Experience must be redefined

Chapter 1 made the case that experience as a discipline is broken. The specialist disciplines that have shaped how organisations think about experience over the past three decades, and the integrated frameworks that have attempted to combine them, were each built to solve for part of the experience challenge. None of them was designed to solve for the whole of it. The result is the experience gap this betabook exists to address. Outcomes have stagnated or gone backwards, and the structural fragmentation across functions, audiences, and metrics is producing diminishing returns on rising investment.

The question this chapter answers is what should replace the existing approach. The answer is not a new specialist discipline to sit alongside the others, nor a reorganisation of what the integrated frameworks already connect. It is a whole-organisation experience strategy: a wider audience scope, aligned through a shared organisational standard, integrated through the operating model and measurement systems. 

The term ‘experience strategy’ is currently used widely and inconsistently. It is applied to a customer journey redesign programme, to a brand refresh, to a digital transformation initiative, to an employee engagement survey. This definitional ambiguity has real organisational consequences. When leaders mean different things by experience strategy, they invest in different things, measure different things, and arrive at different conclusions about whether the work is succeeding.

The absence of a universally agreed definition is itself revealing. Unlike competitive strategy or corporate strategy, concepts with decades of rigorous academic and professional development behind them, experience strategy has evolved primarily as a practitioner-led practice shaped by the domains in which it has been most actively developed. Customer experience practitioners define it through the lens of the customer journey. Brand strategists define it through the lens of perception and positioning. HR leaders define it through the lens of the employment relationship. Each definition is coherent within its domain. None of them is sufficient as the foundation for whole-organisation experience strategy.

For the purposes of this betabook experience strategy is defined as:

The deliberate, organisation-wide discipline of defining, designing, delivering, and measuring the intended experience across every audience an organisation impacts. It is derived from an organisation's values and promise, translated into behavioural standards that govern operational decisions, and connected to the financial, social, and environmental outcomes that sustain its long-term organisational performance and purpose.

This definition applies whether the organisation is a private business, a public body, or a not-for-profit. What changes is not the discipline but the balance of outcomes it is accountable for: financial performance for some, social or environmental mission for others, and for most, a combination of all three. 

Reviewing the definition in more detail:

Deliberate: Experience strategy is an active, intentional discipline that requires investment, governance, and leadership commitment. Organisations that do not deliberately define and manage their experience do not avoid having one. They simply have one they did not choose.

Organisation-wide: Experience strategy spans every part of the organisation, because every part contributes to what audiences actually experience, whether or not it recognises that contribution as experience work.

Defining, designing, delivering, and measuring: Experience strategy is a continuous cycle: articulating what the intended experience is, applying it to each audience, building the capability to deliver it, and tracking whether the delivery matches the intent. 

Every audience: Experience strategy is not customer strategy with a broader name. It encompasses every relationship an organisation has, because all audiences shape its reputation, its performance, and its long-term resilience simultaneously.

Derived from values and promise: Experience strategy is the operational expression of what the organisation believes and what it has promised, the mechanism by which values become visible in the daily reality of every audience relationship.

Translated into behavioural standards: Experience strategy’s primary output is a set of behavioural standards, specific enough to govern decisions and broad enough to travel across every function and every audience relationship, rather than a set of emotional qualities or brand aspirations.

Connected to financial, social, and environmental outcomes: Experience strategy is a primary driver of the value an organisation exists to create. For a commercial business it appears as revenue, loyalty, talent, and durable competitive advantage; for a public body or not-for-profit, as the social and environmental outcomes its mission is accountable for. In every case, its value is measured in the same terms as any other strategic investment.

This definition deliberately goes further than most current definitions of experience strategy in its audience scope, its operational ambition, and its accountability. The experience challenge has grown faster than the frameworks built to address it. It now reaches more audiences, extends further into decisions nobody designed, and carries financial, social, and environmental consequences.

Experience is derived from values 

Deriving experience standards from what an organisation believes has been worked on for thirty years, in a tradition that was not considering experience. Collins and Porras established the principle in 1994. Studying companies that had endured for generations, they found that each was built on a core ideology, a set of core values and a purpose beyond making money, that guided and inspired the people in it and remained ingrained over decades. What changed was strategy and practice, not the ideology beneath them. The insight that followed has shaped management thinking ever since: an organisation's values are the fixed point the strategy moves around.

Blanchard and O'Connor turned that principle into a method. Managing By Values, published in 1997, runs in three phases. The organisation clarifies its mission and values, communicates them, and then aligns its practices to them. The third phase is where the substance of the work sits, and it consists of closing the gaps between the values an organisation aspires to and the values it practises. Their ambition was explicitly broad, describing a way of doing business in which every stakeholder, owners and shareholders, employees, customers, and others, comes out ahead.

