Every single day, your company deals with a variety of experiences. You offer personalized service and loyalty programs to your customers—and work hard to motivate your employees with perks and improve their performance with training sessions.
What if you created a multi-layered strategy that integrates all these experiences? The logic behind this idea is simple: There’s a clear link between happy employees and the excellent service they provide, which directly impacts customer satisfaction. This strategy has a name: total experience (TX).
Let’s explore how it can transform your business results.
What Is Total Experience?
Traditionally, customer experience and employee experience are treated separately. Customer satisfaction is one department’s responsibility, while employee well-being is what another team is focused on. Each department uses its own tools and metrics, and they rarely share their findings with each other.
However, the truth is that all things are interrelated: empowered employees provide exceptional experiences for customers, while grateful customers motivate teams to keep their performance bar high.
Yet, a total experience strategy is not just about customer and employee experiences.
Core Elements of a Total Experience Strategy
TX is like a puzzle: each piece matters on its own, but they all need to fit together to complete the big picture. Here are the key building blocks of a successful total experience strategy.
Customer experience (CX)
CX is the journey your customers take, from the very first visit to your website to the latest purchase or help request. The quality of your products and how helpful your customer service is impact your CX.
Employee experience (EX)
This aspect focuses on your team’s journey from their initial job interview to everyday work life until offboarding. EX involves the work environment, the tools used, training opportunities, and company culture.
User experience (UX)
While CX covers the general shopping experience, both brick-and-mortar and online, UX focuses on how smoothly your user can browse your website or use your app.
Multi-experience (MX)
The goal of MX is to create a consistent experience across multiple devices and platforms, both internal (used by your employees) and external (interfaces your customers interact with).
When it comes to internal tools, your team should easily work across platforms, from handling support tickets to collaborating with other departments. Similarly, good MX ensures that customers receive consistent service—whether they use your mobile app, browse your website on a desktop, or visit your store in person.
Technology is a key player in putting this puzzle together. And we’re excited to share some must-have tools to support this strategy. But first, let’s find out why you should even care about TX.
Why Total Experience Strategy Matters
Think back to the last time some company made you feel appreciated and satisfied. It probably wasn’t just one thing; it was everything working together. Follow their lead and implement a total experience strategy, too, and you’ll enjoy the following benefits.
Maximized operational efficiency
As we said, the main goal of total experience is to link every part of your company together, technology included.
Connected systems mean automated information flow. For example, when a customer changes their email address on your site, it updates automatically in billing, shipping, and marketing systems, so no one has to make these updates manually.
With all your core systems integrated, you can significantly speed up processes, reduce errors from manual entry, and let your teams zero in on the activities they were hired for rather than chase down the necessary information.
Increased employee satisfaction
Maximized operational efficiency translates into greater employee satisfaction. Total experience makes work more enjoyable as it tackles everyday frustrations:
- Manually copying data between separate platforms
- Struggling with outdated software that takes forever to load
- Waiting for other departments to share critical updates
- Sifting through endless email threads to track down a customer’s history
What’s more, when you unite employee and customer experiences, support agents can see the results of their work very well. You’ve probably noticed how, after a phone call with a company, they ask you to rate the conversation. You can add similar surveys to your total experience strategy. Gratitude and positive feedback will lift employee morale and confidence, while complaints will encourage your teams to reconsider their approach.
Teams with highly engaged employees also see 10% higher customer loyalty. However, this represents just one of the many positive impacts of a strong TX strategy on customer perception of your brand.
Stronger experience for customers
Another value of total experience is how it simplifies the creation of a personalized customer journey. For example, once you’ve optimized your UX and CX, your mobile app can suggest products based on both online and in-store purchases.
Plus, when MX connects all your service channels, your team stays in sync—so if a customer starts with a chat and follows up with a phone call, they won’t need to explain their issue all over again.
These kinds of thoughtful touches will show that you genuinely care about your customers. Eventually, they will become your best advocates, spreading the word about your business.
Enhanced business results
Ultimately, each of the total experience components will positively affect your business’s bottom line. Researchers found a connection between employee engagement and company results. Teams with engaged employees generated 23% more profit than those without this level of engagement.
By focusing on personalization, you can also halve your customer acquisition costs and potentially boost your revenue by 5-15%.
Challenges in Implementing Total Experience
Creating a unified approach sounds great, but in practice, it can be a bit of a struggle. Here are the main challenges companies face when building TX.
