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 was a good one. However, the result is often 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.

Independent experience disciplines

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.

A professional association for usability was founded in 1991, two years before Don Norman coined “user experience” at Apple, and it renamed itself the User Experience Professionals Association in 2012, by which point its members’ interests had grown beyond usability. Customer experience followed a different path, with the Customer Experience Professionals Association founded in 2011 and an independent certification following in 2014.

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 shows how far a single-audience discipline can be taken. It measures customer experience against six pillars, runs annually, and in its 2025/6 edition covered 16 markets, interviewed 80,594 consumers, performed 804,137 brand evaluations, and researched 2,684 brands.

What came with that professionalisation was fragmentation. Each discipline has its own executive sponsor, technology stack, and 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.

What each of these disciplines produced is real expertise, applied to a defined problem, with methods that work. The limitation is not in the quality of the work. It is in where the work stops. Each discipline stops at the boundary of the function that built it. Customer experience reaches the customer and not the supplier whose delivery failure the customer experienced. Employee experience reaches the employee and not the candidate who was rejected badly. And within its own boundary, each discipline reaches only the parts of the experience someone designed. The pricing decision that frustrates a customer belongs to finance. The procurement process that exhausts a partner belongs to procurement. Neither is anyone’s experience work.

That is not a flaw in any single discipline. It is the predictable result of building each one inside a function. A discipline can only govern what its function controls, and no function controls the whole.

Integrated experience frameworks

The partial scope of the independent disciplines 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 frameworks that connect several of these disciplines into a more unified whole.

Each of them identified something real, and each built something to address it. Taken separately they look like five competing products. Taken together they are a field working out, piece by piece, what managing experience across a whole organisation requires.

Qualtrics' Experience Management (XM)

Of all the attempts to treat experience as a single connected discipline, Qualtrics’ Experience Management, usually shortened to XM, is the one that named the category. Qualtrics launched its platform in 2017 and describes itself as the creator of experience management.

What it identified was that 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 deserving equal standing.

What it built is a measurement architecture. Six competencies and twenty supporting skills, separate maturity models for competency, technology and culture, and executive ambition treated as a fourth requirement. It is the most fully specified framework in this section. By insisting that experience data and operational data be captured together and acted on continuously, XM gave experience a shared vocabulary and a place in the systems that run modern organisations.

Where it stops is at the point of judgement. 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. Values are present in the culture component. In a purpose-led culture, Qualtrics says, the organisation’s mission drives decision-making and its stated values drive behaviours, so that people can anticipate how decisions will be made and adjust accordingly. The assessment looks for three things: employees motivated by the mission, employees using the values to guide their decisions, and leaders behaving consistently with a clearly articulated set of values. What it does not supply is what those values require in a given decision. That is left to each employee to infer.

Deloitte's Human Experience (HX)

Deloitte’s Human Experience framework 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 across these relationships produce people who feel seen, valued, and heard.

What it identified was that treating customer experience and workforce experience as isolated initiatives produced marginal results, and that the values held by customers, workers and partners overlap more than the organisational boundaries between them suggest.

What it built is the only cross-audience measurement instrument any of these frameworks produced. The Human Values Compass surveys and assesses the values of customers, workforce and partners, drawing on more than 200,000 respondents and over 10,000 questions, mapping four cardinal values: personal achievement, belonging, curiosity and control. The HX Quotient then combines customer, workforce and partner experience and raises them to the power of alignment with those values. Deloitte has applied it, calculating the quotient for nearly 50 hotel brands across seven categories and reporting a positive correlation between alignment and financial performance. Its wider commercial case is that organisations providing a more human experience are twice as likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth over three years.

Where it stops is on whose values are being measured. The 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 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

Accenture Interactive published its Business of Experience report in 2020, and its argument is more structural than the others.

What it identified was that treating experience as the responsibility of a single function cannot work, because the delivery of experience runs through every part of the business.

What it built is the case for reorganising the entire business, front office and back office, around the delivery of experience, owned across the C-suite as a chief executive priority. In Accenture’s survey of more than 1,550 executives across 22 industries as well as 21 countries, those who said their organisations were organised around experience for customers, employees and society also reported profitability growing at least six times faster than their industry peers. It is the only one of the major frameworks to name society explicitly alongside customers and employees, and the one that comes closest to the whole-organisation ambition.

Where it stops is on what the reorganised business should deliver. 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 audiences with standing in their own right. It answers who the organisation should orient itself around, without reaching what it should commit to deliver.

Gartner's Total Experience (TX)

Gartner’s Total Experience, defined as "a business strategy for creating superior shared customer and employee experiences", was introduced as one of its top strategic technology trends for 2022.

What it identified is the 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.

What it built is the case for governing them as a single connected whole, bringing together customer experience, employee experience, user experience and multiexperience, along with the technology behind them, and elevating that connection to strategic significance.

Where it stops is in what it counts as an audience. Of those four components, only two are audiences, customers and employees. One is an operational discipline, users, discussed further in the next chapter. And multiexperience is a delivery concept, concerned with orchestrating experiences across devices, modalities and touchpoints. Placing them in one list treats a practice and an audience as the same kind of thing, which is why a count of four delivers coverage of two. Its orientation is also towards digital tools and platforms. Gartner’s 2022 trend report is explicit that starting with total experience identifies the digital and nondigital needs of both employees and customers, but its research home, its practical guidance and its illustrative cases remain firmly technological.

Forrester's Total Experience Score

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.

What it identified is that brand perception and customer experience are usually measured separately, and that an organisation cannot understand either in isolation from the other.