Richard Barrett developed the most complete operational version. The Barrett model begins with the leadership team committing to the process, then measures the organisation's culture, comparing the personal values of its people, the values they experience day to day, and the values they want. It then defines the core values and behaviours the organisation intends to run on. From there it works through four kinds of alignment: personal, values, mission, and structural. The structural work reconfigures the systems, processes, policies, incentives, and procedures so that they reflect the values the organisation has chosen, which is what turns a stated value into an institutional one. Barrett describes the purpose of espoused values as providing a set of common principles that define how people in the organisation should interact with each other and with the outside world.

Some in this tradition carried the standard further out. Jim Stengel's study of high-growth brands, published in 2011, set out a sequence: discover an ideal rooted in human values, build the culture around it, communicate it internally and externally, deliver an experience that matches it, and evaluate the organisation against it. Raj Sisodia went wider still. Firms of Endearment, written with David Wolfe and Jagdish Sheth, argued that companies built on purpose create value for five stakeholder groups at once: society, partners, investors, customers, and employees. Conscious Capitalism, written with John Mackey, developed the same principle into a broader account of business purpose. Both showed that a standard drawn from values can reach the people an organisation serves, and both produced evidence that it pays.

Taken together, these approaches establish how the mechanism works. Values can be clarified, translated into behavioural standards, built into the structures that govern daily decisions, and measured over time. Organisations have been doing it for three decades, and the discipline of doing it well is documented, tested, and mature.

Brand practice developed the same mechanism in parallel. Internal brand management, set out by Burmann and Zeplin in 2005, focused on the role of employees in delivering a consistent brand identity and on what it means for them to live the brand. In practice this became brand behaviours: a brand's values expressed as a defined set of actions people are expected to demonstrate, usually a small number for each value, carried into recruitment, induction and performance management. The logic is identical to the values-led frameworks. A value on its own is too broad to guide a decision, so it is expressed as behaviour. What differs is scope. The standard is written by one function, for the behaviour that function can observe, and the functions it does not reach remain free to work to their own.

These frameworks were all built to change the organisation itself. Their subject is culture, and they succeed when an organisation's behaviour matches the values it has declared. 

What the values-led frameworks do not do is define what the organisation is therefore committed to delivering to each of its audiences, or carry that standard through to how those audiences actually experience it. Barrett's model goes furthest, with instruments that measure how customers and communities see the organisation, though what they capture is those groups' values rather than their experience, and the structural work is typically owned by the HR function rather than shared across the organisation. 

The integrated experience frameworks connected the disciplines and defined experiences within them, but did so audience by audience, from what each audience said it wanted, and only for the parts someone had designed. The values-led frameworks defined the standard rigorously, and the furthest-reaching of them carried it out towards audiences. But none built the architecture that designs the experience intended for each audience, the operating model that delivers it, and the measurement that proves it.

Experience has multiple audiences

An audience experience is the experience of a single audience: the cumulative impression a specific group forms of an organisation across the entire relationship. It is defined by who is having it, and spans the whole of that relationship rather than any single channel, touchpoint, or moment. A customer's experience runs from first awareness through every encounter that follows; an employee's runs across the whole of working there. Most organisations have their reputation, performance, and long-term resilience shaped by several distinct audiences, each with its own needs, expectations, and power to influence outcomes. Defining these audience experiences is the work of the Audiences dimension, introduced in the next chapter and built in Chapter 5.

What makes an audience an audience

The foundations of this thinking come from stakeholder theory. In his 1984 work Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, R. Edward Freeman defined a stakeholder as any group that can affect, or is affected by, an organisation's objectives. Freeman's definition names who has a stake. It does not tell an organisation which of those groups to prioritise. Mitchell, Agle and Wood answered that question by proposing the most influential answer in 1997, arguing that a group's claim on management attention depends on three attributes: power, legitimacy, and urgency. XEF asks a different question again. Not who has a stake, and not whose claim is most pressing, but which groups the organisation must actively design an audience experience for. 

Three criteria set the boundary:

1. 1. The audience is on the receiving end of the organisation's decisions. How the organisation acts toward them is chosen, not incidental, whether or not the organisation has yet thought about it as an experience. This separates a relationship the organisation is able to design from an effect it has without choosing to.
   
   
2. The audience can advocate for or undermine the organisation. The experience the audience has affects the organisation in ways the organisation cares about. Employees who advocate produce talent pipelines. Employees who do not produce attrition. Customers who advocate produce growth. Customers who do not produce churn.
   
