What is Total Experience?

Modern customer and employee interactions are increasingly taking place via mobile, virtual, and distributed channels, making it difficult for many businesses to keep up. In fact, Gartner predicts that 40% of cross-industry businesses will implement a blend of virtual and physical experience for their employees and customers in the next three years. This transformation has been accelerated by global events and there is no turning back.

Until now, there has been little to no intersection between the customer and employee experiences. The employee often operates on office-based, legacy enterprise systems, while the customer is on modern, consumer-grade apps. The two worlds are disconnected - creating a jarring impact on the overall user experience.

Total Experience (TX) is anchored around removing the barriers between front and back offices and aligning company-wide engagement with business outcomes. A TX strategy ensures internal and customer-facing operations are linked and function in step with each other. 

The recent boom in remote working has expedited the inevitable shift to the digital career style that goes hand-in-hand with the new generation of employees. The willingness of the workforce to use outdated tech at work is waning fast, as personal devices are increasingly capable and powerful. The gap between personal and professional experiences, as internal employee and external consumer, will continue to widen without a more integrated approach.

The business pain caused by this disconnected experience is significant, both to the employee and customer, as illustrated by these industry statistics below:

• Nearly 10% of businesses now have more than 200 apps in their enterprise information-technology systems.

• 69% of workers indicated that they waste up to an hour a day switching between different applications; that’s almost 32 days a year.

• 66% of workers would prefer one unified platform to communicate across. This simplification would help streamline and organize business processes across all departments.

• 56% of workers say they find having to look for information within different apps to be disruptive to productivity.

• Employee productivity increases by 20-25% in organizations where employees are connected.

• 57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a badly designed experience on mobile.

Investing in a Total Experience (TX) is the way forward for companies to stay competitive in evolving markets and to combat the statistics above. The increasing expectation of a seamless customer experience must also be replicated for the employee as a user.

In order to achieve this, there are 3 key strategies that need to be implemented:

Modern business applications need to be end-to-end and fully accessible, by anyone, at any time, anywhere. Today, there is a common disconnect between the front and back office teams. This leads to an inherent pain caused by not understanding if route-to-market strategies and investments are effective, wasting billions of dollars.

As remote working increasingly becomes the norm, the instant availability of information and access to real-time data has become essential. Total Experience (TX), allows all users to progress seamlessly through a series of business processes, removing the need to jump around in a variety of systems, and all on-device.

TX further provides continuous alignment between HQ and field teams, ensuring all users are equally engaged and productive, regardless of their location. One consolidated platform means real-time distribution of information, without a lag caused by disconnection or remote systems. In the Consumer Goods (CG) industry there is a real need to instantly connect decisions made at Head Office with in-store execution. This is particularly important in the way Trade Promotion Management (TPM), Customer Segmentation, Visit Planning and Retail Execution are all seamlessly connected as one. 

An effective Total Experience strategy allows a CG company to see immediate results on a unified platform. No delays waiting for data to be imported, uploaded or synchronized across systems.

As we constantly reach for our mobile devices to connect all aspects of our personal lives, it’s becoming evident that the applications we use at work are not integrated at the same level.

As the image below shows, our personal experiences as a consumer versus as an employee can be worlds apart. With a growing digitised and mobile workforce, there is a significant sales productivity impact caused by these clunky, complex and disconnected Experiences. This impacts user adoption, visit productivity and overall sales revenue.

Our experiences at work need to be as seamless as our personal lives. Understanding where employee and customer experiences intersect and enabling them to interact effortlessly and cross-device, streamlines the business process, improves productivity and creates a better experience for everyone.

As an example, integration with PayPal allows users to track and verify payments without switching between systems. In addition, familiar brands offer a guaranteed user-friendly and secure experience for both customers and employees. With consumers being 54% more likely to buy from a business that accepts PayPal, name brand recognition can clearly play a major part.

Customer interactions take place on a wide range of channels and to stay competitive companies need to be across all of these, ready to engage. An omnichannel approach, with a Total Experience, will ensure that the customers needs can be met from every angle.

Modern businesses need an end-to-end platform that engages customers anywhere across the digital and real world. The same platform, data model and pricing engines must sit across Online, Mobile (connected/disconnected), Telesales, Direct Store Delivery (DSD), Distributors (DMS) and Commerce channels.

Additionally, with a more centralized and end-to-end journey, data analytics and attribution are much easier to track. Information about where and when customers are engaging in the field becomes visible from HQ, allowing for greater understanding of the market, better planning and promotional campaign success.

Introducing the Aforza Total Experience (TX) Cloud. For the first time ever, Consumer Goods businesses are supported by an industry cloud and on-device mobile platform that is purpose built for them.

Through the connected Total Experience Cloud, users can seamlessly move from strategy to execution in real-time; online and on-device. Combine business data and apps into one simple experience, across all teams, with mobile interoperability across everyday touch points. Think Slack, WhatsApp, PayPal, Waze, PowerBI and more. Aforza Total Experience Cloud connects them all.

With Aforza TX, Consumer Goods businesses can easily design and launch complete promotional campaigns in the cloud. These can be released in real-time by business users, deployed in multiple currencies around the world, and executed omnichannel, from e-commerce through to on-device, online or offline.

Constantinos Andreou, Group Business Systems Manager at Photos Photiades and Aforza customer, said: “Introducing a streamlined and data-driven approach will bring real value to our business, our partners and most of all our customers who we can better serve by helping them understand consumer behaviour and optimising their approach to maximise revenue.”.

Never before has the Consumer Goods business user had such powerful, seamless capabilities at their fingertips. Aforza brings together all the modern social and mobile applications that your employees and customers use on a daily basis, in a consistent experience. 

Total Experience is a game-changer for companies that want to remain current and essential for those seeking to be competitive. Increased channels for customer engagement make seamless movement between them an obvious necessity.

Check out this demonstration of the Aforza Total Experience (TX) Cloud in action from our latest webinar:

Aforza’s Total Experience Cloud has already helped Photos Photiades move from spreadsheets, legacy processes and a manual dashboard to an integrated sales experience. For WowTech’s customer and distributor network (spanning over 60 countries and thousands of retailers, including Walmart and Amazon), Aforza has provided a singular solution to optimise overall trade investment and reduce administration. Distell is leveraging Aforza’s online and mobile offline order capabilities, segmentation, promotion execution, surveys and audits. They also benefit from real-time, AI-driven insights at the point of customer interaction to make up/cross-sell recommendations. 

Find out how Aforza can help transform your business with our Total Experience Maturity Assessment. Answer 10 simple questions, understand where you are positioned compared to Consumer Goods industry peers and take the next step to transforming your business today.