Defining the "Customer Experience"

A lot of businesses are concerned with improving their customers’ experiences. But while this sounds like a worthy goal, how do you go about it, exactly? What are the actual elements of a “customer experience” anyway, and what should you focus on? What kinds of actions would improve the experience you offer to customers?

In my view, before setting off on any initiative to improve your company’s customer experience, you first need to agree on what a customer experience actually is. And any useful definition of it should be based on straightforward language, while at the same time clearly differentiating the term “customer experience” from other marketing terms and buzzwords, such as customer service, brand preference, customer satisfaction, CRM, or customer loyalty.

So here’s a simple definition of customer experience that is both straightforward and differentiated from other buzzwords. “Customer experience” is:

The totality of a customer’s individual interactions with a brand, over time.

Each of the terms in this definition is important, because each term identifies some aspect of your own company’s customer experience that you have to pay attention to when it comes to making improvements. If you are crafting an initiative to improve your customer experience, the words in this definition will help you ensure that you are focusing on the right things, and not undermining or diluting your effort:

• The word “customer” is meant to include both current and prospective buyers and users. When you make it easier for a prospect to find information about your firm or your product, for instance, you are improving the “customer experience” even though the prospect may never actually become a customer.
• “Individual” means that we are talking about each different customer’s own individual perception or impression of the experience. What you intend to provide a customer is not nearly as important as how the customer perceives what you provide.
• “Interactions” occur in addressable or reciprocal channels, i.e., non-mass media. Marketing campaigns, taglines, and brand messages may be important, but they aren’t interactions, so they lie outside the “customer experience" domain. On the other hand, improving your mobile app by, for instance, embedding voice or chat connections into it, would definitely improve your customer experience.
• “With” a brand means that the interactions a customer has with others about a brand are not really a part of the customer experience, although of course the customer experience does include how your own company engages with customers and prospects in various social channels.
• “Brand” is a proxy for all your selling and servicing entities. In addition to your own company, it includes dealers and distributors, any retailers that sell your product, any service firms that install or repair your company’s product, or that handle customer inquiries or interactions of any kind. For each of these interactions, 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. You improve your customer experience, for instance, when you make it easier for a repeat customer to get back to their preferred configuration, or when your call-center agent already knows what a prospect was just trying to find out on your web site.
• 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. Integrating your interaction channels may be the single most important step you can take today to improve your customer experience, and there are all sorts of new technologies now available to do this.