We’ve all heard the saying that the customer always comes first. While this is typically true, the overall experience in making this happen involves not only customers but employees involved in repetitive, time-consuming work and complex critical thinking activities to improve the full customer experience.
A first step in prioritising the experience is to recognise that the interactions that take place across different channels are where total experience (TX) is realised, created from a holistic strategy bringing together the employee, customer, and user experience that leads to better outcomes, growth, and market competitiveness.
In fact, Gartner1 predicts that 60% of large enterprises will use a TX strategy by 2026 to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels. The frenzy around enterprises to boost productivity and drive better business outcomes is being driven by hypercompetitive markets and rapid advancements around artificial intelligence (AI) that rival the past technology waves of the internet and mobile devices.
Central to a TX strategy is on how inbound data is captured, processed, and managed whether it is from forms, documents, emails, conversational AI bots, or social media. All these omnichannel inputs play a key role in determining the experience and how smoothly employees and customers can move between different communication channels and systems.
Decades of investments – is the experience better?
For decades, businesses have made enormous investments in technology and new systems to better manage and process the sheer volume of data being produced. These advancements have led to greater efficiency, cost savings, and productivity. Still the underlying problem for enterprises to create a unified experience between customers and employees has been the number of disconnected systems that support departmental and business functions. You can think of it like a puzzle where all the pieces are scattered about; some fit together well, and other pieces simply do not fit.
The impact from legacy computing architectures and the sheer number of SaaS platforms utilised today by enterprises is why data often lives in silos. This is highlighted in the number of journeys and touch points managed by complex business logic across modern and legacy systems, resulting in hybrid architectures.
Opportunity to Transform the Experience
There is an opportunity to transform TX, starting with breaking down technology and business silos created from decades of investments. Core to TX is how data is integrated from various sources across customer, employee, and partner interactions to ensure a consistent and impactful experience.
As consumers, we are the critics of what makes us happy or dissatisfied with a business. Our interactions and experience with a business, whether it’s buying a product, opening a new account or filing a claim for reimbursement, determines our satisfaction with that business.
Ultimately, inbound capture is where it all starts. Inbound capture is the onramp to a process of collecting and managing all incoming customer interactions and communications. These interactions include several channels today, such as emails, documents, phone calls, social media posts, web chats, and more. These interactions are very fluid, involve unstructured data, and are not always easy to predict what the outcomes should be.
To achieve success in TX, businesses need to harmonise the interactions and processes between customers and employees, systems and applications, creating a user experience from start to finish.
Think about the investments being made by financial institutions. For example, Bank of America spends over $12 billion2 annually on technology, of which approximately $4 billion was directed to new technology initiatives in 2024. These ongoing investments are intended to enhance client experiences and to drive greater operational efficiencies with solutions like CashPro Chat and Bank of America Intelligent Receivables.
Customer experience starts with inbound capture
Let’s look at the customer experience and break it down into four parts describing how inbound capture intersects and enhances customer experiences:
- Personalisation. The first interaction a business has with a customer or partner will often determine if the customer feels they are being valued. Personalisation is ultimately powered by the collection of data, and the ability to analyse and respond in real-time. In a PwC Customer Loyalty Survey, 51% stated that they would be less loyal if the online experience isn’t as enjoyable as in person.
- Efficiency. The right automation platform should be able to quickly interpret incoming content to determine the “next best action” and deliver it to the right process. This results in faster response times and lower cost or risk in making mistakes.
- Consistency. A key to inbound capture is building consistency into the experience regardless of the communication channel – email, phone, mail, or web chats.
- Insight. Inbound capture is all about the data and an opportunity to continuously analyse to understand the customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points. Decisions, buying habits or whatever experience you are trying to understand and improve need to be driven by the data. Customers are often willing to share personal information for a better experience and employees can then utilise that information to deliver a better experience through personalised interactions and decisions.
Bring all four of these pieces together and what is at the heart of a total experience is the data. Data drives personalisation. Data drives opportunities to create better operational efficiency. Data needs to be handled consistently regardless of channel or content – structured and unstructured. Data drives insights and is the basis for all decisions. Data is the backbone to observability and monitoring oversight across systems (ERP, CRM, IDP, ECM, RPA, EHR, etc.) and experiences involving customers, partners, and employees.
Role of AI Agents in Total Experience
We’ve talked about customer to employee experience, so where do AI agents fit into this discussion? Agentic AI is really the next frontier to AI that can autonomously solve complex multi-step problems. In the case of interacting with a customer or employee, an AI agent can gather and process vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, generate responses or solutions to problems, and continuously learn from the interactions.
AI agents can assist in harmonising the process between customers, employees, and the overall experience using a common language to communicate and operate dynamically vs. through a predefined code path. The road to using agentic AI will be a series of steps and foundational shifts that will progressively build over time. This will not happen overnight, but what is occurring already are customers and employees welcoming easier and dynamic interactions that do not require endless attempts to navigate multiple online support options, voice prompt driven circular call transfers, or traversing several systems and screens to find the right information.
One of the key areas where AI agents are improving the customer experience is customer service enhancements to self-service capabilities and communication between customers and employees,automating routine communications.
Recent research shows that 84% of IT leaders believe AI will help their organisation better serve customers in the form of interactions, reducing response times and boosting satisfaction.
Total Experience – the future is now
TX is the interconnected experiences of customers, employees, and users, and highlights the challenges enterprises face today around data – the silos, quality, sheer volume and complexity, and ability to interact with it in real time. However, the future of the customer and employee experience is changing today as the digital representation of a business, a network of agents, and a new layer of analytics emerges. There is no better time than now to explore how businesses can engage customers across channels to create a better experience between customers, employees, and of course AI agents.