Legacy systems that don’t play nice
Challenge number one is how to handle your old systems—make them work together and integrate them with newer solutions. Connecting or replacing these systems often requires time and money.
Department silos and resistance to changes
Change is especially hard when teams are used to working in a particular way. Breaking down the silos takes more than introducing new tech—it needs a shift in company culture.
Managing diverse needs
Every customer has their own priorities—some hunt for the best deal, while others don’t mind paying more for top-notch services. The same goes for your teams: each one brings a unique mix of skills, work styles, and, of course, responsibilities.
Creating an experience that meets everyone’s expectations while keeping things consistent can feel like putting together a seriously tricky puzzle. For this, you’ll need flexible systems that can adapt to various preferences.
Budget constraints
A solid total experience strategy usually involves a hefty investment beyond tech—in training, adjusting processes, and even bringing in new talent. You may find it hard to justify these expenses in the short run, even though they do pay off in the long term.
Don’t let these challenges hold you back. Revisiting your old strategies can yield enormous rewards. Just tackle them step by step, following a plan like the one outlined below.
Tips for Improving Your Total Experience
Ready to bring TX to life in your organization? Here’s how you can get started.
Conduct experience audits
Before you make any changes, evaluate your current processes. You can begin by creating a list of all the ways your customers and employees interact with your organization. This will highlight any gaps and help you decide where to focus your efforts first.
Align business goals with experience objectives
While fantastic experiences are crucial, every improvement must contribute to your overall profitability. For instance, investing in new customer support software should help you speed up ticket resolution, increase employee productivity, and boost customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
Listen to both sides
Gather input from both customers and employees. One way to do this is to run surveys, organize focus groups, and then assess the feedback. You might ask about the biggest pain points in your customer interactions and what tools your employees feel would make their jobs easier.
Choose total experience technology wisely
Select flexible, user-friendly systems that can adapt and grow with your business. These customer service tools must also integrate well with each other and your existing systems.
Train and support your people
To make your new processes work, your teams need to understand how to use the new tools well. Just as important is helping them see why these changes matter and how they will benefit from them.
Measure and adjust
By tracking satisfaction metrics—CSAT, net promoter score (NPS), customer retention rates, employee satisfaction scores, and staff turnover rates, as well as revenue per customer, and return on TX investment—you’ll see how your changes impact your business. Remember to share progress updates and successes with your team to keep them motivated!
Total Experience Tools and Technologies to Use in Your Strategy
Without the right digital tools, connecting all digital touchpoints and creating a positive experience is nearly impossible. So, we’ve rounded up some of the best tools to help you create a winning total experience strategy.
Employee experience platforms
Employee experience platforms simplify routine tasks, like submitting and approving time-off requests, tracking hours, accessing company policies and training materials, or getting IT assistance. Help desks and service desks, for instance, can automatically route IT tickets to the right expert.
Employees are better positioned to assist customers when they can quickly find what they need and get timely support. Remember the airline safety instructions? “Put your oxygen mask on first.” The same principle applies here.
These tools also collect data about employee engagement and productivity, which helps managers determine where additional training is required to enhance customer service.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
CRM is your central hub for everything customer-related. Tools like HubSpot and Salesforce keep track of all your customer interactions, from basic contact information to their entire interaction history with your company. So, when a customer reaches out, your team has the full picture: which marketing emails they opened, past sales conversations, and where they are in their buying journey.
Help desks
While CRM systems serve as a comprehensive customer database for marketing, sales, and other teams, help desk platforms are built specifically for customer support. These tools help you manage customer requests, prioritize tickets, track past inquiries, build a knowledge base, and much more.
The help desk market offer is quite impressive, so no wonder that most of these customer service tools allow you to deliver omnichannel or multichannel customer support. People can contact you via email, phone, chat, or social media—and you can keep these requests in one place.