What it built is a composite score producing 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, which rates whether an organisation equips and motivates its people well enough to sustain the customer and brand experiences it is trying to deliver. Forrester argues that brand perception and customer experience each contribute to revenue on their own, and that the two multiply rather than simply add when an organisation runs them as one. In the US that shows up in what organisations keep and grow from existing customers, where automotive firms with a strong total experience report a 2.6 times revenue lift and retailers 3.8 times.

Its value is in detection, and Forrester’s own data illustrates that with unusual clarity. In the 2025 rankings Tesla scored 72.5 among its own customers, ahead of the industry benchmark and ahead of Honda, Toyota and Volvo. Among non-customers it scored 33.3, the widest distance between the two of any of the 413 brands Forrester measured across 10 industries and 13 countries, drawn from more than 360,000 consumers. Forrester read this as a signal of trouble ahead for growth if the company left it unaddressed. The score caught that gap precisely because it measures customer and non-customer perception at the same time, which a single-lens instrument could not have done.

Where it stops is at explanation. What it could not do was say why the gap existed. The most sophisticated measurement instrument experience management has produced draws its score from consumer perception, with an employee measure added alongside it in 2026 covering 150 US brands in its first year. Partner, influencer and societal experience go unmeasured, so the causes of the gaps it exposes frequently sit outside what it can see.

What has been achieved?

Between the independent disciplines and integrated frameworks, most of what a whole-organisation approach would need has been established.

The independent disciplines did the foundational work. They established that experience is something an organisation designs rather than something that happens to it, they built the methods for doing it, and they built the professional infrastructure that turns a practice into a discipline. They also established the first three audiences. Customer experience, employee experience and partner experience each exist as a named discipline with its own practitioners, its own methods and its own literature.

The integrated frameworks then made several arguments that no single discipline could make from inside one function.

• Gartner argued that the disciplines are interdependent, and that managing them separately is what allows experience to fragment.
• Qualtrics argued that what audiences feel belongs in management information alongside what the numbers say.
• Forrester argued that experience can be measured as one thing and tracked over years.
• Accenture argued that experience belongs to the whole organisation rather than to a function, as well as adding a fourth audience, naming society alongside customers and employees.
• Deloitte argued that there should be something to aim at, not only something to report.

The integrated frameworks recognised something else as well. Product, brand, user experience and multiexperience all appear as components in their own right, which establishes that what an audience receives is shaped by more than the audience relationship itself.

So the field has mapped most of the territory. Four audiences. A set of practices. Methods rigorous enough to certify against. An instrument that tracks performance year on year. And between the five of them, an argument for almost everything a whole-organisation approach would have to do: connect the disciplines, put what audiences feel alongside what the numbers say, measure it as one thing over time, make it the responsibility of the whole organisation, and give it something to aim at.

What remains unresolved?

The disciplines haven't been classified. Run through the names and they are not the same kind of thing. Customer experience, employee experience, partner, and society experience name who is having the experience. User, product, digital, sales, service, workplace, learning, developer and physical experience name what produces it. Patient, student, passenger, resident, member and beneficiary experience are sector-specific audiences. Candidate experience is a stage within employee experience. Brand experience, total experience and multiexperience sit somewhere else again.

Nothing in the field says which is which, or how any of them relate to each other. So an organisation that adds a discipline has no way of knowing whether it has extended its coverage, duplicated something it already runs, or renamed it. The list keeps growing and the question of what the items actually are has never been asked.

Every standard points outward. Qualtrics derives its standard from what audiences say they need. Deloitte's Values Compass measures what customers, workers and partners value. Forrester measures against competitor benchmarks and what audiences have come to expect. Accenture answers who the organisation should orient itself around rather than what it should commit to deliver. The disciplines do the same thing in their own territory, benchmarking against Net Promoter norms, engagement averages and industry scores.

In every case the target sits outside the organisation. None of them derives a standard from what the organisation has itself committed to deliver.

And there is a second half to this. Between a standard and its delivery sits a question none of them answers: what does this mean for each audience, at each stage of its relationship, in the moments that matter most? Qualtrics includes designing new experiences and building the processes, systems and training to deliver them consistently. Deloitte's guidance is to create experiences driven by the values it finds shared across the ecosystem. Both describe the output without describing how to produce it.

What is the impact?

Of the two, the standard is the one that shapes everything else, because it is what keeps experience an improvement effort rather than a strategic one.

An organisation closing a gap to an externally set expectation is reactively responding rather than proactively deciding. And that expectation keeps moving. 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. Because expectations rise as delivery improves, the gap ahead does not close.

Forrester's benchmark data records convergence across most of the industries it tracks. Reviewing seven years of its CX Benchmark Study, Forrester sorted those industries into four patterns and placed 11 of the 13 into the three it characterises as decreasing differentiation. In two of the three, the gap narrows because weaker brands climb while stronger ones hold steady or slip back. In the third, by Forrester's definition, the top and the bottom stay where they are. Singapore's banking sector shows how tight that can get. In 2023, 5.7 points on a 100-point scale separated the best bank from the worst.

Forrester attributes the convergence to organisations losing focus and becoming less customer-obsessed, and in Singapore it pointed to inflation and the cost of living squeezing what banks could deliver. There is a further explanation worth considering. 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 it 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, an organisation can close that distance by promising less, or by giving an audience something it did not know to expect. A standard derived from stated expectations will not surface the second one. 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 other two follow from this one. Without a standard set from inside, there is nothing for the classification to serve, because sorting the disciplines only matters once you know what they are sorting towards. And there is nothing to assemble the five arguments around, because interdependence, measurement, operating model integration and whole-organisation ownership all need something at the centre to be interdependent about, to measure against, to organise around and to own.

So the question the next chapter opens on is where that standard comes from. It exists, though not within the experience field. There is a thirty-year tradition of deriving what an organisation does from what it believes, and that is where the answer begins.