what is customer experience research

Everything You Need to Know About Customer Experience Research

Updated: July 18, 2024

Published: October 27, 2022

Think back to the last time you received amazing customer service . Remember how it made you feel and how you perceived that business before and after your experience. Compare that experience to the last negative encounter you had with a business, and the difference could not be more obvious.

With recent CX trends such as omni-channel marketing and support, along with the continued growth of e-commerce, it's necessary for companies to understand the customer experience (CX) from multiple angles to reduce pain points and improve customer satisfaction.

CX is not something that your company can just ignore, as nearly half of all customers report that CX is more important to them in 2021 than it was just a year ago. Given this surge in demand for a quality experience, how can your company pivot to meet your customers' rising expectations?

The answer lies in conducting extensive customer experience research. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about CX research, or use the links below to jump ahead:

What is customer experience research?

Why is customer experience research important, customer experience research tips, customer experience research methods, start conducting your own customer experience research.

Customer experience is the summation of every interaction that a customer has with your company throughout their journey. From a cold call to a service inquiry or a coupon in the mail, each interaction between your company and a customer helps to create individual impressions, perceptions, and behaviors that together make up the customer experience.

Meanwhile, customer experience research represents the actionable steps that your company can take to understand CX. This includes collecting customer data — both pre-and post-sale — and then analyzing that data for trends that can lead to process, product, or service improvements.

Best practices in customer experience research programs include focusing on three core components:

• Development

Image source

Your company's CS research journey starts with a customer experience strategy that lays out your vision of your company's goals and maps out the customer journey as it stands and how you hope it to be.

Once you have a strategy in place, you can then put your ideas into action and develop tools and practices for measuring, organizing, and deciphering the data you'll need to validate any changes you make.

Finally, the research process ends with the tracking and implementation of findings that your company can use as a foundation for continuous improvements to CX design.

Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Experience

To truly understand CX research, we must first take a moment to differentiate customer experience from customer satisfaction. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, they are actually quite different and should not be conflated with one another.

Customer satisfaction is a measurement used to gauge how happy a customer is with your company's products, services, or brand overall.

It pays to have happy customers, with 89% of consumers admitting that they are more likely to make an additional purchase after a positive customer service experience.

While customer satisfaction aims to measure how a customer feels about your company — whether good, bad, or neutral — customer experience attempts to measure every interaction that your customers have throughout their entire relationship with your company.

Customer experience research can help you tease out key CX data points and measure your company's success against them. A few of those data points are highlighted in the image below.

All of these metrics and more combine to make up the customer experience. With carefully planned and executed customer experience research, your company can glean insights from these interactions that you can then use to enhance your CX design and raise client satisfaction.

There's nothing worse than losing a customer to a competitor due to a poor experience. Unfortunately, this reality is all too common, with 58% of American consumers reporting that they will switch companies because of a negative customer service experience.

Regardless of the industry, CX is highly correlated with brand loyalty, with the customers reporting the most positive experiences also scoring highest on surveys measuring brand loyalty.

On average, there is a 38% difference in likelihood to recommend a company between customers that rated a company's CX as "good" versus customers that rated that company's CX as "poor."

The ROI of conducting customer experience research is well worth the expense, especially when you stop to consider the alternatives.

After all, it's well known that lead generation is one of the most daunting tasks faced by any company. Yet, at the same time, it costs between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

It's no wonder that 48% of customer service professionals state that creating a positive customer experience is a top priority for their team.

There are as many methods to conduct customer experience research as there are ways that customers interact with businesses.

Some companies will choose to use deductive reasoning and use commonly held assumptions and perceptions from the market and their customers to map out the customer experience and make changes from there.

On the other hand, other companies will opt to use inductive reasoning and take small sample sets of observable data and use that information to create their CX map and inform their decision-making.

Whatever route your company chooses, it's important to drill down and identify the essential aspects of what you're hoping to gain from this research.

The questions highlighted in the image below are a great place to start.

