Defining "Customer Experience"
When I used to be a management consultant and people asked me, “So, what do you do?”, I remember finding it challenging to provide a concise explanation. I worked across many different functional areas and industries. My answer was typically, “I help companies fix their problems.” (sorta right?)
After transitioning to "industry," you’d think that question would be easier to answer, but somehow it’s even more difficult! Why?
It’s not a well-established field but it is rapidly growing and transforming.
When properly operationalized, it truly impacts all parts of your business.
I’ve seen companies where everyone thinks they “own” the customer experience and hastily race towards their version of the North Star. While everyone has good intentions, this often leads to teams independently working in silos and ultimately appears as a disconnected experience to the customer.
So… that’s what inspired this post: what is customer experience (CX)?
This definition is borrowed from Don Peppers, author of “Customer Experience: What, How and Why Now”.
Let’s break down its core components:
“Customer” doesn’t just entail your current consumers but also includes prospective ones. If you consider your customer base from this lens, you’ll be setting yourself up for successful growth AND retention.
What you intend the experience to be may not be how your customers perceive it. “Individual” means recognizing each customer’s own interpretation or impression. Experiences are subjective, not objective.
“Interactions” occur in addressable or reciprocal channels. Marketing campaigns and brand messages are important, but they aren’t interactions, so they lie outside the CX domain.
“With” a brand encompasses how your company directly or indirectly engages with your customers. You can’t control what your customers say about your brand but you can influence their opinion based on the experiences you provide.
“Brand” is the identity for your products and services, which also includes your dealers, distributors, retail partners, and service firms. These entities are an extension of your brand that should align to your values. You can contract out the task, but not the responsibility - at least not as far as the customer is concerned.
“Over time” recognizes the ongoing nature of a customer relationship. Each customer’s experience is not an isolated event, but accumulates through time. While a single unpleasant experience may not seem so bad, the compounding effect of multiple poor experiences leads to one very unhappy customer.
And the very first word in the definition, “totality,” means that you cannot improve your customer experience without considering all of these issues in total, including how each one impacts the others.
It’s critical to be clear what “customer experience” means in your organization because how can we effectively improve something we can’t define? In my subsequent blog posts, I’ll be dissecting each of these elements.
TLDR: Defining “customer experience” can be challenging because it’s constantly evolving and impacts all parts of your business, but gaining clarity is a necessity to draw boundaries, focus on the right elements, and drive effective change.