Well 2020 has been a year to forget and 2021 is starting off differently than we all hoped for. Nevertheless, our shopping behaviour has undergone a metamorphosis: as consumers we are shopping online as the shops are closed and/or following. B2B customers are engaging with potential vendors online. New colleagues are introduced to the team online and in many cases haven’t had any interaction with their fellow team members. It has become our new reality and it does indeed offer the opportunity to bring both our employee experience and our customer experience closer together. No more boundaries.
According to Gartner we are noticing that technology is developing towards three main trends:
People are still at the core of everything that is happening inside and outside the company, even despite the pandemic. However, the physical and emotional component of our interactions is lacking. A sales conversation with a customer has become different. It’s something many colleagues and customers are missing out on.
Despite a remote working environment, technology can be delivered efficiently, regardless of any office location, store or commercial area.
Technology ensures continuity of our people and commercial operations and allow for 24/7 availability.
Personally, these developments make sense and are a clear indication that many corporations and employees have undergone the first phase of their transformation in the pandemic. Several retailers & brands have adapted quickly and are posting double digit growth in their online channels.
We can’t all neglect that we are talking about a short-term fix here and we are still missing the interaction with a product, a physical store experience.
In this article we will give you a blueprint for setting up your own TX environment to engage with your customers and your employees from one digital environment. Secondly, we will provide a prime example of a Total Experience (TX): our very own digital experience room.
A TX which is a combination of customer, employee and user experiences. It offers consistency and a more human experience in the way how customers perceive our service, products and on the other hand how employees are able to learn and to exploit their potential to become true ambassadors for the organisation.
Let’s look at the five major components of a TX that reinforce and unite our customers and employees.
We still need to be able to have a real-life interaction with others despite the digital threshold. Think about ways to include your employees in a conversation on your products and services.
It is important that both employees and customers are utilising the same technology. Usually, both sides of the TX are separated and managed by different teams.
It has to be well-balanced and be as engaging as possible for different audiences. This means that it needs to be simple in use and easy to understand. Both customers and employees hit the ground running.
Use data to see exactly how your employees and how your customers are interacting. Which parameters do define our success? Engage with the audience throughout their respective journeys and allow them to learn from each other. If your customers value your communication and expertise why not do so for your employees.
“A well-known e-commerce retailer made a few years the decision to implement certain elements of their customer journey in the employee journey”. This decision has boosted a new era of growth.
The holy grail obviously, but when customers and employees are satisfied with their journeys, they keep returning and they will definitely share their experience with others and beyond.
With the pandemic, we have seen the development of how important experiences are for customers and employees. Circling back to the TX blueprint, we are able to share how the experience room is contributing to your TX.
You can watch our video presentation of our experience room here.
If we apply the 5 blueprint ingredients of a TX to the experience room we are seeing that the value proposition is reinforced in various ways:
Despite the current global challenges and the impact on our daily routine, we foresee that sales and people enablement will continue to make people smile and most importantly become a valuable addition to our existing sales channels and learning platforms. A start is not to forget to smile! 😊
