Experience is broken

Open any business publication, attend any leadership conference, or scroll through the strategy deck of almost any major organisation today, and you will encounter experience everywhere. Customer experience. Employee experience. User experience. Digital experience. Business experience. Product experience. Brand experience. Sales experience. Visitor experience. Student experience. Passenger experience. Patient experience. Resident experience. Total experience. And the list is constantly expanding.

The instinct behind this proliferation is a good one. The problem is that in attempting to solve for experience, the experience industry has made it more complicated, more siloed, and more disconnected.

Over the past three decades several of these experience areas have evolved into a recognised professional discipline: a field with its own methodology, its own body of research, and its own community of practice. And with that evolution has come fragmentation. Each discipline has spawned its own executive sponsor, technology stack, and its own set of metrics. Customer experience teams measure Net Promoter Score. Human Resources or People teams measure employee engagement. Product teams measure activation and retention. Marketing teams measure sentiment and share of voice. Every function measures what matters to it. Very few organisations are measuring the same thing, or connecting those measurements into a coherent picture of how their audiences actually experience them. 

Fragmentation is only half of the problem. Even well coordinated, the disciplines only cover the parts of the experience someone has designed. The pricing decision, disputed invoice, resignation, or leader's public statement belong to no discipline at all. They are left to the judgement of whoever happens to be making them.

The result is a collection of experience disciplines working in parallel or worse, in competition, each optimising for its own definition of success while the whole remains unmanaged. That competition is made significantly worse if leadership does not believe in the value of experience as a strategic discipline, when the prevailing view at the top of the organisation is that experience is essentially aesthetic. "Just make it look pretty", "Sort out the website", "Run the survey". The disciplines are not merely competing with each other, they are fighting against an organisational culture that does not take what they do seriously. Without leadership buy-in, experience work is perpetually underfunded, deprioritised, and vulnerable to being the first thing cut when commercial pressure increases. The people doing it are talented, committed, and increasingly frustrated. Because they can see the gap between what the organisation could deliver and what it does, and they lack the organisational authority to close it.

The disciplines and frameworks that organisations have previously relied upon to manage experience are inadequate because they were not designed for the scale, the complexity, or the whole-organisation ambition that experience strategy requires.

Independent disciplines to integrated frameworks

Individual disciplines were built within a single organisational function, such as HR for the employee experience and marketing for brand experience. Each is valuable, well-developed, and commercially proven within its domain. Customer experience is the most rigorous of them. The Customer Experience Professionals Association maintains a competency framework, an independent certification, and a body of knowledge, all grounded in a job task analysis of what the work requires. KPMG's Customer Experience Excellence programme, refreshed annually and among the most extensively evidenced frameworks of its kind, shows how deep a single-audience discipline can go. But each of these individual disciplines solves one part of the experience challenge. Each stops at the boundary of the function that built it, and within that boundary, at the parts of the experience that function designs.  

That partial scope, the focus on a single audience, is precisely what integrated frameworks set out to address. Over the past decade, a number of the world's leading advisory, research and technology firms, among them Qualtrics, Deloitte, Accenture, Gartner and Forrester, have developed integrated frameworks that connect several of these disciplines into a more unified whole, and in Forrester's case an instrument for measuring them together. This is a wider view than any single discipline offers, and it demonstrates real progress. 

Each represents a meaningful evolution, acknowledging that experience disciplines are interconnected rather than independent, and that managing them in isolation produces the fragmentation that undermines experience quality across the board. These frameworks represent real progress, and deserve credit for making the commercial case with greater rigour than any single discipline could alone. The sections that follow examine what they achieved, and the limitations they share.

Qualtrics' Experience Management (XM)

Of all the attempts to treat experience as a single, connected discipline, the one that did most to name the category is Qualtrics' Experience Management, usually shortened to XM. Qualtrics launched its experience management platform in 2017 and is widely credited as the creator of the XM category. It frames Experience Management as the practice of combining how people feel about an organisation, what it calls experience data, with the operational data an organisation already holds, in order to measure and strengthen four core experiences: customer, employee, product and brand.

The central idea behind XM is a genuine contribution to the field. For decades, organisations made decisions almost entirely on operational data, the costs, sales, and performance figures that describe what is happening. XM established experience data, the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that explain why it is happening, as a category of management information that deserves equal standing. By insisting that the two be captured together and acted on continuously, XM gave experience a measurement architecture, a shared vocabulary, and a place in the systems that run modern organisations. It is also the most fully specified framework in this section, setting out six competencies and twenty supporting skills, with separate maturity models for competency, technology and culture, and executive ambition treated as a fourth requirement.

