winning on both the talent and the profit fronts.
Breaking down departmental silos is a critical part of TX. Enabling cross-departmental collaboration requires taking advantage of technology to integrate front and back offices, and make all employees feel that they are part of the bigger picture.
The objective is to create a unified experience that engages customers, resulting in enhanced satisfaction from customers and employees alike. For business owners, this requires investment in smart technology and tools that enable engagement across disparate areas of the business.
TX can be a tricky concept to grasp, but it is really about improving customer experience by improving the business as a whole.
Keeping employees engaged and interested is the foundation. On top of that, businesses need to find ways to design a connected customer experience – from the very first interaction all the way through to repeat buying, never losing sight of the customer’s goals and objectives.
Companies that transform all touchpoints that users, employees, and customers have with the business into a unified whole will be better positioned than their competitors to operate remotely; they will also have a greater ability to grow their digital revenue streams.
References
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-10-19-gartner-identifies-the-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2021
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-10-18-gartner-identifies-the-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2022
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/survey-us-consumer-sentiment-during-the-coronavirus-crisis
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