As the business landscape continues to change, more companies are opting for a strategy that encompasses the 'total experience'. This way of working is intended to resolve ongoing issues and provide solutions in collaboration with industry leaders. This mentality has become key when it comes to winning customers and supporting employees, however, there isn’t one platform that caters to all.

A total experience ensures that the goals of stakeholders, through all channels and interfaces, are met during an engagement or interaction, and creates shared experiences that incorporate the multi-experience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and user experience (UX).

As EXs and CXs continue to mature, the need for external and internal integration has become more crucial, with Gartner revealing that by 2024, organisations providing a total experience (TX) will outperform competitors by 25%.

Why the Chief People Officer plays such an important role

A CPO understands human behaviour, motivations and recognises internal and external pain points, making them key in facilitating cross-departmental collaboration, removing obstacles and bridging gaps. They ensure that the people behind the departments, products and services, are aligned, and look for areas where improvements are needed so that customers and employees are empowered and engaged.

Agilitas recruited its CPO, Bev Markland, to better engage with managers and directors, and connect them with employees in a different way. The company's priorities changed during the pandemic, so the CPO’s role was to facilitate and navigate what the world has gone through with the understanding that employees now have more of a voice than ever before. To accommodate that voice, Agilitas is adhering to its pride values, and its passion for sustainability, which is driven by its employees.

This process eliminates a siloed approach, ensuring that team leaders and supervisors can come together, playing an integral role in supporting the business’ growth strategy and proactively reforming practices that don’t fit with today’s culture.

How TX can better drive employee and customer confidence

A TX can better drive employee and customer confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, and when implemented efficiently, TX delivery can demonstrate and communicate through every human touchpoint, a company’s core values and value proposition.

Customer experience is one of Agilitas’ core values - it understands the challenges facing Channel customers, ensuring that it provides an excellent and evolving service that continually develops to economic and environmental change.

The company has recently introduced CX Edge, its framework for effectively aligning and delivering customer needs, as well as measuring success. In addition to InventoryAssure, Agilitas has incorporated its Professional Services and Smart Logistics capabilities into the framework to streamline the customer journey through its systems, as well as measure how the company is delivering against Channel customers' requirements.

Both underpinned by Agilitas’ sustainability initiatives, Professional Services acts as an extension to its customer's engineering capabilities to accelerate time to revenue with skills and resources to streamline deployment and with Smart Logistics being centred around how the company optimises warehouse, logistics and circular economy services.

With the introduction of CX Edge, Agilitas is putting its Channel customers at the heart of everything it does. The framework allows greater control, forecast and predictability of customer success, ensuring effective management over costs or investments and proactively incorporating trends rising in the Channel.

This ensures Agilitas’ customers have a clear service roadmap across three key stages:

● ALIGN with customers’ business goals and create a blueprint for success

● TRANSFORM clients with a proven model to accelerate time to service

● SCALE with confidence through continual innovation and managed services

Developing a cross-departmental TX roadmap

Until now, companies have tended to view the various experience areas as separate entities, and have dealt with them in different departments.

By opting for a departmental view and managing teams holistically, users, products and services all benefit from journey mapping as it can flag gaps, friction points and frustrations and take note of links among departments that still need to be created.

Leveraging technology to develop TX

Technology has always been a business enabler, but never more so than for building a TX. Integrating modern technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can take the customer experience to a new level, providing an interactive and bespoke experience.

As the demands of today’s market increase, technology hardware remains a critical part of the Technology Channel, in line with the continued supply chain challenges. Yet supporting, storing and transporting hardware is resource-heavy and can mean high customer service standards can slip.

In TX-focused organisations, employee collaboration tools, dashboards for customers, operations and HR help to meet expectations and personalise experiences.

This not only helps to keep a pulse on the CX and EX, but can provide support when changes are needed for products, services and interactions. With 360-degree feedback available for these tools, employees in all departments can become agile problem solvers that can benefit not only personally but also form part of the success of the business.