Experience strategy for the hybrid world is CX leadership’s greatest challenge

In a study that HFS recently conducted in partnership with Startek, 300 CX decision makers agreed that developing experiences strategies for the hybrid world is their greatest challenge. Other challenges such as talent resources and understanding customer needs also remain hard nuts to crack.

• The post-pandemic hybrid world demands rethinking of strategies that can meet both physical and virtual experience expectations, and create seamless transfer between them.  Similarly for employees, who are part-time in the office and part-time remote, ensuring their experiences are positive and they’re equipped to support the customer is one of the greatest challenges for leaders to tackle. Happy and skilled employees leads to happy customers is the new mantra.
• At HFS’ 2022 Super Summit during the session X takes all: experience is your brand, a panel of experience experts discussed how to revise these strategies for real business results. As Tamar Cohen, VP of Employee Experience at Travelers expressed, “How do we build business value by articulating employee experience? We aren’t going for hugs; it’s about fixing what is broken and helping employees succeed. How do we identify the blockers and how they impact negative value and fix that?”
• Knowing and understanding customers is the second top challenge; drastic changes in the behavior and expectations of customers have exacerbated this age-old challenge. And the third top challenge is having skilled resources for good CX. Finding and retaining talented skills in the workforce has also always been a tough issue to solve; today’s trends such as The Great Resignation and needs for different digital skillsets are increasing that challenge.
• It is the responsibility of experience leaders not only to plan the strategies but also lead the business towards execution and success. Continuously monitoring and re-evaluating the plan is also required to stay on top of changes; there is no endgame, it must be an ongoing journey to observe, predict and evolve the strategy based on market demands.

The Bottom Line: Organizations can no longer hang their hats on traditional experience strategies. The hybrid world demands new ideas, new execution methods and faster results.

To address both the challenges and opportunities, companies must re-evaluate their CX to find the right balance in physical and virtual realities. Smart enterprises will consider the role of EX in this same conundrum – balancing physical and virtual worlds. EX is more closely tied to CX than ever, and leaders must have the mindset to align the two.

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