For a few years now customer experience and employee experience have been a top table conversation.

Slides have been produced, methodologies and frameworks developed and action put in place to listen to the customer/employee, understand satisfaction drivers and improve the experience.

Maybe the focus has been on the processes that we hope our customers and employees will follow – and finding ways to make those processes frictionless.

Maybe the focus has been on bringing clarity and understanding to every touch point of the customer or employee journey.

Maybe the focus has been on ensuring the right data is captured and analysed to improve the understanding of actions and drive better results.

I sense a new era is emerging as we go further into to the 2020s and that’s one of going beyond engagement to an era of more informative creative ways to engage in a more entertaining way and also going beyond frictionless efficiency drivers to creating experiences that enhance well being, inclusivity and mindfulness.

Anyone who has been working in the retail sector seeing the move to the online shopping carts and away from the bricks and mortar shopping malls would have been watching the John Lewis experiment to create “experiences” on the shop floor – the cooking demo master classes, the music and entertainment sessions.

Anyone who has been working at home during the pandemic may have been witnessing the corporate HQ being reconfigured with well being, mindfulness as well as a wow factor in the catering and community experience to make the office more than just a desk where we work (after all we all have that desk and experience at home right now) as a way of encouraging us all to benefit from being back in the office.

And then to the visionaries of the online experience world the metaverse will provide the opportunity for the experience of being immersed in virtual worlds designed to entice us to enter and spend time in them as we work, shop, get fit and be entertained.

At the heart of all these initiatives is getting to the human centred aspects of work, rest and play – putting thought into how people feel, what people think and going beyond what people do and say.

It’s an exciting time where those that go beyond process and efficiency measures and move more to effectiveness and satisfaction measures will strive. For those who can bring a sense of entertainment and some might say theatre to the day to day routines of life will win.

It’s an opportunity for the creative and fun loving characters at work to bring their whole self to work and influence how things are done around here and for us to break out of some of the more structured and stifling approaches of the past.

It's about time that we make the seamless connection between experience and the two other facets of an enterprise: identity and architecture by meeting in the intersections as shown in this picture: