Understanding how Total Customer Experience (TX) impacts companies’ business goals is an absolute must today.
Total experience is about making connections, providing a perfect link between the customer, the employee, the user and the multiple experience. It also challenges organizations to think about the entire customer and employee experience. It requires building a strategy, having a technology capability and innovation frameworks embedded holistically, as the experience must be end-to-end. So rather than planning, implementing and measuring these different functions in silos, the total experience requires organizations to bring them all together.
Success Milestones
Total experience is a little phrase for a big idea. But how do you know if companies are on the cutting edge or lagging behind?
We’ve provided a way to measure the total experience through a comparative benchmarking study by IDG Communications. The main purpose of this study was to understand the role customer experience plays in the total experience. This helps companies to be truly customer-centric in an intentional way. The study explored these relationships through research with approximately 500 business organizations around the world.
The strategy and your customer
The only way to build a truly cohesive, valuable and forward-looking customer strategy is through the total experience. If you’re not thinking about how this affects end-users, then you don’t have a customer-first mindset. To provide customers with the best possible experience, all working parts must be happy, think about it: if employees aren’t happy, customers generally aren’t happy either. If suppliers don’t understand the service they provide due to miscommunication, customers won’t be happy when they have supply chain issues. All experiences must be combined in a coherent way for companies to function as a well-oiled machine.
For example, if a current user cannot easily interact with customer service without having a consistent experience across all of their devices, it will affect their overall experience. The interaction between the customer and the organization must be seamless, which is what the overall experience takes into account.
Cohesive Customer Interaction + Strategy
Only half of the companies surveyed in IDG’s study rated themselves as “good” at “cohesive interaction strategies.” What are the components that fall under this strategy? I’m glad you asked!
In our study, we had companies rank by the following: mobile devices, social listening, amplified service channels, real-time social media engagement and analytics. All of these influence not only a cohesive customer strategy, but also the overall business strategy and, you guessed it, the total customer experience journey.
