2020-02-01_strategy+business

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Matt Egol

[email protected]

is a leading practitioner in digital

strategies for Strategy&, PwC’s

strategy consulting business.

Based in New York, he is a

principal with PwC US. Egol works

with B2B and B2C clients to help

them accelerate the development

of new disruptive strategies and

capabilities for customer and

employee experience.

Sujay Saha

[email protected]

is a director with PwC US in the

customer strategy practice, and

is based in San Francisco. He

partners with companies that are

at different maturity stages in

delivering customer and employee

experience, driving them toward

building a more customer-

centered culture, operating model,

and program structure.

Also contributing to this

article was s+b editor-in-chief

Art Kleiner.

The problem, he added, was not so much a lack of technological acumen

as a lack of connection between the company’s formal leaders (those with the

highest-ranking positions) and their employees and customers. These executives

needed to demonstrate that they could stay on top of today’s complex challenges.

Only then would employees feel confident enough to really invest themselves

in the company’s future. The formal leaders also needed to be more skilled

at understanding their customers — less focused on giving them what they

demanded immediately, and more on recognizing how customers were changing,

and what kinds of experiences would make them more loyal. “If we want to

really do our best with employees and customers,” the CEO concluded, “we as

the top team need to work on ourselves.”

This CEO’s conclusion represents a high-leverage opportunity that is

overlooked at many companies. A well-designed leadership experience (LX) —

oriented not just to issues of strategy and execution, but to addressing the leaders’

own collective development — can be linked to employee experience (EX) and

customer experience (CX) in a way that fosters a healthy, productive, emotionally

driven commitment among all three groups: leaders, employees, and customers.

This, in turn, can forge a stronger identity for the company and set it up for

success in the digital age.

Many business leaders are beginning to recognize return on experience

(ROX), a concept that we have pioneered at PwC, as a critical way for their

companies to create value. They are investing in CX to build customer loyalty,

and in EX to improve their culture and transform their workforce. They’ve heard

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