Why Experience Strategy Matters More Than Ever
- Nichola Wolfe
- Nov 5
- 5 min read
For most of my career, my focus has been on Customer Experience — helping organisations understand their customers deeply, design around their needs, and create journeys that drive loyalty and growth. But in the last few years, I’ve seen a clear shift: the same thinking that transforms customer experience is now being applied inside organisations.
The catalysts are clear. The pandemic changed how people work and connect. AI is reshaping how work gets done. And generational shifts in values mean employees expect more purpose, more transparency, and a sense of belonging at work. Together, these changes have created a new challenge for organisations — how to protect talent, strengthen employer brand, and build high-performing teams in an era of constant change.
The principles of experience strategy and design are now coming to the forefront as a powerful way to meet those challenges, providing a way to translate expectations into business reality by using a structured approach to designing the experiences that enable both people and performance.
So, What Is Experience Strategy?
At its core, Experience Strategy is about designing with intent — aligning what people need and feel with what the organisation is trying to achieve. It’s the discipline that connects empathy and evidence, ensuring that every experience, whether for a customer or an employee, is purposeful, relevant, and measurable.
Traditionally, Experience Strategy has shaped how organisations attract, serve, and retain their customers — mapping journeys, uncovering pain points, and turning insights into meaningful improvements. But today, those same principles are proving just as powerful inside organisations. As businesses face new challenges around talent, technology, and transformation, they’re realising that the experience of employees is equally critical to performance, culture, and competitiveness.
In practice, this extends far beyond HR initiatives. It shapes how new platforms are introduced, how AI products are adopted, and how transformation feels for the people delivering it.
In essence, Experience Strategy helps organisations design the moments that matter, whether it’s a customer completing a purchase or an employee adapting to a new way of working. It’s about more than making experiences prettier or smoother; it’s about making them work better, for both the people they are intended for and for the business creating them.
From Customers to Employee: The Principles Stay the Same
In customer experience, we’ve long understood the importance of relevance, simplicity, and connection. We create empathy maps, journey maps, and personas to ensure we’re designing with the user in mind. In employee experience, the same tools — and the same mindset — now apply.
Recently, in a series of workshops with global HR leaders, employee experience emerged as one of the top business challenges. What’s changed is not the existence of the problem, but the recognition of its impact. Where EX was once viewed as a people issue, it’s now understood as a business performance driver — a critical differentiator in growth, innovation, and competitiveness.
Whether it’s the rollout of a new system, the launch of an AI product, or a large-scale transformation, every initiative creates an experience — for employees and for customers. How those experiences are designed determines whether people feel empowered or exhausted, engaged or resistant.
Yet in many organisations, there’s still a lingering mindset that employees should simply adapt, that change is something to be managed for them rather than with them. As one participant put it, “I often feel as though change is happening to me, not with me.”
That sentiment doesn’t just apply to major transformations; it reflects how employees experience their workplace every day — through systems, leadership, and communication that either enable or exhaust them. Experience Strategy addresses this by designing with people, not around them — involving them early, understanding what they need to succeed, and embedding that insight into how work, tools, and change are shaped.
When people feel seen and included, resistance turns into readiness, performance improves, and change becomes something they can believe in and get behind.
The Business Impact of Experience Strategy
From my experience, many organisations still treat experience as a tick-box exercise , something they feel they should be seen to be doing rather than something they truly invest in. It can be viewed as intangible, soft, or “nice to have”, but the proof is in the results.
Experience Strategy delivers outcomes, not just good intentions. It earns its place at the leadership table because it translates empathy into measurable impact, the kind that drives performance and growth.
Research increasingly supports what I am seeing firsthand. According to Gallup, business units in the top quartile for employee experience achieve 23% higher profitability than those in the bottom quartile (Gallup, 2023). Similarly, a study by the MIT Center for Information Systems Research found that organisations with strong employee experience outperform competitors on innovation, customer satisfaction, and profitability (MIT CISR, 2017).
The link is clear: when employees have better experiences, they create better ones for customers — and better business results follow.
The same logic applies to technology and product investments. When experiences are designed around users, adoption increases, ROI accelerates, and the value case holds up long after launch.
When applied well, Experience Strategy delivers:
Higher retention, by creating experiences people want to return to — whether that’s a customer buying again or an employee choosing to stay.
Increased adoption and productivity, by making products, systems, and processes easier to understand and use.
Improved competitiveness, by aligning innovation and investment with real human need.
Stronger brand reputation, through consistency between what people experience inside and outside the organisation.
This is why progressive organisations are reframing employee experience not as a “people initiative” but as a strategic advantage — a measurable contributor to performance, culture, and growth.
Put simply, Experience Strategy connects people, purpose, and performance — creating environments where individuals thrive and organisations achieve more.
Why This Matters Now
We’re in a defining moment for organisations. Technology is advancing faster than people can adapt, AI is changing how work gets done, and expectations are shifting at every level. The success of these changes no longer depends on the strength of the business case alone but on the quality of the experience they create.
Consider a new AI platform or a reimagined digital workplace. The success of either won’t hinge on the technology itself but on how people experience it — how intuitive it feels, how relevant it is, and how easily they can make it part of how they work.
This is where Experience Strategy comes in. It helps leaders see transformation through a different lens — one grounded in human understanding and designed for performance. It brings clarity to complexity, aligning ambition with the realities of how people think, work, and adapt.
Many transformations fail not because the strategy was wrong, but because the experience was never designed. Experience Strategy ensures that what you build delivers the impact you imagined, and the value your people and customers expect.
If your organisation is moving through change, it’s worth asking not just what you are changing, but how that change will be experienced. Because in the end, experience is what determines whether your strategy succeeds.
