Article Total Experience – The Transformation You Need
By Insight UK / 1 Jul 2022
By Insight UK / 1 Jul 2022
Alex Guillen, Go-to-Market Manager at Insight highlights why Total Experience is becoming a priority for organisations in 2022 and beyond, and the technology essential to make it happen.
We’re going to hear a lot more about Total Experience (TX) in the coming months and years. It’s likely to become so much a part of the fabric of our interactions with organisations that it won’t even need spelling out. Why is this? Up until now, most organisations have focused technology and resources on improving the experiences of discrete sets of people: users (UX), customers (CX) and employees (EX). There’s even multi-experience (MX). So many acronyms! The beauty of TX is that it integrates them into a single, holistic, consistent experience for everyone. Which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.
Certainly, Gartner sees the sense of TX as a natural evolution of all the individual Xs. Gartner features Total Experience in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, predicting that “by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use Total Experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels”.
As it’s likely to be central to how we interact with businesses, whether as customers or employees, it’s worth taking a deeper look at TX and the advantages it delivers. And, from an organisation’s perspective, how to go about preparing for TX.
First of all, what is TX? Going back to Gartner for a minute, it describes TX as a new business strategy that interlinks the other experiences, (UX, CX, EX, MX) to create ‘superior, shared experiences’. Which essentially means breaking down siloes and building links between various digital experiences to create a cohesive, frictionless experience for everyone.
Why should this matter? Well, the goal of TX is to improve people’s experience of your organisation, to drive greater satisfaction, trust, loyalty and advocacy. As well as streamlining systems and processes to improve efficiency and productivity, getting TX right will have a big impact on your brand, and your standing among customers, employees and the market in general.
As customers, we’ve got used to online services. Over recent years we’ve seen a marked improvement in customer experience. This is largely down to the early disruptors like Uber who transformed how we use taxi services, and Netflix’s transformation of subscription-based TV. Digital services are now so much part of our lives as consumers, that when Covid disrupted our working lives, our expectations for a matching digital experience increased.
The trend towards remote or hybrid working put the focus on people’s experience of work and was already being seen before the pandemic, but it was greatly accelerated out of necessity.
The combination of the two led to TX – creating a complete experience from employees to customers that interlinks their experiences and interactions to transform business outcomes. In all of these scenarios, people are going to need to connect to operational systems and data from distributed locations.
Ultimately, the function of a TX strategy is to stop treating each ‘human element’ as a separate entity. It involves breaking down the siloes to create unifying and engaging experiences for everyone. Customer facing, front- and back-office systems and workflows need to be integrated and data needs to be accessible.
Total Experience isn’t static, and it needs a platform that can flex to meet current and future needs. It also needs to respond quickly to disruptive events. The experience you can deliver during disruptive times can set the benchmark for how people will engage with you in the future. Business resilience, its ability to recover quickly and still provide great service, is key to survival.
It won’t come as a surprise to learn that Cloud is the essential platform for TX. It allows you to scale quickly to meet demand peaks, during Black Friday or seasonal sales, for example, without worrying about overloading internal systems. But this doesn’t mean shifting everything to cloud. You’ll still need access to internal processes and infrastructure as well as data – wherever it is stored – and you will need seamless connectivity between them.
A successful TX strategy involves understanding where your customer, employee and user experiences intersect and the best way to create meaningful connections between them. This requires expert services, a robust platform and enabling technology that delivers consistent infrastructure and operations for any system, anywhere.
TX presents opportunities to extend your competitive advantage and open new business channels as you offer an experience that meets rising expectations among current and future customers and employees. People engage with and buy from companies that make them feel good. TX is the way you can deliver on this promise with an integrated strategy using the right services, people and technology.
To discover how Insight with AWS and VMware can help you realise the transformative benefits of a Total Experience strategy click here.