   
3. The relationship is ongoing rather than episodic. An audience is in a sustained relationship with the organisation, not a single transaction. The experience accumulates over time, and the impression that forms is built from many moments rather than one. This is what distinguishes an audience from a one-off interaction.

Four audiences have already been identified by existing integrated experience frameworks: employees, customers, partners, and society. XEF adds a fifth audience, influencers, the individuals and groups that have the power to shape an organisation’s reputation at scale. 

The five audiences are a reasoned choice rather than the only defensible one. Applied more finely, society could be separated into distinct audiences for regulators, communities, and the natural environment, each of which behaves differently. Applied more broadly, influencers could be folded into customers or society rather than named in their own right. Both would be legitimate readings of the same test.

The framework uses five because it is the level at which the audiences stay distinct enough to design for separately, while remaining few enough to govern together, across the widest possible range of organisations. Split society into three and most organisations would find themselves managing overlapping relationships that are more useful to have as a single societal contract. Merge influencers into other audiences and a group that behaves like neither a customer nor the wider public, would lose the distinct attention it warrants. Five is the point at which the criteria produce a set that is both complete and workable.

Why not stakeholders

The term "audiences" is used in preference to "stakeholders" deliberately. Stakeholder theory has made a significant contribution to how organisations think about their broader obligations, but it does not provide a working unit for experience strategy. The stakeholder framing treats every group with an interest in the organisation as relevant to its decisions, which produces a list that is conceptually inclusive but practically unmanageable. Experience strategy needs a smaller, more selective unit: the groups whose experience the organisation must actively design, deliver, and measure against. Audiences are the operational equivalent of stakeholders, narrowed to the groups whose experience the organisation is able to design and accountable for delivering.

Audiences have multiple segments

Some audiences that appear in other frameworks are treated within the five rather than as separate audiences. For example, the regulatory relationship is a significant operational concern in many sectors, and organisations in heavily regulated industries will invest substantial attention in it. Within XEF, regulators sit inside the societal audience, because a regulator acts on behalf of the public. Its stance toward an organisation is shaped by the same record of public conduct that shapes society's, which is why the two are best governed together. Pulling regulators out as a separate audience would isolate one thread of a relationship that only makes sense whole. The same logic applies to communities, environmental advocates, public institutions, and other groups whose interests form part of the societal audience even when their dynamics are distinct.

Investors and shareholders are part of the partner audience, as capital partners. Theirs is a consequential relationship, and in a public company it carries the power to reshape what the organisation does, which is why many frameworks give it a place of its own. But it follows the same pattern as every other capital relationship. They provide the means for the organisation to operate, they form an experience of it based on how clearly they are informed and how much confidence it earns, and that experience determines how much capital they commit and at what cost. They belong with the other capital relationships, governed as one, because they behave as one. The same holds for funders, and for the donors and grant-makers that public bodies and not-for-profits rely on.

Volunteers, part-time workers and contractors are all part of the employee audience, as they are committing their time, effort and expertise to the organisation. Candidates are part of the employee audience, at the first stage of the lifecycle. Their experience shapes not only whether they accept an offer, but what they say about the organisation if they never receive one. Former employees are also a part of the employee audience, treated as the final stage of the employee lifecycle. Their experience continues to shape the organisation's reputation long after they have left. Families of employees are part of the employee audience because the experience of being an employee travels into the household and back out as advocacy or criticism. 

Additional or alternative audiences

The five audiences are designed to apply to the majority of organisations, but they are also a guide. A whole-organisation experience strategy considers every audience together, and adapts to each organisation's structure. Some will operate with all five audiences in the form the framework describes. Others may not have all five, or have additional audiences, especially if they are sector specific. For example:

• Hospitals may replace customer experience with patient experience 
• Universities may replace customer experience with student experience
• Government agencies may replace customer experience with citizen experience
• Transportation companies may replace customer experience with passenger experience
• Charities may replace customer experience with beneficiary experience
• Professional bodies may replace customer experience with member experience and student experience

This is the framework working as intended. The criteria for what makes an audience an audience remain the same. The five core audiences remain the right starting point. What changes is the specific audience structure each organisation builds against, calibrated to how it operates.

Why all audiences matter simultaneously

Audiences are not independent; they form an interconnected system in which the experience of each audience influences and amplifies the experience of others.

Employees who have a poor internal experience deliver a worse external one. Partners who feel marginalised become less invested in the quality of what they produce. Influencers who feel managed rather than respected become sceptical rather than supportive. Society that feels exploited rather than served generates regulatory, reputational, and commercial consequences that cascade through every other relationship. And customers who sense the misalignment between what an organisation says and what it does — through its treatment of staff, its environmental record, its public associations, or its political behaviour — increasingly take their trust and spending elsewhere.

