How to succeed in the experience economy

A few weeks ago, I joined a 10,000-strong group of attendees at Qualtrics’ X4 Experience Management Summit, where a major theme was the experience economy. I’ve been thinking a lot more about this concept since the event. The currency in the experience economy is worker loyalty, and therefore the employee experience is an equity to be protected. Without doing so, companies are at risk of losing the “war for talent” and of falling prey to “the great resignation.” 

To avoid such consequences, companies must transform into design-led organisations, where it’s recognised that the engagement and feelings of the workforce that uses its technology services are critical to maintaining a strong business and strong brand.

Given that a company’s biggest investment will go into staffing, IT must have the ability to diligently support that workforce and recognise when productivity is at risk. Providing an amazing workplace experience helps to attract the best people to your organisation – and keep them there. It must be standard practice that day-to-day IT operations deliver services efficiently, with quality and with consistency, and that the IT organisation accumulates knowledge of future employee service demands.

Critically, optimising the employee experience will impact your customers’ experience. The first rung of the ladder you’ll climb to build a strong customer experience is providing the IT support needed to have an energised and productive workforce.

Organisations must realise that sustainable success is inseparable from the experience of their workforce, and that empathy must be a corporate concern. Utilising experience analytics and reporting metrics provides a means to achieving sustainable success.

Getting transformation underway

Until recently, there hasn’t been an objective way of defining what a good employee experience is, though there certainly is a way of defining a poor one. A CTO who notices that unapproved applications are popping up everywhere should be concerned about shadow IT and the risks that creates across the IT estate. In the experience economy, where employees are consumers of a brand of workplace experience, the dilution of that brand causes shadow IT.

To avoid brand dilution and empower an organisation to positively and successfully take part in the experience economy, it necessitates having an efficient and repeatable way to discover what employees feel and think about their IT services. 

In collaboration with the partner team at Qualtrics, DXC has integrated our Modern Workplace solutions with its Experience Management platform (XMos), to create hybrid insights into employees’ circumstances through experience, operational and technical sources. DXC’s innovative Experience Cube methodology harnesses this data to create a three-dimensional view of the employee’s workplace experience – without significant manual effort in collection and analysis.

By regularly providing objective, averaged metrics for the employee’s level of satisfaction across the technology experience, the methodology enables IT organisations to gain insight, resolve issues or create new needed services, evidenced by clear and measurable demand signals.

This is key to DXC’s ultimate goal of getting customers to the position where their workforce will consistently experience the best possible service landscape – that is, where everything just works, each time. 

Committing to experience

To further this goal, DXC is leveraging Qualtrics’ technology to generate insights for employee experiences across workplace journeys in realtime. A typical employee’s journey starts with a goal – a task they need to do or issue they need to fix – that will take them through multiple functions across multiple systems and channels. For IT today, managing that journey can be a logistical challenge for technology services, and too often employees become frustrated with the inability to smoothly reach a resolution. You can see how that may lead them to become a proponent of shadow IT.

Within a journey managed by DXC, user feedback is collected at various points, using advanced analytics to observe and process how workers express their sentiment and perception as the journey progresses. IT can intercede to help users at the point where they become dissatisfied with the experience. Interventions could range from popping up the information they need to move on, to dispatching a service agent to their place of work.

Having a deep understanding of employees’ needs and preferences puts IT in an excellent position to finely control journey mapping. Here we are using Qualtrics Experience iD feature to build user experience profiles and automatically route employees on the journey that should have the least friction for them.  

The ability for IT to service employees in this way is even more critical now that so many people work remotely or in hybrid conditions. In today’s workplace you need a strategy and tool sets to understand what is happening at the “point of consumption” of the service, wherever the employee sits. 

Guiding the experience management lifecycle

The experience economy is very real, with major implications for how well people perform in the workplace. DXC began its transformation into an experience company two years ago, with the goal of delivering a personalised and modern workplace experience that empowers employees to connect, collaborate and work seamlessly and securely on any device, anytime and anywhere.

Today, we act as an experience company for our Modern Workplace customers. Along with our Modern Workplace services for managing devices, providing digital support and enabling intelligent collaboration, we have built a practice with dedicated experience managers to walk customers through the experience management lifecycle. This includes profiling the workforce and analysing employee sentiment and perception. We are focused on continuously calibrating and optimising the workplace experience for employees so that their company can participate fully and successfully in the experience economy.  

Learn more about DXC Modern Workplace.