These questions and more need to be addressed before your company attempts to analyze a shred of evidence. If you skip the planning and strategizing phase of the CX research process, then you're doomed to fail before you begin, because your company won't know what customer experience research questions it's trying to answer.

Once you've settled on your questions, it's time to start organizing the tools and resources you'll need to actually conduct your research.

Customer Experience Research Tools and Resources

Depending on your goals, you may choose to collect qualitative data that provides in-depth CX insights. However, this type of data is not easy to quantify. For example, long-form customer interviews provide a wealth of information about how customers see your CX but the results are difficult to reduce to actionable insights.

Alternatively, your company may decide to focus on measuring and tracking CX key performance indicators and highlight the collection of quantitative data. Surveys are one of the most commonly used mediums to collect quantitative data, as they allow companies to easily sort and organize responses into groups that can be used for statistical analysis and comparison.

Whatever customer experience research method your company chooses, it's essential that leadership is all on the same page to embrace CX research as a key aspect of your business. With as many as 93% of CX initiatives destined to fail, you want to make sure you're doing everything you can to make sure the time you're investing into CX research is well-spent and not just more money down the drain.

Traditionally speaking, most customer experience research was carried out by large marketing research firms that conducted the interviews, focus groups, and surveys that companies used to make changes to their CX design.

Today, the research landscape also includes data collection firms that help companies collate and store their data for easy retrieval and analysis.

That said, many companies also choose to conduct their own research in-house using a variety of research methods for collecting, organizing, and interpreting data.

As shown in the image above, some of the most common methods of collecting CX research data include:

• Feedback Software

Let's discuss each in more detail.

1. Interviews

Interviews provide a wealth of qualitative data, while surveys are highly customizable, allowing your company to tailor its surveys to collect any type of quantitative data. However, these methods are often more time-consuming and labor-intensive than other methods, so are usually conducted by larger organizations with more resources and time.

Two of the most popular surveys are also among the easiest methods of conducting CX research: NPS and CSAT.

Net promoter score (NPS) is a benchmark used to determine how likely a customer is to recommend your business to someone. NPS surveys are useful, as they measure how a customer feels overall about your brand, which allows your company to gather lots of big-picture information.

Then there's customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which measures customer satisfaction with a particular interaction, product, or service. CSAT surveys allow your company to get quantifiable data concerning every little detail of your business that can then be used to design specific solutions.

3. Feedback Software

In addition, many companies now turn to feedback software to help them collect, organize, and track CX data from multiple sources. These applications make it easy for companies to conduct CX research by bringing sophisticated analysis software and technology support all within one system.

Each type of CX method provides valuable information to the table that your company can use to improve the customer experience. Still, you'll need to make sure that you're following CX research best practices to ensure that you get the most out of your efforts.

Customers are no longer willing to settle for a bad shopping experience to get the best price or a superior product.

The new normal requires successful companies to be sensitive to their customers' needs and smooth pain points when and where they emerge. To do this, companies need to invest in CX research that paints a portrait of the customer journey, identifies areas of improvement, and urges leadership to implement actionable changes.

If your company is serious about prioritizing the customer experience, then you need to do the requisite research. That way, you can turn your assumptions into meaningful solutions that let your customers know you care about them.

And we all know there's nothing better than a satisfied customer.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Customer Experience Research: Steps, Methods, Best Practices

Have you ever wondered what sets successful businesses apart? The answer often lies in their commitment to understanding and enhancing the customer experience. How do industry leaders consistently deliver exceptional service? The key lies in strategic customer experience research.

Customer experience research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing data to understand and evaluate the interactions between a customer and a company throughout the entire customer journey. 

It involves studying customer perceptions, expectations, and satisfaction levels to enhance and optimize the customer experience.

In this blog post, we will explore the essential steps, methods, and best practices for conducting effective customer experience research.

What is a Customer Experience Research?

Customer experience research is a systematic and strategic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to customers’ interactions with a brand, product, or service. The objective of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall customer journey, perceptions, preferences, and satisfaction levels. 

