A Quick Guide

In today’s Experience Economy, customers don’t just want good products or services—they crave memorable, engaging experiences. To meet these expectations, businesses must first design exceptional employee experiences, since happy, engaged employees are the key to delighted customers.

The Experience Profit Chain

• Employee loyalty and satisfaction directly boost customer loyalty and satisfaction—creating a self-reinforcing loop where better employee experiences lead to better customer experiences, which in turn feed back into higher employee engagement.

Engagement is Everything

• Engagement—emotional involvement and commitment—is at the heart of all great experiences.
• To create engaging customer experiences, companies must first empower employees with personal, memorable, and engaging work experiences.

Time: The Hidden Driver of Experience

Pine outlines four types of time businesses must manage to create value:

Time Wasted — Bureaucratic or inefficient processes that drain productivity and engagement.
Time Well Saved — Eliminating unnecessary time burdens so employees (and customers) can focus on what matters.
Time Well Spent — Designing work so employees are engaged in personal, meaningful ways.
Time Well Invested — Helping employees grow and transform, gaining skills to create long-term customer value.

Qualities of Remarkable Experiences

For both employees and customers, experiences should be:

• Robust: Combining entertainment, education, escapism, and aesthetics.
• Cohesive: Organized around a unifying theme.
• Personal: Tailored to individual needs.
• Dramatic: Structured with emotional highs and satisfying conclusions.
• Transformative: Enabling lasting personal growth and fulfillment.

The Call to Action

Companies need to shift from inside-out thinking—focusing on internal processes—to outside-in thinking, where they understand customer and employee needs first and design experiences backward from those desires. By creating engaging, cohesive, and transformative experiences for employees, businesses can unlock exceptional value for customers and secure long-term success.

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Pine, B. J. II. (2020). Designing employee experiences to create customer experience value. Strategy & Leadership, 48(6), 21–26. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-08-2020-0114