“Experience is now the organising principle of the global economy.” That’s how SAP CEO Bill McDermott introduced the experience economy at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 in Orlando. The New Economy spoke to a dozen influencers and thought leaders about what the experience economy and experience management means to them.

Lee Odden: You know, when I hear experience economy, I think about experience being the number one differentiator in business today.

Tamara McCleary: It’s kind of this thing that’s grown out of what we know to be true, and that is: business is done through relationships.

Rodrigo Herrera: People might forget who you are and what you do – but they will never forget how you make them feel.

Ronald Van Loon: Basically, everything that we do is experience! So the experience economy already exists for many years, but we use now more and more technology to support our experience.

Kirk Borne: For me, the experience economy is really about how we can get value out of data and technologies to improve customer experience, employee experience.

Tamara McCleary: Everyone! All those external stakeholders as well as internal stakeholders.

Lee Odden: Experiences with really any individual that the brand is going to interact with, or have a touchpoint with.

Tamara McCleary: That’s what it means to me when we talk about an experience economy.

Lee Odden: Delivering an incredible experience really comes down to data. Having the data about customers, and what those pain points are, what those preferences are.

Keith Townsend: You have to think about reducing friction. I don’t want to or desire to interact with a human for commodity services.

Eric Kavanagh: But you need to have the right information in place at the right time – and these days the latency is so small! You want that customer service representative to have all the latest information right at their fingertips.

Yves Mulkers: Technology allows you to create individual experiences. Companies can look into that data and really customise your experience to what you would really like to have.

Eric Kavanagh: Right now companies can know John likes blue shirts, Jim likes red shirts; we know certain things about you. We have to be careful about how we use that information!

Kirk Borne: There’s a difference between personalisation and getting personal. And so crossing that line of too personal, you have too much information about me, can really change a positive experience to a negative experience.

Fernanda Nascimento: To understand what the customer wants, we need to first of all listen to the customer. It can be through VOC – voice over customer. It can be through NPS. And also analysing the churn rates.

Keith Townsend: Social media’s a great resource to get realtime information on how customers are interacting with your brand, or having experiences with the product.

Kirk Borne: Technology now enables us to capture data about every touchpoint in the customer journey. Of what they looked at, what did they think about – because maybe they put it in their shopping cart, then they took it out.

Rodrigo Herrera: Netflix for example, just took out the rating criteria. But they still measure how much length of the content you watched.

Michael Li: I think that what we see is that a lot of digital-first companies that are based on the web or mobile – they’re doing a really great job of enabling a great customer experience. And I think that what we see is that a lot of those companies that are digital-first are also data-native. And so they understand how to analyse that data and process that data.

Ronald Van Loon: And some technologies are very innovative, and they really set this bar very high. Which means there’s a lot of pressure on companies to increase their experience: get your data management right, the data acquisition, the data processing, the data insights, the real time actions. Because if you don’t you lose your clients, because they don’t think you’re reaching the level of experience anymore.

Dion Hinchliffe: Businesses have to respond to the experience trend by moving out of their siloed structures they have today. So we built our organisations around marketing, sales, operations, delivery, customer care – and they don’t really talk to each other, and they’re kind of disjointed when they’re facing our customers.

Michael Li: Every department has their own data silo; they don’t want to talk to each other, they don’t want to play nice.

Dion Hinchliffe: Let’s integrate this! Let’s make it more seamless, let’s take the friction out of it. Let’s make it as easy as possible for our customers to do business on the channels and devices in the manner they prefer.

Michael Li: If I’m in procurement, if I connect with marketing data: there’s a whole wealth of things I can do. And not just marketing: but sales, and engineering, and all the other departments. If you combine all that data from across the organisation, we can do a lot more.

Eric Kavanagh: Was this customer just on a website? Did this customer just visit one of our establishments? Were they just on the phone? Get all that information to the customer service rep in real time, and then of course you need a polite, caring, professional person to deliver that.

Tamara McCleary: It’s going to be absolutely critical in this experience economy that we’re focused in on the employee experience as well.

Rodrigo Herrera: Your employee needs to be committed; to have the same mindset, the same values as your brand and your customer has. People want to be part of something bigger; and that’s culture, that’s what you need to have in your company.

Tamara McCleary: That’s how you’ll be able to have the best talent within your organisation, is by delivering those experiences. And you’ll be relevant to your customer by delivering those exceptional experiences.

Lee Odden: When companies create a great employee experience, just like with customers you have loyalty, you have less attrition. You might have increased productivity.

Kirk Borne: So the outcome is obviously: good ROI at every front.

Tamara McCleary: The outcome from a better experience is a trusted relationship, which equals business growth.

Lee Odden: The biggest point of differentiation for a brand – the ability to deliver great experiences makes them dominant in their industry.

Tamara McCleary: Who is giving us the experience that makes us feel seen, heard, acknowledged, and that we build trust with? You will have a business and be relevant five, 10 years from now, if you’re creating those exquisite experiences that are memorable for your stakeholders, internal and external.