Through various research methods such as customer satisfaction surveys , interviews, focus groups, and observational studies, businesses seek to uncover insights that can inform improvements in products, services, and customer interactions. 

The ultimate goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the overall quality of the customer experience, contributing to the business’s long-term success. 

Importance of Customer Experience (CX) Research

The significance of customer experience (CX) research cannot be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in various aspects of a business’s success. Here is a more detailed exploration of the importance:

Customer Retention and Loyalty Building

Customer experience research dives into understanding the intricate nuances of customer needs and expectations. Businesses can tailor their products, services, and interactions to create meaningful and positive experiences by gaining insights into what truly matters to customers. 

This, in turn, increases customer loyalty, as they feel understood and valued and are more likely to continue their association with the brand. Retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, making customer retention a key focus for sustainable business growth.

Competitive Advantage in a Crowded Market

In a fiercely competitive marketplace, where products and services may be similar, the quality of positive customer experience emerges as a powerful differentiator. 

Companies that invest in understanding their customers and consistently deliver exceptional experiences gain a distinct competitive advantage. Positive customer interactions become the brand’s trademark, setting it apart from competitors and attracting a loyal customer base.

Driving Revenue Growth through Customer Satisfaction

Satisfied customers are likely to make repeat purchases and become brand advocates. Customer experience research helps identify the touchpoints that leave a lasting positive impression, encouraging customers to choose the brand repeatedly. 

Satisfied customers are more inclined to recommend the brand to their networks, effectively becoming brand ambassadors. This word-of-mouth marketing can significantly contribute to organic growth and increased revenue streams.

Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

CX Research provides valuable insights beyond enhancing customer satisfaction by pinpointing pain points in the customer journey. It can lead to operational improvements within the organization. 

Streamlining processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and resolving pain points can increase operational efficiency and cost savings. This dual benefit of enhancing customer experience while optimizing internal operations is a strategic advantage that can positively impact the bottom line.

Steps Customer Experience (CX) Research

Conducting practical customer experience (CX) research involves a series of well-defined steps to ensure that you gather meaningful insights that can drive improvements in your products, services, and overall customer interactions. 

Here are the key steps for conducting customer experience research:

1. Define Objectives

At the outset of any customer experience research initiative, it is imperative to outline and define the goals and objectives meticulously. These should serve as the guiding principles throughout the research process, helping to maintain focus and relevance in enhancing the overall customer experience.

2. Identify Touchpoints

To comprehensively understand the customer journey, mapping out each touchpoint where customers interact with the brand is essential. This involves a detailed exploration of various phases, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. 

Identifying these touchpoints provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting crucial moments that significantly impact satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Select Metrics

Choosing the right metrics is important to measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall experience accurately. Metrics should align with the defined objectives and touchpoints, encompassing quantitative and qualitative aspects. 

Relevant metrics may include Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction scores, and key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to each touchpoint.

4. Collect Data

Employing a multifaceted approach, customer data is collected through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, and analytics tools. Surveys offer structured insights, interviews provide in-depth qualitative information, and analytics tools offer quantitative data on customer behavior. 

This comprehensive data collection process ensures a well-rounded understanding of customer preferences and sentiments.

5. Analyze Data

Once the data is collected, a rigorous analysis is undertaken to discern patterns, identify trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Advanced analytical techniques may be applied to extract actionable insights. 

This phase transforms raw data into meaningful information that can guide decision-making and strategy formulation.

6. Implement Changes

With the insights from data analysis, strategic improvements are implemented in the customer experience. 

This phase involves making necessary adjustments to processes, communication channels, or any other touchpoints identified as potential areas for enhancement. The objective is to align the customer experience more closely with the defined goals and objectives.

7. Monitor and Iterate

The customer experience journey is an evolving process that necessitates continuous monitoring. Customer feedback, both solicited and unsolicited, is consistently reviewed. 

