Editorial
The Gist
- CX misalignment. Companies' focus on CX often neglects EX and PX, leading to overall dissatisfaction.
- Total human experience. A comprehensive outlook incorporating CX, EX and PX can deliver on product/service promises.
- "Moments Framework." Mapping key stakeholder experiences helps identify crucial interaction points and optimize operations.
Between employees quiet quitting, customers frustrated by delays and business partners struggling to meet demand, it’s no surprise that companies are struggling to provide a great customer experience (CX).
The problem? Their CX initiatives are failing to move the needle — and at the same time — are lending leadership teams a false sense of security. Case in point: Nearly nine in 10 companies believe they provide excellent CX — but only 11% of customers agree.
By focusing exclusively on CX, these companies tend to miss what I call the total human experience — an overarching outlook that not only accounts for CX but also the employee experience (EX) and partner experience (PX). Only by understanding the interdependencies between these three groups can companies truly deliver on the promise of their products and services.
Here’s how each element of the total human experience works together and how your company can leverage this framework to deliver a better experience for all stakeholders.
Related Article: Want to Improve Your Customer Experience? Remember the Partner Experience
Why Each Element of the Total Human Experience Matters
Think of a tripod: How well could you take pictures if your camera only had one leg to stand on — or even two? Sure, you could snap a few photos, but is that the outcome you’re looking for? What’s more, each leg relies on the other for support, and the slightest imbalance could throw everything off.
The same follows for the total human experience — for instance, a labor-intensive CX improvement project might lead to better customer outcomes and feedback in the short-term, but it could impact EX and burn out your employees in the long run if you make it harder for employees to do their jobs.
When you start looking for it, you start to see these issues in everyday encounters. Recently, my wife and I were remodeling our bathroom and were looking for a specific bath model from a well-known brand, so we went down to one of the big-box hardware stores. When we brought it back home, the bath sat in a box for several months as we waited for our contractor to begin. When he opened the box, the bath was cracked. We returned it and reordered another one.
When we didn’t hear anything back by the day the store told us our order would be in — with our contractor unable to move forward — we called and discovered the supplier had not updated the store on the item’s location and missed the delivery window promised. And when it did finally arrive, it was cracked again. Eventually, we discovered that the store's supplier decided it was cheaper to replace broken tubs than to ship them with quality padding.
Like so many other organizations today, the hardware store was trying to provide great CX — but because it hadn’t spent time cultivating the partner experience with tighter quality control, we went to another store for the bathtub. And the fumbling in between also created a poor employee experience because the customer service representatives had to have hard conversations with frustrated shoppers.
Related Article: Why It’s Time to Embrace Employee Experience
3 Ways to Provide a Total Human Experience
So where should companies begin? To ensure alignment across the three aspects of the total human experience, businesses should adopt an approach centered around the key moments that matter — for each stakeholder. Our three-part human-centered "Moments Framework" does just that.
Know the Moments
Organizations should deploy service design methods — such as quantitative and qualitative research, ecosystem maps, journey maps and service blueprints, etc. — to comprehensively chart out the different stakeholder experiences for a specific journey. That way, they can understand what the experiences are and identify where there is overlap or dependencies between them.
If companies choose not to add every stakeholder into a single journey map, they should still know how each journey map ties into one another. Think of each as a single dimension that can add up to a three-dimensional picture of the total human experience.
Once companies have seen the whole picture, they can unearth operational issues that impact customers, employees and partners using root cause analysis — which I’ve discussed previously. By doing so, they’ll be able to identify which moments in the total human experience have the greatest impact on their business outcomes.
For example, by attempting to improve CX through big promises like unrealistic turnaround times, a company may inadvertently impact partner retention because these stakeholders can’t fulfill those requests. Consequently, a revolving door of partners could lead to drops in revenue and additional costs to onboard and offboard.
The same goes for sacrificing the employee experience in an attempt to improve CX. Let’s say an organization wants to automate as much as possible through digital means for the customer but aren’t willing to provide the necessary tools for employees to effectively deal with this new experience, thus adding additional burden by making employees manually key the data into a legacy system. Ultimately, they get frustrated and leave, resulting in the additional cost of finding a replacement or the potential loss of revenue from losing the customers on those employees’ books of business.
Own the Moments
By knowing the moments of the three stakeholders’ experiences, companies can get creative by envisioning the ideal future state of their product and/or service and how it drives the desired outcomes. But to get the most out of it, they’ll have to be inclusive of all stakeholders in their design.
One way to do that? Put employee and partner representatives in the room along with the customer — and then co-create concepts for the total experience. When it comes to gathering perspectives, don’t just rely on voice of the customer (VoC) programs; implement voice of employee (VoE) and voice of partner (VoP) ones to inform your design decisions. Empower employees, especially, to speak up — because most are thinking about how they would execute a task rather than how they would feel doing it, their voice often gets lost in the shuffle.
Companies should also have a measurement framework that examines CX, PX and EX in relation to operations and business impact (A framework we call CPEO$) and can quantify the potential impact from a future state concept or internal change. Having metrics in each of those five buckets allows organizations to see the positive — or negative — impact that decisions have on the total human experience.
Going back to the earlier bath example, let’s say the company wanted to improve on-time delivery. After making changes to the supply chain — including processes and technology — it sees the on-time delivery metric has improved. But it starts to see a quality metric decrease under the partner bucket, with lower satisfaction under the customer bucket (a cracked tub that is unusable and delays to the timeline), and lower employee engagement scores (having to deal with upset customers). Ultimately, the company might see the financial impact of lower sales or increased costs. This allows the company to quantify the impact of decisions into true dollars and cents. The result? Ensuring you make the right choices.
Deliver the Moments
Now that the organization has designed the ideal future state of its product and/or service, it’s time to consider the technology, data, culture and operating model (i.e., the ecosystem) best suited for delivering a topflight experience for all stakeholders.
That means companies must revisit their initiatives and reprioritize them to account for their potential impact on their stakeholders. By doing so, leadership can avoid a situation in which, for instance, they roll out customer service initiatives employees aren’t prepared to handle.
Think about a healthcare provider that prioritizes introducing cutting-edge technology as part of a CX initiative, for example, but hasn’t put in the time to properly train its staff on all the features, resulting in frustration for employees (can’t do my job) and patients (delays in seeing my provider or an inattentive provider). Perhaps that initiative should move further down the list until the company identifies the best way to bridge gaps in employee upskilling.
Leadership teams must also develop a change strategy that secures employee buy-in — whether it be through changes in workplace culture or other incentives. Remember the acronym WIIFM: What’s in it for me? Most employees adopt change when there’s a potential upside for them. It’s the responsibility of leadership teams to implement a workplace culture that is mutually beneficial for all stakeholders involved.
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CX Is Only Part of the Puzzle
While providing exceptional customer experience should be the priority of every company, it can’t be delivered through initiatives designed in a vacuum.
By using a three-dimensional approach that accounts for the total human experience — CX, EX and PX — companies can craft an excellent experience for all their stakeholders, while effectively managing the impact on their operations and financial outlook.
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