Reflecting Qualtrics' domain as a software company, XM is built to capture what audiences think and route it to action. Its own culture assessment puts it plainly: experience management is fundamentally about making smarter, faster decisions with data. This makes it exceptionally good at revealing the gap between what audiences expect and what they receive. 

Qualtrics presents the four experiences as co-equal pillars, though only two of them are audiences, with product and brand the surfaces those audiences encounter. The same assessment describes experiences as created and consumed by customers, employees and partners, then measures only customers and employees. Values are present in the culture component, where a purpose-led culture is one whose leaders behave consistently with clearly articulated values, and where those values drive behaviour by allowing people to understand and anticipate how decisions will be made and adjust accordingly. Employees are expected to infer what the values require of them. Nothing in the framework defines it for them. 

Deloitte's Human Experience (HX)

Deloitte's Human Experience framework represents another significant attempt to broaden the scope of experience strategy beyond the customer relationship. HX is built on the recognition that everyone, whether acting as a customer, a worker, or a partner, is fundamentally a human. Organisations which show up with empathy to create powerful experiences across these relationships produce people who feel seen, valued, and heard. Deloitte describes the ambition of the framework as helping leaders responsible for customer experience, workforce experience, and partner experience create differentiated solutions by understanding the shared values and aspirations of the humans in their ecosystem.

The commercial case Deloitte makes for this approach is grounded in its own research, which found that organisations providing a more human experience are twice as likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth over a three-year period, and to grow revenue up to 17 times faster than those that do not. That finding gives the framework a commercial foundation that goes beyond the empathy argument and connects human-centred experience management directly to financial performance.

The Human Experience framework is a more human-centred and more commercially grounded approach than a purely technology-led one, and its explicit inclusion of the partner audience alongside customers and workforce is a meaningful advance on frameworks that focus exclusively on two audience relationships.

But HX shares some of the same gaps as the frameworks it seeks to go beyond. Influencers and society sit outside it, and as the Fyre Festival and Nestlé examples in the Introduction demonstrate, those are precisely the relationships whose neglect produces the most commercially consequential and most publicly visible experience failures. HX's primary orientation is also towards customer strategy consulting and human-centred design rather than the whole-organisation operating model change that embedded experience requires. 

HX does connect experience to values, more explicitly than most. Its Values Compass maps what customers, workers and partners value, and Deloitte's guidance is to identify shared values across the ecosystem and create experiences driven by them. The values it derives from, however, are the audience's rather than the organisation's, which produces alignment with what people want rather than a standard for what the organisation has committed to deliver.

Accenture's Business of Experience

A further attempt to broaden experience into a whole-organisation concern came from Accenture Interactive, which published its Business of Experience report in 2020. Where most frameworks describe how to connect existing experience disciplines, Accenture's argument is more structural. It calls for organisations to stop treating experience as the responsibility of a single function and to reorganise the entire business, front office and back office, around the delivery of experience. Accenture positions this as an evolution beyond customer experience, owned not by the marketing function but across the C-suite as a chief executive priority. The commercial case is substantial. Accenture's research, based on a survey of more than 1,550 executives across 21 countries, found that organisations that organise around experience for their customers, employees, and society grow profitability at rates at least six times higher than their industry peers.

Of all the integrated frameworks, this is the one that comes closest to the whole-organisation ambition. It frames experience as an operating model question rather than an improvement programme, it locates ownership at the top of the organisation, and it is the only one of the major frameworks to name society explicitly alongside customers and employees. Each of these is a genuine and important advance, and each points in the direction that closing the experience gap requires.

The centre of gravity in the Business of Experience, however, remains the customer. The framework is explicitly an evolution of customer experience, organised around becoming customer-obsessed. The employees and society it names are brought in largely in service of customer-led growth rather than managed as a connected system of audiences with standing in their own right. However, it establishes that experience belongs to the whole organisation and to its most senior leadership. 

Gartner's Total Experience (TX)

Gartner's Total Experience, introduced as one of its top strategic technology trends for 2022 and continuing to feature prominently in its emerging technology research, is the most widely cited of the integrated frameworks and the most ambitious in its stated scope. It brings together four experience disciplines that organisations have usually managed separately: customer experience, employee experience, user experience, and multiexperience, the last describing how a person moves across the many devices, channels and touchpoints an organisation now operates. Gartner frames TX as a strategy for lifting the overall experience by connecting these disciplines, and the technology behind them, instead of leaving each to be run on its own.