This iterative approach allows organizations to adapt swiftly to changing customer expectations, ensuring the customer experience strategy remains dynamic and responsive. Regular reviews and refinements based on ongoing feedback contribute to the sustained improvement of the overall customer experience.

Customer Experience Research Methods

Customer experience (CX) research employs various methods to gather insights into customers’ perceptions, expectations, and interactions with a brand. The choice of methods often depends on the research’s specific goals and the business’s nature. 

Here are some common customer experience research methods:

• Structured Questionnaires: Design surveys with clear and concise questions to collect quantitative data on specific aspects of the customer experience, such as satisfaction levels, ease of use, and overall impressions.
• Scale Utilization: Implement rating scales, Likert scales, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) scales to quantify responses and measure the degree of customer satisfaction or loyalty.
• In-Depth Exploration: Conduct one-on-one or group interviews to dive deeply into customer experiences, emotions, and perceptions, allowing for a nuanced understanding of their thoughts and motivations.
• Open-Ended Questions: Open-ended questions encourage customers to express themselves freely, providing rich qualitative data beyond predefined categories.

Observation

• Ethnographic Research: Immerse researchers in the customer’s environment, whether physical or digital, to observe natural behaviors and interactions, revealing insights that may not emerge through traditional surveys or interviews.
• Task Analysis: Break down customer interactions into specific tasks to identify pain points, bottlenecks, or areas where improvements can be made.

Social Media Monitoring

• Sentiment Analysis: Employ sentiment analysis tools to gauge the overall sentiment of customer conversations on social media platforms, helping identify positive and negative trends.
• Engagement Metrics: Track engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, and comments, to understand which aspects of the customer experience resonate most with the audience.

Usability Testing

• Task-Based Testing: Design usability tests with specific tasks for participants to complete, assessing how easily they can navigate products or services.
• Iterative Testing: Conduct iterative usability testing throughout development to identify and address usability issues early on.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Standardized Scoring System: Use the NPS scale to categorize customers as promoters, passives, or detractors based on their likelihood to recommend the product or service.
• Follow-up Qualitative Questions: Supplement NPS surveys with open-ended questions to gather additional insights into the reasons behind customers’ scores and their suggestions for improved customer satisfaction. 

Best Practices for Customer Experience (CX) Research

Practical customer experience (CX) research requires careful planning and adherence to best practices to ensure the insights gained are meaningful and actionable. Here are some best practices for CX Research:

Customer-Centric Approach

• Understanding Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas to comprehend different customer segments’ diverse needs, preferences, and behaviors.
• Journey Mapping: Create comprehensive customer journey maps that outline every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase support, ensuring a holistic understanding of the customer experience.
• Empathy Building: Encourage customer service teams to adopt an empathetic mindset to see the world from the customer’s perspective and better anticipate and meet their needs.

Multi-Channel Analysis

• Integrated Data Systems: Implement integrated data systems that consolidate information from various channels, including online and offline interactions, social media, and customer support, providing a unified and comprehensive view of the customer journey.
• Omni-Channel Strategy: Develop an omni-channel strategy that ensures a seamless and consistent experience across all customer touchpoints, regardless of their chosen channel.

Regular Feedback

• Real-Time Feedback Mechanisms: Implement real-time feedback mechanisms, such as post-purchase surveys, online reviews, and social media listening, to capture immediate customer sentiments and preferences.
• Periodic Surveys: Conduct routine surveys to dive deeper into specific aspects of the customer experience, allowing for more in-depth insights into identifying evolving trends.

Employee Involvement

• Training and Awareness Programs: Provide employees with comprehensive training on the importance of customer experience and equip them with the skills to understand and respond to customer needs effectively.
• Employee Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops where employees can share insights from customer interactions, fostering a collaborative approach to improving the overall customer experience.
• Recognition and Rewards: Recognize and reward employees who contribute positively to the customer experience, reinforcing a customer-centric culture.

