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What on earth is ”Total Experience”? – How a food company, bank and logistics company took it to practice and thrived

Total Experience can sound like an unapproachable word monster. In practice, it is nothing stranger than developing customer and employee experience side-by-side. In this article, we share three true stories of companies who have already taken the idea of Total Experience into practice. At the end of the article, you will find seven steps that will help you get a  headstart in your own digital marathon.

In our previous blog, we noted that customer and employee experience are closely connected. A difficult-to-use webservice can reflect on employee experience as a large workload and repetitive tasks, for example – not to mention the angry customer calls.

Gartner recently listed “Total Experience”  as one of the hottest technology trends of the year, and with good reason. By developing the workflows and processes of your business armed with the principle of Total Experience, you can make sure that employee and customer experience support each other. By developing them in tandem you will also gather significant business benefits. According to  ServiceNow, you can speed up the onboarding process of new employees by 60% compared to older models, for example.

Combining customer and employee experience can sound like a mission impossible that will swallow up the organisation’s resources for years to come. However, the following real-life examples show that you can get started in small steps.

The reform that started with Valio’s service portal expanded from offices to production facilities

Valio began their total experience journey by renewing their customer experience. Soon, the project grew to encompass both customer and employee experience. The company wanted to provide customers and grocery stores with a better service portal (in Finnish), where consumers can report a defective product or request new flavors in products, for example.

Prior to the reform work, Valio had a customised tool that had already served for ten years, with over 300 users, from production to office workers. However, the challenge was that the customer’s journey or service processes had not been documented. In addition, the functionalities for measuring process efficiency or customer experience were lacking and it was difficult to utilise the siloed data resources efficiently. Valio decided to use ServiceNow’s platform to streamline processes and information.

Now, ServiceNow’s workflow carries the process throughout the organisation and the wider ecosystem. Experts at different stages of the process get a unified view of the customer and their issue – and the customer gets the best possible service, of course. The process and customer experience are measured in real-time, which contributes to continuously improving the service.

A Nordic bank identified the same support functions behind employee and customer experience

Our second example of total experience is provided by a Nordic bank that wanted to refine its employee experience into a diamond. The company started with the digitalisation of support function workflows, but soon realised the same functions on the ServiceNow platform were also central to developing the customer experience.

The journey towards the excellent customer and employee experience got off to a quick start when the company brought both customer service and the support functions the employees needed to the same platform. Now the Nordic bank can move customer contact requests with seamless workflows to any part of the organisation without breaking the flow of data into endless email chains. Customer service no longer serves the customer alone, but the entire organisation is can chime in and help if needed.

A Finnish logistics company found links between processes and reduced manual work

In our third customer example, a logistics company embarked on a journey of total experience by bringing maintenance processes and equipment data from their operating environment to ServiceNow’s platform.

After they had mostly modeled the operating environment and digitised their first workflows, the company noticed how easy it is to extend the use of the platform to new process areas. Now employees can use familiar and unified user interfaces in different processes. In the case of this logistics company, these interfaces are often on mobile devices.

During the reform, the company quickly discovered connections between processes. This changed the employee experience from recurring cut-paste routines to seamless digital workflows. Now employees are able to spend their time on customer encounters with different tools instead of being frustrated over them.

Here’s how to take the first steps with a marathon of total experiencet:

  1. Map processes
  2. Evaluate every process against your digital goals
  3. Prioritise processes by criticality and status
  4. Build a roadmap for digitalisation opportunities
  5. Define metrics for progress tracking
  6. Implement quarterly status reviews, be sure to invite management as well!
  7. Identify the following priority, digitise, and repeat

Eager to learn more about Total Experience? We’ve got you covered!

Juha Kujala is a two-time ServiceNow customer who is now the CTO of Sofigate Service Management. His professional passion is to lead organisations and ecosystems toward excellent service by utilising the best of modern technologies and methods. Juha has extensive experience in ServiceNow architecture and leading service development in both client and service provider environments.

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