What is Customer Experience

A definition to guide organizations

On the face of it a Customer Experience is quite simple. It is the experience a customer has when dealing with an organization. This could be when you are having a meal at a restaurant, going to see your Doctor or buying a $50m computer system. All of these are Customer Experiences.

We all know that most Customer Experiences are bland at best and unforgivably poor at worst. Only the occasional experience is noticeably good, and this normally stands out from the crowd. Millions of dollars are spent acquiring customers, however nowhere near enough is spent on customer retention or deserving a customer’s loyalty.

To build a great Customer Experience that differentiates you from the competition we need to look at the details of what a Customer Experience is and break it into its constituent parts.

Over the years we have developed a definition of a Customer Experience to help guide organizations. A Customer Experience is:

A Customer Experience is an interaction between an organization and a Customer. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact.

Using this definition will help you discover how you are doing and what you need to do to build and sustain a great Customer Experience—one that drives business value. As you journey through the rest of our web site you will see what this definition means in more detail.