Data Security

• Compliance Measures: Implement robust data security measures to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, and build customer trust in handling sensitive information.
• Transparent Data Practices: Communicate openly with customers about data collection and usage, providing clear information on how their data is stored, protected, and utilized.

Continuous Improvement

• Agile Implementation of Findings: Adopt an agile approach to implementing research findings, allowing quick adjustments to products, services, or processes based on customer feedback.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish KPIs to measure the impact of changes implemented due to customer experience research, ensuring that improvements align with business goals.
• Benchmarking: Regularly benchmark against industry standards and competitors to identify areas for differentiation and innovation, fostering a commitment to continuous improvement beyond immediate customer feedback.

How QuestionPro CX Can Help in Customer Experience Research

QuestionPro is a survey and research platform that offers various tools for conducting customer experience (CX) research. It provides a range of features to help businesses gather feedback, analyze data, and make informed decisions based on customer insights.

Here’s a general overview of how QuestionPro CX can be used for customer experience research:

NPS & Churn Risk

• The NPS Survey Dashboard provides an advanced analytics platform for measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) and predicting churn risk.
• Isolate, identify, and predict customer churn based on NPS data, allowing businesses to address issues and retain customers proactively.
• Leverage customer interactions to make informed decisions for improving products and services.

Sentiment Analysis

• Sentiment analysis helps classify text feedback as positive, negative, or neutral, offering more profound insights into the quality of interactions between customers and the organization.
• Move beyond numerical ratings to understand the emotional tone and sentiment behind customer feedback.
• Identify areas for improvement based on sentiment trends and patterns.

Advanced Dashboards

• Access customizable dashboards with various widget configurations, enabling you to tailor your dashboard to specific needs.
• Customize filters, chart types, labels, and month-tracking widgets to effectively visualize and analyze customer feedback.
• Gain a holistic view of customer experience data through visually appealing and insightful dashboards.

Workflow Setup

• CX Workflow allows you to assign and send surveys to customer segments within the same data file.
• Automate survey reminders to improve response rates and gather more comprehensive feedback.
• Streamline survey processes for efficient data collection and analysis.

Disposition Metrics

• Monitor emails sent continually to collect valuable data at every engagement point.
• Track changes in customer behavior over time and identify key touchpoints influencing customer satisfaction.
• Use disposition metrics to refine communication strategies and enhance customer engagement.

Closed Loop

• Capture the customer journey at various touchpoints in real time.
• Share feedback with different teams to foster collaboration and implement organizational improvements.
• Implement a closed-loop system to address customer issues promptly and enhance the overall customer experience.

Incorporating customer experience research into your business strategy is a proactive approach to building strong, lasting customer relationships. By following these steps, employing effective research methods, and embracing best practices, you can gain valuable insights that drive positive change and elevate the overall customer experience. 

Remember, a satisfied customer is not just a one-time buyer but a potential brand advocate who can contribute to the long-term success of your business.

QuestionPro CX empowers customer experience research through advanced NPS analytics, sentiment analysis, customizable dashboards, workflow automation, disposition metrics monitoring, and closed-loop feedback. 

This comprehensive toolset enables businesses to proactively identify issues, understand the sentiment, and continuously enhance customer interactions, ensuring a superior and informed customer experience.

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Customer experience

Understand what customer experience is and how it’s changing.

• What Is Customer Experience?
• Why Is Great Customer Experience Important?
• How Is Customer Experience Changing?
• Who is Responsible for Customer Experience?
• How Can Companies Improve Customer Experience?

Introduction to customer experience

Customer experience is the heart of the relationship between a business and its customers. Typically, when people talk about customer experience (CX) they mean traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey—for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores, or simple and beautiful apps and websites. In the past, when executed well, CX investments have yielded good results: better customer retention and acquisition, increased sales and stronger loyalty.

