INSIGHTS
Smooth Sailing: Bridging The Gap Between Customers and Employees with OneExperience
Picture this: You’ve built a sleek, user-friendly mobile app that keeps your customers happy. However, a customer interacts with your support team and hits a wall. Stuck with outdated systems, the employee can’t help quickly, leaving the customer frustrated and waiting.
Doesn’t it sound familiar?
In today’s digital era, creating fragmented and siloed experiences for customers and employees simply doesn’t cut it.
By 2026, Gartner expects 60% of large enterprises to employ the total experience strategy to transform their business models. The total experience strategy, as defined by Gartner, integrates four key disciplines: multi experience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and user experience (UX), with the aim of crafting superior shared experiences.
At Vation, we pursue a unified MX discipline, blending MX and UX to consistently deliver seamless user experience across various interaction points, encompassing traditional screens, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), voice and gesture interfaces, among others. Through this approach, we empower our clients to deliver OneExperience, an integrated strategy to create exceptional shared experiences for both customers and employees.
Breaking the siloed mindset
Siloed solution mindset remains the biggest roadblock for creating OneExperience for customers and employees concurrently. Developing OneExperience mindset is, however, a natural evolution to how we approach creating experiences. This evolution also goes hand in glove with the prevailing technology disruptions. Such evolution mirrors the perpetual transformation seen in products like cars, mobile phones, personal computers, and televisions.
Let’s explore how to break the siloed solution mindset and drive OneExperience through the lens of sailboats:
Harnessing the power of UX
Popularized by Don Norman in the early 1990s, UX emerged as the scientific approach for ensuring user satisfaction in interactions with products or services. Emphasizing positive perceptions of usability, utility, and efficiency, UX became pivotal in enhancing the overall experience. However, its effectiveness hinges on aligning with customers’ preferences for interaction methods. Without considering the context of customers, diverse personas, and their individual user journeys, applying UX is akin to navigating a rudderless dugout canoe.
Dugout canoes, dating back around 8,000 years to the Neolithic Stone Age, are the earliest known boats, crafted by hollowing out tree trunks. Although these canoes served the purposes of fishing and transporting goods for centuries, their inherent limitations became evident. Firstly, their narrow and rounded hulls made them susceptible to tipping over in rough waters. Secondly, rowers had to rely on specialized skills and brute force for navigation. Thirdly, these canoes often drifted off their intended courses due to underwater currents that exert forces of push or pull.
UX design, like early dugout canoes, focused on basic functionality. However, neither were designed for the complexities of real-world environments. Dugout canoes struggled against water currents, just like UX faced challenges when user behavior and preferences became more dynamic.
Harnessing the power of CX
Fortunately, UX evolved in tandem with CX during the rise of the internet’s adoption. Enterprises that previously relied on distributors and retailers to sell their products suddenly gained direct access to their customers. The advent of digital devices like laptops, mobile phones, and the emergence of social media ushered in a new era of customer engagement. They adeptly mapped customers based on their preferred channels of interaction and their position in the brand experience lifecycle: evaluating, buying, experiencing, or advocating. Consequently, enterprises initially provided independent multi-channel customer experiences, later evolving into unified omni-channel customer experiences.
This progression mirrors the transformation of dugout canoes into later-day reed and wooden boats that introduced rudders and keels around 7,000 years ago. Rudders revolutionized navigation by offering control over the boat’s direction, significantly improving maneuverability and course-keeping. Similarly, keels functioned as underwater fins, ensuring stability in rough waters and resisting lateral movement caused by underwater currents.
Harnessing the power of EX and MX
Meanwhile, enterprises today grapple with navigating two dominant winds of change: Firstly, facing headwinds, companies recognize a pivotal challenge: customer experience often falters at touchpoints where employees interact with them, be it in contact centers, stores, or branches. Secondly, propelling tailwinds, the digital revolution introduced a plethora of new devices: fitness trackers, voice & gesture activated devices or speakers, and virtual/augmented reality headsets, to name a few. This MX technology adoption presents an opportunity for companies to improve customer engagement further.
Despite these advancements, many companies still rely on outdated technology for employee applications, limiting their capacity to deliver exceptional customer experiences. This underscores the need for EX transformation.
These transformative winds of change echo the challenges faced by our ancestral sailors, whose
innovation is relevant for replication in today’s digital era. About 3,500 years ago, reed and wooden boats evolved with fore-and-aft rigs, introducing square or triangular sails to capture and harness the power of winds efficiently. Sails minimized the need for constant rowing, enabling sailors to cover long distances. Adjusting sail angles allowed control over direction and speed, navigating against the wind, and maintaining course — a timeless innovation.
Over the past decade, companies have increasingly embraced cloud and mobile applications to enhance EX. According to Salesforce’s The Experience Advantage 2022 report, a focus on improving EX can potentially boost revenue growth by up to 50% or more.
As technologies like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D continue to evolve rapidly, the future of content, commerce, and interactions between customers and employees is set for further transformation. How companies leverage these MX technologies for their customer and employee experiences will determine their capacity to innovate, transform, and grow.
Conclusion:
CX, EX, and MX are intertwined forces that companies must manage simultaneously to achieve desired business outcomes. This integrated approach is akin to how sailboats successfully navigate by managing the complex interplay of water currents, winds, and thrust. By focusing on these key elements, businesses can navigate the winds of change and drive sustainable growth.
Vation
The essence of our brand, Vation, embodies a spirit of continuous innovation, growth, and relentless pursuit of client satisfaction.
Founded in 2021, Vation set out with a clear vision – to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers and employees by crafting experiences that resonate, inspire, and foster lasting loyalty.
Our mission is to accelerate business growth by enabling our clients to embrace OneExperience – Vation’s recipe for transforming integrated customer, employee, and multi-experiences.
