Experience is everyone’s business

5 min readMar 29, 2021

Creating a cohesive culture of experience across your organization

Written by Raj Wickramasinghe, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Salesforce Business Group — North America

More than 4,000 people packed into Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on a cool February day to get a COVID-19 vaccination. This was a massive operation. Imagine all the different moving parts that needed to come together to vaccinate at such a large scale. It’s mind-boggling.

How does something so complex at such a large scale — and with life-saving consequences — happen quickly?

The answer is innovation + collaboration at lightning speed. An effort like this doesn’t roll out on its own. It takes extraordinary teamwork, the right technology solution, and a relentless focus on the human experience at each stage of the process. This unprecedented scenario is a case study in broadening our thinking beyond traditional customer experience to understanding the need for experience to be integral to all parts of an organization, a concept that serves as the foundation of Accenture’s new Business of Experience (BX) report, which reveals how organizations can push beyond the CX philosophy to reimagine their entire business through the lens of experience.

“BX is ultimately about fusing your front office of sales, marketing, service and product functions (no more siloes) and connecting it to the back office (e.g., HR, supply chain, etc.). It is an operating model change across the board that flips the focus from engaging customers at touch points to the full customer journey instead1.”

Overcoming vaccine distribution challenges with collaboration

The core objectives of COVID-19 vaccination programs are driving toward a very simple outcome: get as many people vaccinated as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, as we unpack the process, there’s an immense amount of complexity. A bevy of stakeholders and various parts of multiple organizations need to come together to make that happen while the patient (every citizen in this case) has to interact and navigate each touchpoint with ease.

More broadly, whether you’re a patient getting a vaccination or a consumer buying a car, there are multiple interaction points that impact the overall experience. A patient’s vaccine journey begins with ensuring eligibility and scheduling an appointment, which requires technology tools and human interactions. The process must be accessible to all, simplified, and needs to take into consideration the vast variations in how tech savvy different populations may be. Vaccination sites must be available, set up quickly, and organized for efficiency. Coordination with the pharmaceutical companies and needle suppliers is another requirement. A two-shot process over a one-month period adds yet another element of complexity. The medical professional on-site must be ready with the right vaccine, so staffing, scheduling, drug management and proper refrigeration storage are essential.

The logistics are astounding. Collaboration across the organization isn’t just one thing to get right, it’s everything.

Why Salesforce?

As the world continues to immunize against COVID-19 through vaccination, it might surprise you to learn that some of these mass-scale health efforts are powered by Salesforce. In fact, our Accenture Salesforce Business Group partnership with Salesforce is helping lead health organizations in vaccine management and distribution.

As we focus on the complexities of such an urgent effort as vaccines, it’s clear that all parties need to operate with the same insights and collaborate across the same tools. Working in silos is a clear path to failure and choosing the right technology can make or break a complex program. Salesforce’s tools and platform are inherently designed to make it easier to work as one cohesive, customer-obsessed unit, providing a 360-view of the customer’s journey, in real time, across multiple touchpoints.

Accenture’s Business of Experience report, the dialogue on expanding the experience across your organization hit the nail on the head. The premise is simple — experience is everyone’s responsibility — yet inherently complex, and complexity can be daunting.

Getting started: Shifting from a CX to a BX

To achieve a holistic anti-siloed approach, leaders must understand how individual roles align with the business and what impact they have on the end experience. When we analyze the vaccination process in the context of using Salesforce to achieve outcomes, I see three high-level keys that are essential to ensuring this platform is maximized through collaboration:

Easy-to-use tools: The digital tools used must be easy and painless for a wide range of people with varying degrees of technical prowess. Without an intuitive and user-friendly platform like Salesforce, any journey will experience significant user-related speedbumps.
Leadership from the top: There needs to be strong and decisive sponsorship from a central point of an organization, whether a COO, CMO or any senior role with authority. It’s leadership that pulls the organization together to make sure all these things happen — a fundamental management principle essential to success.
A collaborative culture: No organization can pull off complex efforts effectively unless every individual takes ownership of the experience using collaborative tools. Ongoing training as part of change management, empowering employees up and down the organizational structure, reward and recognition are vital to growing and nurturing a culture built on teamwork.

Years from now, we will look back at 4,000 people in a baseball stadium getting vaccinated during a global pandemic as an interesting footnote in history. While the pandemic will hopefully soon be in the rearview mirror, the need for a unifying, cohesive and organization-wide approach to delivering on experience will continue to be essential for any vital business endeavor in the future.

There is much more to unpack on becoming a business of experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s continue the conversation.

1Accenture C-level BX Survey; data collected from November 2019 to January 2020, with a refresh in May-June 2020

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