But the world has changed. It’s more than just the COVID-19 pandemic: A non-stop barrage of external life forces—economic, social, political and beyond—is affecting people’s everyday decisions in unavoidable ways. In fact, according to Accenture research , 72% of consumers say that external factors, such as inflation, social movements and climate change, are impacting their lives more than in the past. Amid so much upheaval, people are revaluating what’s important to them: 61% of consumers say their priorities keep changing as a result of everything going on in the world. As a result, the way they interact with brands is evolving, and so too is the idea of customer experience.

Here, we will explain what customer experience is, how it’s changing and how a new customer experience strategy can benefit your business.

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What is customer experience?

Customer experience is many things, but it can broadly be described as the perception a customer or a company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction, and each interaction is an opportunity to build a stronger bond between the company and the customer—or has the potential to weaken that bond.

Good customer experience involves building a relationship by understanding what people want, need and value. It goes beyond the act of using the product or service itself: The full experience includes pre-purchase connections with the brand (via marketing or awareness), the process of researching and making the purchase (either in-store or online) and post-purchase interactions (regarding service, repairs, additions and more). The goal is to create smooth and efficient connections between the brand and the customer.

It’s vital that brands remember that every interaction people and other businesses have with them elicits some sort of emotion. Whether good, bad, happy or sad, the feelings brought on by those interactions are then associated with the brand. This can result in your customer asking some all-important questions: To buy or not to buy? To love or not to love? To return or not return?

It’s also critical to acknowledge that people’s needs, desires and emotions change moment to moment based on external forces. An oversimplified understanding of people’s emotional responses is not enough—brands need to see their customers beyond walking wallets and respond to the complexities in their lives.

Why is great customer experience important?

Positive customer experience is a way of standing out from competitors. As more brands compete for public attention and more options are readily available, CX provides a way to put your product and brand at the forefront.

Imagine you’re a business looking to place beverage vending machines in your offices. Your overall customer experience isn’t just how much you like using the machine, it’s the full start-to-never-fully-finished process of engaging with the brand, making the purchase and continuing interactions for service and support or future upgrades. When making the purchase, the beverage retailer can offer you a one-size-fits-all experience, such as showing you pictures of various products. But a better approach would be to use augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) to create a bespoke, personalized and customized experience so that you can see exactly how each type of machine would look in your office space. Because of this great customer experience, you and your business colleagues are happy, and your business will use the same retailer next time you want a vending machine.

Brands that want to increase customer acquisition, customer loyalty, customer engagement and drive growth need to think about delivering more exceptional experiences and connecting with customers in more dynamic ways.

With so much at stake, brands need to ask: is great CX enough to elicit positive emotions and meet customers’ changing needs?

How is customer experience changing?

Twenty years ago, the answer to “what is great customer experience?” would have been a straightforward explanation about optimizing touch points, mapping out customer journeys and designing and producing covetable products that customers want.

But today, how we interact with brands and what we need from them has transformed exponentially. At a time when people are navigating constant change amid external economic, social, environmental and political forces, their behavior is increasingly inconsistent. Consumers are more comfortable with paradoxical choices as their decisions become trade-offs between what they want, what they need and what options are available.

Adapting customer experience to these changes isn’t easy. Oversimplifying segmentation and underestimating the impact of external life forces has created a disconnect :

A life-centric approach to customer experience creates connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs, while

of executives think their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up.

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach .

Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

Who is responsible for customer experience strategies?

Historically, CX was limited to the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) or the Chief Operating Officer’s (COO) purview with different functions in the business operating in siloes focusing on their own priorities.

Let’s take a quick look at how traditional CX thinking has informed how leaders and functions within an organization think about their customer experience strategies:

• CEO: prioritize maximizing profitability
• Marketing and brand: focus on making people want things
• Sales: focus on the product the company wants to sell
• Product development: create products based on market research that are easy to use
• Talent: use traditional metrics based on employee performance within a function (onboarding, annual reviews, etc.)
• Tech and IT: focus on enabling business processes at greater scale
• Operations: focused on providing efficiency for the company that often limits growth
• Supply chain: focus on moving products and goods to consumers

As you can see above, each department and function has its own priorities, targets and metrics. With blinders to the rest of the company, each department is executing a specific customer experience strategy template without seeing the bigger picture. Instead of operating in isolation, companies need to organize all of their internal operations in new ways to evaluate and serve changing consumer needs.