Of the integrated frameworks, it is one of the clearest statements of a principle this betabook shares: that these disciplines are interconnected rather than independent, and that managing them in isolation is what allows experience to fragment. That a poor employee experience produces a poor customer experience, and that UX failures create CX consequences, is an important contribution to the field. Total Experience deserves credit for making those connections explicit, for insisting the disciplines be governed as a single connected whole, and for elevating that to strategic significance.

Its scope, however, is narrower than the count of four suggests. Of those four components, only two are audiences, customers and employees. One is operational, users. And multiexperience is a delivery concept, concerned with orchestrating experiences across devices, modalities and touchpoints, rather than an audience in its own right. In a world where operational partners are active extensions of the brand, where influencers shape perception at scale, and where societal experience increasingly determines commercial performance and talent attraction, a framework that does not account for these relationships is not a total experience. It is a more connected partial one.

Its orientation, reflecting Gartner's domain as a technology research and advisory organisation, is towards digital tools and platforms. Gartner's own definition acknowledges digital and non-digital techniques, but the framework's research home, its practical guidance and its illustrative cases remain firmly technological, and multiexperience is explicitly about digital touchpoints. This produces genuinely valuable guidance for organisations building digital experience capability. What sits alongside it, outside the framework's primary focus, is the culture, behaviour and operating model design that determine how people show up for every audience in the moments no one designed.

Forrester's Total Experience Score

While Gartner’s Total Experience proposes a way of connecting experience disciplines, Forrester’s Total Experience scores how well the results align.

Launched in June 2025, Forrester's Total Experience Score is the most recent significant development in the field, and the only entry in this section that measures experience rather than proposing a way to manage it. Forrester introduced it as a metric, and it works as a composite score, combining three separate benchmarking indices into a single number per brand. Its 2026 edition draws on Forrester's long-standing Customer Experience Index, its Brand Experience Index, and for the first time an Employee Experience Index, built to assess whether an organisation's employee experience strengthens or detracts from its business outcomes. Across the 375 brands measured in both 2025 and 2026, 41% improved their score and 3% declined.

The commercial case is substantial. Forrester's position is that brand and customer experience each drive revenue independently, and that the effect multiplies when they are orchestrated together. In the United States, firms delivering a strong total experience see materially higher returns from retention and enrichment, with a 2.6 times revenue lift in automotive and a 3.8 times lift in retail.

Its value is diagnostic, and Forrester's own data illustrates that with unusual clarity. Tesla, in the 2025 rankings, achieved a customer score of 72.5 points, exceeding the industry benchmark and outperforming Honda, Toyota and Volvo on customer experience. Yet its non-customer score of just 33.3 points revealed a perception gap among potential buyers that signalled a fundamental threat to future growth. The score caught that gap precisely because it measures brand and customer experience simultaneously, which a single-lens instrument could not have done. What it could not do was explain the gap. 

That boundary is a point about the field rather than about Forrester. The most sophisticated measurement instrument experience management has produced measures three lenses across two audiences, customers and employees, plus brand perception among those who are not yet customers. Partner, influencer and societal experience go unmeasured, which means the causes of the gaps it exposes frequently lie outside what it can see. 

A consistent pattern of limitation

Most independent disciplines were developed within a single organisational function, which shaped their audience focus, their tool set, and their definition of success. They are optimised for the problems most visible from within that function, which means they are systematically less effective at the problems visible from other functions, and largely blind to the problems that only become visible when the whole system is in view.

The integrated experience frameworks that have attempted to connect those disciplines share a pattern, both in the audiences they reach and in the capabilities they provide.

The Introduction set out why intention and impression separate. An organisation produces more than it designs, and governs less than it produces. Audiences then interpret all of it, designed and undesigned alike, through mechanisms the organisation does not control. Closing that distance requires an organisation to know what it is committing to deliver, to extend that commitment into the parts of the experience nobody planned, and to test what audiences actually perceive against what was promised. These frameworks are assessed against those three requirements.

The standards they set

None of these frameworks provides a mechanism for deriving experience standards from what the organisation itself has committed to deliver. Qualtrics and Deloitte derive the standard from what audiences say they need, what they value, and what they expect. Accenture answers the question of who the organisation should orient itself around, but not what it should commit to deliver. Gartner does not address the standard, and Forrester measures against competitor benchmarks and audience expectations.

