Don't Forget Employees in the Experience Equation, CX Connect Speaker Urges

Customers have experiences with your company. Employees have experiences with your company. Put them both together and you can radically change how your company performs.

That was the key takeaway from this morning’s session at CX Connect.

This new process, called Total Experience (TX), puts companies in a better position to compete with the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Doordash, and Amazon, whose exceptional customer and employee experiences “have made it hard for other companies to keep up,” said Mark Smith, vice president of digital engagement solutions at CSG, during the first session of the day.

In fact, total experience has become “a board-level priority,” at many companies, particularly as they see employee experience (EX) overtake customer experience (CX) in boardroom discussions, according to Smith.

The concept is simple: Happier employees can better serve customers, which in turn creates greater efficiencies which lead to lower costs and higher customer satisfaction, he said.

And though it might seem like a challenge to optimize TX, it really isn’t. Most companies already have the tools in place; they just need to make them more available to customer service agents, Smith argued.

“The same tools that you are using for CX can be used to help employees,” he stated. “Give employees access to the same tools and intelligence that you use to offer customer self-service.”

And then, allow your staff to know your customers better and understand their unique contexts, desires, and needs.

Total Experience also goes much deeper than either CX or EX alone. “With TX, every experience with your company becomes a series of interactions that take place over time,” Smith continued.

TX, he said, requires companies to link all of the data they have about customers, leverage all of their communication channels, and tie it together with intelligent journey management that connects both customers and employees to the right information for their mutual benefit.

“You need an intelligent journey orchestration engine that runs your journeys and tracks everything that happens along the way,” Smith said.

Each journey, he explained, could touch multiple channels, and sometimes, one person might even be on multiple journeys at the same time.

With a TX mindset, companies can create proactive journeys that guide users to desired outcomes, according to Smith, who suggested that every business needs to have an idea about what the ideal journey would be and a plan to guide customers and employees through it.

That will ultimately lead companies to employing what Smith called “intelligent automation for the contact center, which includes capabilities like intent-based call handling, predictive agent routing, context-based agent assistance, and proactive agent knowledge.

Companies looking to ensure good TX also need to audit their data and technology stacks to make sure they can handle the increased information involved., and to align on the journey metrics that will be used, according to Smith.

“Total experience needs to be about journeys, not individual touchpoints,” he said. “You need to empower your employees so they can help customers help themselves."

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