Total Experience (TX)
Definition
Total Experience (TX)
Total experience (TX) is a strategy that treats customer, employee, user and multiexperience work as one connected problem, not four separate programmes. It lines up people, process and technology so that every touchpoint a buyer or an agent meets improves together.
Gartner coined the term and named total experience a top strategic technology trend for 2022, announced in October 2021.
The idea caught on because siloed programmes kept cancelling each other out. A shiny customer portal means little when the staff behind it work from three disconnected systems.
TX does not replace customer experience. It expands it by pulling in the employee and operational factors that quietly set the ceiling on what customers feel.
Key takeaways
- TX unifies customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user experience (UX) and multiexperience (MX) under one owner and one set of goals.
- Gartner named it a top strategic technology trend for 2022.
- The employee’s tooling sets the ceiling on the customer’s experience.
- TX expands CX rather than replacing it.
- Shared data and workflows across systems are the practical starting point.
How it works
TX works by giving four disciplines one owner, one roadmap and one shared data layer. Instead of a CX team chasing survey scores while IT rebuilds the app, both work against the same outcome and the same measurement set.
Genesys describes TX as a unified strategy that lines up customer, employee and user experience against shared outcomes. Its common use cases are worth borrowing.
The first is matching customer-facing goals to the employee workflows that deliver them. The second is unifying digital touchpoints across websites, mobile apps and internal tools.
The third is the unglamorous one that decides the rest: connecting data and workflows across systems so nobody retypes anything.
That last one is where most programmes stall. Plumbing work has no launch event attached, so it loses budget arguments to the visible front-end projects that depend on it.
| Discipline | Who it serves | Typical measure |
|---|---|---|
| Customer experience (CX) | Buyers and end customers | Net Promoter Score (NPS) |
| Employee experience (EX) | Frontline staff and agents | Attrition, time-to-competency |
| User experience (UX) | Anyone touching the interface | Task completion, error rate |
| Multiexperience (MX) | Everyone, across channels | Channel containment, handoff rate |
Practitioner guides from Appian and OutSystems extend the same frame to partners and clients.
Measurement usually stays familiar. Teams keep customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) and customer effort score, then read them beside staff-side numbers rather than in isolation.
Examples
TX shows up wherever one team’s tooling limits another team’s outcome. The clearest cases sit in contact centres, retail banking and any business running a service desk across several channels at once.
Take the outsourcing floor. Four disciplines meet on a single agent desktop, which is why business process outsourcing (BPO) is the sharpest example of TX in practice.
An agent fighting six unlinked screens cannot deliver a calm call, whatever the CX scorecard says. The tooling is the experience.
Retail banking is another. A mortgage application spans a website, an app, a branch tablet and a back-office queue — omnichannel customer service handles the front, but TX also fixes the queue behind it.
Service desks make the point at smaller scale. When the knowledge base an agent reads and the help centre a customer reads are two different documents, the two answers drift apart, and the gap shows up as a repeat contact.
Then there is product design. When a UX designer and an operations lead work from the same customer journey map, the internal admin screens get designed with the same care as the public ones.
Related terms
TX borrows vocabulary from several neighbouring disciplines. These terms describe the parts a total experience programme pulls together, or the measures teams use to prove the joined-up approach is working.
- Customer Experience: the sum of every interaction a buyer has with a brand.
- Customer Experience Management (CEM): the practice of designing and tracking those interactions deliberately.
- Customer Journey Mapping: a visual method for charting each stage a customer passes through.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): a loyalty metric based on likelihood to recommend.
- Customer Effort Score: a measure of how hard a customer had to work to get something done.
FAQ
Is total experience just a rebrand of CX?
No. TX expands customer experience by adding the employee, interface and channel factors that shape it, rather than replacing the CX discipline.
Who owns TX inside a company?
Usually one senior leader with authority across service, HR and technology, because the whole point is removing the handoffs between those functions.
How do you measure total experience?
You keep the existing CX and EX metrics but read them together — a rising satisfaction score next to rising agent attrition tells you the model is being propped up by burnout.
Does TX require new software?
Not necessarily, though most programmes start by connecting the systems staff already use.
Explore more outsourcing and experience-strategy terms on Outsource Accelerator.
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