Why Should You Take a Total Experience (TX) Approach to Business Strategy?
It’s no secret that the employee experience has become a hot topic as many companies have been affected by what is known as “the great resignation”. As companies put a magnifying glass up to the employee experience, it’s common that the customer experience slips from their grip. In order to avoid this and find the perfect balance between the needs of everyone, a new concept has emerged in strategic thinking and planning, known as the Total Experience (TX).
What is the Total Experience?
Experiences are delicately interwoven- employee experience affects customer experience, user experience affects employee experience, employee experience affects shareholder experience, and vice versa.
Realizing that a subtle change in any one experience can drastically improve or impair another is where the Total Experience (TX) was born. TX refers to an integration of all experiences into one strategy that creates the ultimate seamless journey for any individual who may engage with your company. Rather than putting customers, employees, or shareholders in different silos, you regard all of their touchpoints as equally important, resulting in a long or short-term strategy that elevates your entire enterprise, not just one silo.
TX thinking isn’t bound to one industry or company size, every organization can benefit from this forward-thinking method to gain its competitive edge in our rapidly changing market.
What does Total Experience Thinking look like in Business Strategy?
When creating a business strategy, it can be easy to trap your mind in the box of “I need to please my shareholders”, or “we need to increase the volume of sales by 10%”. But what happens when you favor one set of people and leave out the others? Your business suffers and people are unhappy!
A Total Experience mindset encourages you to break down those silo walls and allow the experience of all people to influence your initiative choices. Sometimes it involves improving technology to ease the employee experience. Sometimes it may be creating a marketing campaign to showcase your employees, because after all… people join people!
The important thing to recognize in practicing TX thinking is the delicate relationship between experiences. Weighing heavily on customers can hinder employees and vice versa, so prioritization of initiatives becomes increasingly important as you make sure your business strategy is filling opportunity gaps in everyone's journey.
How Do you Incorporate TX Thinking in your Next Business Strategy?
To develop TX-oriented strategies, Stonehill leverages Design Thinking. Start with empathy for all who interact with your business, understanding what motivates them, what they desire, and who they are as an employee, customer, or shareholder.
Now that you understand those who interact with your business, document their entire journey with your company and look for areas that can be improved. Now the fun part is brainstorming solutions to fill those gaps with your team! Once you go through iterative problem-solving sessions, the important step is prioritizing which initiatives need to happen first, and so on. By doing this, you can ensure the experiences of everyone are equally elevated. This results in human-centric solutions for the gaps in each party’s experience, thus contributing to a Total Experience approach to strategy!
Need Help Getting Started?
The Stonehill team has vast experience helping organizations use Design Thinking to create “Total Experience” strategies that please all parties who interface with your organization. And then with our Program Management team, you can watch your vision come to life as we successfully implement the human-centric solutions.
If you just want to dip your toes in the water, we’ve created a suite of tools to help you successfully begin to navigate the design thinking process.
To learn from our team of Strategy, Design Thinking, and Program Management experts and maximize your team’s efforts, contact us today!
