“Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your customers,” English business magnate Richard Branson's famous quote summarises the connection between employee experience and customer experience, suggesting that success involves enhancing holistic experiences that make up a business and not just one aspect.
Analyst Paul Meersman defines Total experience (TX) as "a way of doing business that connects how employees feel (employee experience or EX), how customers feel (customer experience or CX), how users feel when using products or services (user experience or UX), and how all these experiences come together (multi-experience or MX)."
Meersman lists some of TX's benefits in an article, including higher customer satisfaction, improved loyalty, consistency, innovation, and higher productivity. He added that TX can enhance competitive advantage, adaptability, positive brand perception, and long-term growth.
"Investing in total experience can lead to sustainable growth. Satisfied and loyal customers, users, and employees can drive repeat business and referrals, contributing to long-term success," he wrote.
Naresh Vemuri, Fujitsu's head of Uvance Regional Offerings, ASEAN and India, believes in the crucial role of TX for business growth, saying that "delivering a seamless and delightful experience across all touchpoints is crucial. To achieve this, businesses must adopt a holistic approach integrating technology, processes, and human interaction."
Where to start
The multi-faceted nature of TX can seem overwhelming for organisations wanting to take it seriously. Vemuri says the process can begin by looking at each experience individually: EX, CX, UX, and MX.
To enhance EX, Vemuri posits that it starts with optimising onboarding and training to set employees up for success while fostering a culture of growth and development.
Vemuri underscored the need for organisations to cultivate a positive work culture, improve communication and collaboration, and actively solicit employee feedback to address concerns and improve workplace conditions.
An open feedback culture helps build a more satisfied and motivated workforce.
“An open feedback culture helps build a more satisfied and motivated workforce,” he shared.
To enhance partner experience, Vemuri suggests starting with streamlined onboarding, maintaining transparent communication, and leveraging technology for collaboration.
He also highlighted the importance of evaluating partner satisfaction regularly. “Conduct regular satisfaction surveys and performance reviews to identify areas for improvement. Strengthening these relationships enhances overall business success,” the Fujitsu executive said.
Customer experience
Regarding CX, Forrester principal analyst Riccardo Pasto posits that improving CX quality starts with investing in core CX competencies that help organisations determine customer needs, design and test solutions and potential experiences, and deliver these experiences while empowering frontline employees.
“Today, AI-powered tools that support these activities are a reality. However, they’ll backfire and worsen CX blunders unless deployed in organisations with strong CX management capabilities,” Pasto said.
He also stressed that CX leaders should invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences.
“Strong alignment leads to better outcomes: Organisations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report 1.6x faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4x better customer engagement,” Pasto explained.
He recommends that organisations invest in a shared journey atlas, prioritise key journeys, pinpoint the intersection between functional teams and business units, and agree to a central budget with operations teams to fund break/fix activities.
Strategic investments
“Our customers in Singapore are telling us they are increasingly focusing on digital innovation and personalised interaction to create a seamless experience across all touchpoints. This enhances customer and employee satisfaction and positions the organisation for sustained success in a rapidly evolving market,” Vemuri said.
At Fujitsu, Vemuri shared that some critical areas for investment to improve UX include Advanced UX design tools and technologies and AI-powered Personalisation engines to accommodate individual preferences and behaviours.
At Fujitsu, key investment areas include advanced UX design tools and AI-powered personalisation engines to accommodate individual preferences. AI-powered platforms supporting EX are also essential to facilitating the shift toward hybrid work, fostering collaboration, and improving communication.
Vemuri pointed out that Fujitsu invests in CX through omnichannel customer support systems and customer data analytics platforms to enable personalised marketing strategies.
For Pasto, a crucial investment in CX is qualitative research skills to help understand customer mental models.
“Customer mental models drive expectations, value perception, and decision-making. But mapping mental models is a complex endeavor, as key drivers of value aren’t obvious — sometimes not even to customers. To reveal mental models, CX leaders must invest in techniques and tools for deeper exploratory qualitative research, like projective interviews and ethnography, to augment quantitative research,” he said.
However, Pasto shared that only 42% of global CX decision-makers say their employees have qualitative research skills, and only 34% use experience research platforms.
“To get started, hire a research practitioner who knows what quality research is — and how to do it — to prevent the biases and false assumptions that often lead to poor design decisions,” he said.
Shaping the future
Looking ahead, Vemuri anticipates that emerging technologies like AI, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), IoT, blockchain, and 5G will significantly reshape the TX landscape by 2025.
“They will enable more personalised, efficient, and immersive interactions, but businesses must stay adaptable and innovative to leverage these technologies and meet evolving expectations fully,” said Vemuri.
Vemuri posits that AI and advanced machine learning algorithms will enable more precise personalisation, provide tailored product recommendations, and customised career development paths.
He adds that AI-powered chatbots for 24/7 customer service and automated administrative tasks will enhance efficiency and unburden human resources.
Vemuri also foresees augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), transforming customer experiences through immersive shopping and product experiences and enabling remote collaboration through virtual reality meetings and augmented reality tools.
Moreover, Vemuri posits that 2025 and beyond will see more examples of how blockchain technology can enhance security and transparency in customer transactions, such as verified product origins and secure payment systems. The technology can also simplify and secure human resources processes, like payroll and contract management.
“The decentralised nature of blockchain can also help build trust between businesses and customers by providing verifiable and tamper-proof data,” Vemuri said.
“Before spending anything, define clear use cases for AI tools that help employees generate insights from unstructured customer data, cluster concepts from ideation sessions, and hatch ideas for inspiration or to overcome blank page syndrome,” Pasto said.
He also recommends that organisations invest in training and upskilling employees “to ensure they have the necessary competencies for success with genAI. They should have hard skills, like knowing how to effectively ask a genAI system to create text, and soft skills, like communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.”
Pasto recommends CX leaders align experiments to strategic objectives and create the conditions in which employees feel ready to adapt, stretch, and grow to maximise technology while avoiding change fatigue and distraction.
He also underscored the importance of experimenting with narrow use cases of customer-facing AI tools to build a pipeline of future capabilities and experiences.
AI is seeping into experiences, with few companies having a clear understanding of how it affects customer journeys.
“AI is seeping into experiences, with few companies having a clear understanding of how it affects customer journeys...To conduct successful experiments, determine which customer tasks can benefit from AI integration; ensure you have guardrails in place to mitigate risks of inaccuracy and bias; define measurable goals, such as increased customer satisfaction or reduced effort; and capture feedback from customers who interact with the tool during the pilot phase to refine the AI models further and improve CX,” said Pasto.
Leveraging TX and CX for growth
Analyst research revealed that those providing a Total Experience would outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX, underscoring the need for organisations to emphasise TX's crucial role in business success.
By leveraging TX, not only is it a strategy, but a necessity for business growth. Those who invest in TX today will not just survive but thrive with a competitive advantage in an evolving business landscape.