In each case the target the organisation is working towards is set externally. Competitors are part of it, but expectations also rise when another sector resets what people assume is normal, when regulation changes what is acceptable, and when a new capability makes something possible that was not possible before. None of those inputs is under the organisation's control.

This is what keeps experience an improvement discipline rather than a strategic one. An organisation closing a gap to an externally set expectation is reactively responding rather than proactively deciding. And because expectations rise as delivery improves, the gap ahead of it does not close. Forrester's own benchmark data records the result. Reviewing seven years of its Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, it characterised 11 of the 13 industries it tracks as showing decreasing differentiation, with the gap closing because lower-performing brands improved while the higher performers stalled or declined. In Singapore's banking sector, 5.7 points on a 100-point scale separated the best bank from the worst. 

Forrester attributes this to organisations losing focus and becoming less customer-obsessed. There is an alternative explanation. The target moves for reasons no organisation controls, but within a sector every organisation is researching the same audiences and optimising towards the same measured expectations. They are working from the same brief, so the work converges.

A follower has a clear target, which is to catch the leader, and keeps moving. A leader already ahead of its peers has nothing left to aim at, because an externally set standard defines good only in relation to everyone else. That is a limitation of the method rather than of the organisation. Audiences can tell you what they want more of, but not what they have never encountered, so research into current expectations cannot point a leader anywhere new.

Oliver's finding cuts both ways here. If satisfaction depends on the distance between expectation and experience, then giving an audience something it did not know to expect is the most direct route to it, and it is precisely what a standard derived from stated expectations will not surface. The organisations that keep moving take their direction from what they have decided to be, and a sector where nobody is differentiated is the easiest place to do it.

The audience experiences they design 

Every one of them reaches customers and employees. Deloitte adds partners and Accenture adds society, but none reaches further than three audiences, and none includes influencers. What follows from this is not just incomplete coverage, but an absence of the tools and governance architecture needed to manage the audience relationships simultaneously. Improvements in one relationship are frequently undermined by compromising another, and the systemic connections between audiences that amplify both success and failure remain unmanaged.

Within the audiences they do reach, several of these frameworks define what should be delivered. Qualtrics includes designing new experiences and building the processes, systems and training to deliver them consistently, and Deloitte's guidance is to create experiences driven by the values it finds shared across the ecosystem. What they define is the designed experience: the journeys, the touchpoints, the interactions someone has planned. 

The undesigned portion is left untouched. It is governed, if at all, by a standard broad enough to reach every function and specific enough to act on, and none of these frameworks produces one. Qualtrics comes closest and shows the shape of the problem clearly. Its culture component asks that employees use the organisation's values to guide their decisions, which is the right territory. What it leaves to each employee is working out what those values require of them in the moment. The undesigned decision is recognised as mattering, and is then left to individual inference.

The operating model they create

The most ambitious of these frameworks argue that experience should reshape the organisation rather than sit alongside it. What they have to organise it around is a set of audience definitions, produced separately and usually by the function that owns that audience. An operating model has to be organised around something that holds across all of them, and several definitions answerable to different audiences and different functions cannot be reconciled when they pull against each other. 

This is the fragmentation the integrated frameworks set out to solve, reappearing one level up. The case for reshaping the organisation is made and the means are not supplied. An organisation that overlays experience improvement programmes on an operating model designed for other purposes will consistently find that the operating model wins. The structures, processes, and incentives that govern daily organisational life are more powerful than any programme designed to work around them.

The measurements they take

Each framework measures the audiences it covers, and the most sophisticated of them combine those measures into a single view of performance. What that produces is an integrated picture of how an organisation is currently perceived, benchmarked against its competitors and against what its audiences have come to expect. It is a rigorous answer to the question of where an organisation stands. What it cannot answer is whether the organisation delivered what it committed to, because the commitment it would be tested against was never made.

This is the gap that brand experience frameworks are most commonly asked to fill, and the reason they consistently fall short. The language of brand is the language of aspiration, and aspiration is not a governance standard. That mechanism does exist, though not within the experience field, and is covered in the next chapter.

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These frameworks have raised the quality of organisational listening, established experience as a concern of the whole C-suite, and produced credible evidence that it drives commercial performance. What they share is a boundary. Each works well within the designed experience for the audiences it covers, towards a standard set outside the organisation. The limitations of the independent disciplines and the integrated frameworks are not arguments against investing in experience. They are arguments for investing in it differently, with a framework designed from the outset for the scale and the complexity that a whole-organisation experience strategy presents.

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