| Feature | Help Desk | CRM |
| Focus | Operational support & service—focused on resolving issues quickly and efficiently. | Sales, marketing, and customer relationship management—focused on growing relationships and managing pipelines. |
| Primary Users | Support teams, IT staff, internal service desks, and sometimes end-users. | Sales teams, marketing teams, and account managers. |
| Touchpoints Covered | Real-time issue resolution, self-service portals, live chat, knowledge base, ticketing—directly improving service experience. | Long-term relationship tracking, lead management, and campaign effectiveness. |
| Employee Experience (EX) | Helps employees handle customer/internal issues faster with automation, SLA tracking, and integrations. Reduces stress. | Offers salespeople a view of customer data but doesn’t directly help resolve customer pain points or improve internal processes. |
| Customer Experience (CX) | Immediate support, transparency through ticket status, faster resolutions—all key to customer satisfaction. | Focused more on personalization and proactive outreach, but may fall short during moments of friction or technical issues. |
| Total Experience Delivery | Strong contributor: aligns CX and EX via integrated support workflows and real-time communication. | Moderate contributor: boosts CX through personalization, but lacks direct impact on EX or multiexperience support. |
| Multiexperience (MX) | Often supports omnichannel service (email, chat, SMS, web portal, mobile app). | Limited multiexperience capability; usually focused on email and phone interactions. |
Why Help Desk Can Be Better for Total Experience
- Real-Time Problem Solving: Help Desks provide immediate support, which is critical during moments of need—greatly boosting both CX and EX.
- Omnichannel Support: Customers can reach out via chat, email, web, or phone, which increases satisfaction and engagement.
- Employee Enablement: A good help desk system improves agent workflows, reduces burnout, and promotes better service delivery—directly enhancing the employee experience
- Self-Service Empowerment: Knowledge bases and FAQs allow users to solve problems on their own, which contributes to a smoother user experience (UX).
- Integrated Feedback Loops: Help desks can collect customer and employee feedback to continuously improve service processes.
When CRM Still Wins
To be fair, CRM systems are unmatched when it comes to relationship-building, data-driven marketing, and sales enablement. If your priority is nurturing leads or upselling customers, CRM is key.
If your goal is to deliver a complete, satisfying experience across every user and employee interaction point, a help desk system often plays a more direct and practical role—especially when combined with CRM for a well-rounded approach.
Final Thoughts
Every experience is connected. When your team struggles with outdated systems, it slows them down—and your customers feel the effects. If customers are frustrated, having to explain their issues over and over, your team’s morale slumps.
But when everything works seamlessly—when teams are supported by solid systems and happy customers enjoy a positive experience—success starts to snowball. That’s the power of total experience.
Total Experience Strategy FAQs
Key elements of the strategy include:
- Automation: Utilizing advanced tools to streamline the migration process, reducing manual effort and errors.
- Employee Empowerment: Providing support teams with the necessary resources and training to adapt to new systems confidently.
- Customer-Centric Approach: Ensuring that the migration process aligns with the specific needs and goals of each client, leading to higher satisfaction rates.
By integrating these components, Help Desk Migration delivers a comprehensive TX strategy that benefits both customers and employees, fostering a more productive and satisfying support environment.
- Customer experience (CX): How customers perceive your brand across all interactions.
- Employee experience (EX): The journey employees have with your organization—from onboarding to growth.
- User experience (UX): The design and usability of digital products and services.
- Multi-experience (MX): The consistency of interactions across multiple devices and platforms.
Together, these create a holistic view of your brand’s interaction ecosystem.
Real-world example: A candidate listed “2 years of experience in Zendesk.” But when we checked dates, it was actually 19 months. For a senior role, that made a difference, so we moved them to a mid-level track instead.
2. Use a clean, repeatable format We standardized how we write experience across job descriptions and internal docs to avoid confusion.
Example from a job post: “We’re looking for someone with at least 36 months of experience in SaaS support, including direct use of tools like Zendesk, Intercom, or Freshdesk.”
3. Context matters—especially for shorter roles Short gigs can still have big impact. Instead of writing off a 4-month stint, we frame it in months to show value.
Example from a CX contractor: “8 months total experience in migrations, including a 4-month Zendesk to Salesforce project for a healthcare client.”
4. Use tools to avoid guessing use tools like timeanddate.com’s duration calculator to plug in start and end dates and get exact results.
Internal SOP sample: “Use a date duration tool to calculate total experience in months. Round down when under 15 days into a new month. Always confirm with offer letters or LinkedIn.”
5. Break it down for clarity When someone’s background spans multiple areas, breaking it down by role or skill helps pinpoint fit.
Example from a team member’s internal growth profile: “Total Experience: 54 months
- 18 months in Tier 1 support
- 24 months in customer onboarding
- 12 months managing a CX team”