To remain relevant and compete in today’s ever-changing world, customer experience strategies need to be top of mind for every stakeholder in your business. From management to marketing to sales to service, everyone across front- and back-office functions needs to be invested in delivering a life-centric customer experience.

By taking the company’s existing assets (such as talent, data and technology) and rewiring them for more coordinated action, internal operations become simplified in pursuit of a common goal. Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

This is a pivotal moment for the C-suite. Leaders who push beyond traditional CX strategies and redefine their organizations, not just by which products or services they sell and offer, but with a life-centric approach to understanding and meeting customer needs, will emerge stronger and ignite growth in their organizations.

Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

How can companies improve customer experience?

From banking onboarding journeys for new customers to how clothing should be presented online, many of the fundamentals of customer experience have become commonplace. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves via CX alone.

Businesses have traditionally focused on optimizing customer touch points around product and service. In the past this has been a successful approach to increase sales and loyalty. Now, it’s no longer enough. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers.

Today, brands must enhance customers’ lives through new technology-led experiences that go beyond short-lived transactions. Consider the impact of omni-channel services that connect brick-and-mortar shopping with customers’ digital data for greater personalization. Companies also need to have the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy for the customer that will drive them to find creative ways to engage and serve people who crave simplification and agency.

By evaluating what brings value to customers and reconsidering how a brand promise fits with customer needs, companies can refocus their efforts to drive growth and relevance.

To grow a life-centric CX strategy, brands need to think of customers as more than just buyers.

The future of customer experience is life-centric

Brands are looking for ways to harness the changes the world is experiencing to emerge stronger and more prepared for the road ahead. To do so, they need to hone in on the complex life forces and paradoxical behaviors driving consumers today. Through data, technology and a holistic, human-centered approach, they can respond to people’s diverse, often paradoxical and ever-changing needs.

To achieve this, an evolution is needed: It’s time for companies to become life-centric .

Explore more about what it means to be life-centric and find out how to create a life-centric strategy that works for your business.

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Frequently asked questions

Customer experience (CX) is broadly described as the perception a customer or a B2B company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction a customer has with a brand. While some focus only on CX as traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey (for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores and simple and beautiful apps and websites), it’s actually much more complex.

What makes a great customer experience?

As customers face growing pressure from external social and economic forces, CX has moved from fulfilling wants and needs in the moment to seeing creating experiences that adapt to their changing circumstances and paradoxical behaviors. For brands, this means taking a life-centric approach that sees customers in their full lives and interacts with them as complex, inconsistent and evolving individuals.

As customer experience basics become commonplace, brands need to do more to differentiate themselves. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers. Companies need to enhance customers’ lives through technology-led experiences that forge long-term connections, and foster the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy that will help them pivot to meet changing needs.​

What is the future of customer experience?

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach. Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex, and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

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You’re on a business trip in Oakland, CA. You've been working late in downtown and now you're looking for a place nearby to grab a late dinner. You decided to check Zomato to try and find somewhere to eat. (Don't begin searching yet).

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• Choose Italian and get started with the first lesson (stop once you reach the first question).
• Now go all the way through the rest of the first lesson, describing your thoughts as you go.
• Get your profile set up, then view your account page. What information and options are there? Do you feel that these are useful? Why or why not?
• After a week in Italy, you're going to spend a few days in Austria. How would you take German lessons on Duolingo?
• What other languages does the app offer? Do any of them interest you?

I felt like there could have been a little more of an instructional component to the lesson.

It would be cool if there were some feature that could allow two learners studying the same language to take lessons together. I imagine that their screens would be synced and they could go through lessons together and chat along the way.

