The attention for customer experience (also known as CX) has grown exponentially over recent years – and it keeps doing so with customer experience now being recognized as an essential focus to create business and customer value.

Yet, at the same time, customer experience has become a “thing,” a term many people use for various reasons. A guide to customer experience and customer experience management, learn more about sitecore solution.

People are at the center of all business success. It sounds obvious, but in times of digital transformation, one can easily forget it. We’re more than our demographic, behavioral and other data – and while data have become increasingly important for customer experience optimization, it’s important to look beyond the dashboards as well.

The customer isn’t king anymore; the customer is dictator (Gerry McGovern)

The expectations of people have also changed. The ubiquity of digital platforms in their – our – lives is one of many factors impacting shifts in behavior and demands. We even started speaking about a digital customer experience.

However, all in all, the essence of CX and customer experience management hasn’t changed all too much because, in the end, customer experience – the experience part – is all about emotions. So, let’s take a look at that essence. And why customer experience keeps becoming more important and so many organizations still struggle to meet those expectations.

The definition of customer experience hasn’t changed a lot either. In a nutshell, it’s still seen as both individual and holistic (cumulative, over a longer period) perceptions and feelings customers have when interacting with any component of your brand and service of your company: support, products, people (employees), applications, marketing, systems and more.

In a sense, everyone is a customer: customers as buyers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders.

Whether it’s in their capacity as consumers, citizens, hotel guests, or workers, people and the ways you serve and empower them are key to future business growth. All parts of your organization and ecosystem need to be connected and aligned with the optimization of customer experience(s) as the drivers of revenue and enablers of value for people you interact with.

Leading brands in CX start with a strong foundation in customer satisfaction. Getting this right and understanding how to build upon it to drive positive financial and business outcomes is what sets the best brands apart from the rest (Augie Ray, Gartner)

Depending on the type of relationship between organizations and people and how the latter are called in that relationship, customer experience can also be referred to with terms such as employee experience, guest experience, or patient experience, to name a few. Obviously, these relationships partially overlap, but they also differ and thus, the perceptions and factors influencing them as well as the ways to measure them will be different.

The exploding attention for customer experience, as such, is great. It – theoretically – shows that organizations are starting to put their customers more at the center: customer-centricity.

Not in the original sense of focusing on your best customers but in the sense of optimizing your processes and business functions around the customer. And not just in an all too theoretical and strategic way but in practice, in real life, in service and beyond.

The end-to-end customer experience

The definition of a customer has changed. Or at least: we would like you to think differently about the customer. In a connected business reality, everyone in the ecosystem of your business is a customer: from employees and investors to partners, buyers and their networks, including the various players in the value chain from manufacturer to end consumer and back. In other words: all stakeholders.

Customer experience is crucial for the present and future of your business. It always has been but in an era of a more autonomous and ’empowered’ customer who has higher expectations it is even more so.

In their 2005 book, Return on Customer, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers presented customer experience as the single most important factor for business success. We can’t ignore it anymore – we see it each day.

In that famous connected – and increasingly digital – age we live in, the determining factors shaping the experiences we have with businesses are multiplying. We used to only look at face-to-face contacts, interactions across several channels, customer service, products and solutions, the brand as such and other attributes, all close to the business, as being crucial elements of the customer experience – as the sum of all experiences.

In reality, the end-to-end customer experience is defined by much more than that. In fact, the customer experience is shaped by numerous factors that escape the “control” of a business. Think about word-of-mouth, to name just one. At the same time customers don’t always want an experience in the ‘wow’ sense we often give it. Sometimes they just want to come in your shop, get their product, pay and get out asap. They want ease over delight.