This interconnection is both the central challenge and the central opportunity of experience strategy. The challenge is that a failure in any one audience relationship can destabilise all the others. The opportunity is that an organisation that manages all audience relationships with consistency and intentionality creates a reinforcing system, where trust in one audience generates trust in the next.

Experience is also operational

Not every discipline with "experience" in its name describes an audience. Several describe something different: the design and delivery of a specific kind of interaction, system, or environment. These are operational experience disciplines. They cut across audiences rather than serving a single one, and the same discipline often serves several at once, depending on who is interacting with what the organisation offers. Designing and delivering them is the work of the Operations dimension, introduced in the next chapter and built in Chapter 6.

Each of these terms is used two ways: for the response a person has, and for the practice that produces it. Service experience, for example, can mean the response a person has to being served, or the practice of designing and delivering the service that produces it. The industry uses the same term for both. This betabook refers to the practice.

Each of these disciplines has its own methods, its own literature, and its own professional community. The purpose here is to demonstrate what separates a discipline that produces experience from an audience that has it. The most established include:

• User experience: the design and delivery of the interactions people have with an organisation's products, services, and systems.
• Product experience: the design and delivery of a product and the value people get from it over time, from first use and onboarding onwards, shaping the customer experience where the product is sold, and the employee experience where it is used internally.
• Digital experience: the design and delivery of an organisation's digital channels and properties as a whole, shaping whichever audience uses them.
• Sales experience: the design and delivery of how a buying process unfolds, shaping the customer experience in B2C contexts and the partner experience in B2B ones.
• Workplace experience: the design and delivery of the physical and digital environments in which people work, shaping the employee experience primarily, and extending to anyone the organisation hosts in its working spaces.
• Service experience: the design and delivery of a service, from the first request to the outcome, shaping any audience the service is built for.
• Learning experience: the design and delivery of how people are taught, trained, and enabled, shaping the employee experience through internal training, the customer experience through education and onboarding, or the partner experience through enablement.
• Physical or spatial experience: the design and delivery of physical environments and the encounters within them, shaping whichever audience occupies or visits them, from retail and events to offices and warehouses.
• Developer experience: the design and delivery of the tools, platforms, and processes developers work with, shaping the partner experience where those developers are external, building on the organisation's products, and the employee experience where they are internal, building the organisation's own systems.

These disciplines are essential, and the work they do is some of the most consequential in the organisation. They are how audience experiences get produced. A customer experience is delivered through the user experience of the customer-facing app, the product experience of the product itself, the sales experience of the purchase process, and the service experience of the support relationship. Every audience experience is the result of many operational disciplines working together.

This distinction is what the rest of the betabook is built on. The organisation defines the intended experience at the audience level, designs and delivers it through the operational disciplines, and then measures what audiences actually experienced against what was intended. The framework in the next chapter sets out how.

Experience is the sum of everything

The most important single principle in this betabook is that experience is the sum of everything an organisation does. The balance between the designed and undesigned decides how much of the experience an organisation controls. The larger the designed portion, the more of what an audience encounters is the product of deliberate intention. The larger the undesigned portion, the more is left to default, habit, and circumstance, and the greater the risk that the impression an audience forms is not the one intended.

This is where the experience gap is generated. The wider the undesigned territory, the more an organisation's delivery drifts from its intent. Closing it is not a matter of designing more touchpoints, since most of the undesigned portion is not touchpoints at all. It is a matter of bringing those decisions under the same intention that governs the designed part. The more of the whole an organisation governs deliberately, the more of the experience becomes the one it intended, and the smaller the experience gap.

This means that every decision, across the whole organisation, is an experience decision. How you price your product. How you handle a complaint. How you communicate during a crisis. How your leaders behave in public. Which causes you associate with and which you distance yourself from. Whether your organisation's stated values bear any resemblance to the daily reality of the people who work there.

None of these feel like experience work on the surface. Yet they are where most of the experience is made. Not in the design sprints, the customer journey workshops, or the brand identity, but in the thousands of ordinary decisions that accumulate over time into the impression an organisation leaves on the world.

This is why experience cannot be owned by a single team or solved by a single programme. The sum of everything an organisation does cannot be governed by a function responsible for only one part of it. It requires a framework comprehensive enough to encompass every audience, rigorous enough to connect aspiration to action, and practical enough to govern real decisions at every level of the organisation.

It is also why the experience gap opens in the first place. Fragmentation is what leaves so much of the experience undesigned: when every function governs only its own part, the territory between the parts, the pricing decision, the crisis response, the leadership behaviour, belongs to no one and goes ungoverned by default. The gap is what happens when no one is responsible for the sum, and closing it requires an approach built to govern the whole.

That framework is XEF.