Overall, the app was very intuitive to use and visually appealing. I also liked the option to connect with others.

Overall, the app seemed very helpful and easy to use. I feel like it makes learning a new language fun and almost like a game. It would be nice, however, if it contained more of an instructional portion.

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What is Customer Experience (CX) Research? Definition, Methods and Best Practices

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What is Customer Experience (CX) Research? 

Customer experience (CX) research is a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting customer experience data to understand and improve the quality and effectiveness of customer interactions with a brand, product, or service. It involves using a wide range of methodologies and techniques aimed at gaining insights into the customer experience journey , identifying pain points, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction. 

Here are the 3 key attributes of CX research:

• It requires gathering customer data through various channels of interaction and feedback throughout their journey with a brand/ product or service. For example, the touchpoints can be dedicated user feedback surveys, user testing , website usability testing , UI testing , customer service interactions, sales interactions, post-purchase experience etc. These sources provide a comprehensive view of customer/ user behavior, preferences, and sentiment. By collecting data from multiple CX touchpoints, organizations can create a holistic view of the customer journey, from initial awareness to product’s user experience .
• CX research is iterative and ongoing. Successful organizations recognize that customer expectations evolve, and continuous research is necessary to stay aligned with these changes. By regularly gathering feedback and adapting strategies, companies can remain responsive to customer needs and maintain a competitive edge.
• Customer experience (CX) research is a driver of organizational change and improvement, creating a customer-centric approach. The insights gained through customer experience research inform decision-making at all levels of an organization. Whether it involves refining product features, streamlining customer support processes, or enhancing website usability, CX research empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions that lead to improved customer acquisition and increased customer loyalty, and therefore more revenue.

Key Benefits of Conducting Customer Experience (UX) Research 

CX research is important because it enables organizations to understand, measure, and improve the experiences of their customers, which allows them to deliver better customer retention, acquire new customers more easily, and therefore grow business revenue.

Here are the key benefits in detail, that make customer experience (CX) research important for businesses:

• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: CX research helps organizations identify and address pain points in the customer journey. By resolving issues and improving the overall experience, organizations can increase customer satisfaction, leading to higher customer retention and loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Understanding customer preferences, expectations, and behaviors gives organizations a competitive edge. By meeting or exceeding customer expectations, companies can differentiate themselves in the market and attract more customers.
• Improved Customer Loyalty: Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers who repeatedly choose your brand. Loyal customers not only generate repeat business but also serve as advocates who recommend your products or services to others. It is often more cost-effective to retain existing customers and increase the acquisition of new customers, driven by great experiences. 
• Reduced Churn and Increased CLV: CX research helps identify factors that contribute to reduced customer churn/attrition and increased customer lifetime value (CLV). By addressing CX issues and offering solutions, organizations can reduce customer turnover and reduce the associated costs of acquiring new customers.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: CX research provides valuable quantitative and qualitative data and insights that inform strategic decisions. Organizations can use this data to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources effectively, and make informed choices that align with customer needs and expectations.
• Better Roadmaps: Customer/ user inputs gathered through CX research serve as a valuable source of input for product and service development roadmaps. Organizations can tailor their offerings to better meet customer requirements and preferences.
• Cost Savings: By pinpointing inefficiencies and areas of frustration in the customer journey, CX research can help streamline processes and reduce operational costs. Improving the customer experience can also lead to fewer support requests and complaints.
• Higher Revenue: CX research leads to better and easier customer acquisition and once converted to customers, these satisfied customers are further likely to repeat/ upgrade their purchases. It allows organizations to identify opportunities for better user acquisition, upselling, cross-selling, and creating more appealing customer-centric offers, which drive revenue growth.
• Brand Reputation: A positive customer experience contributes to a strong brand reputation, as well as better brand recall. Happy customers are more likely to share their positive experiences with others, recommend your products/ services, and therefore drives organic growth.
• Customer-Centric Culture: CX research encourages organizations to adopt a customer-centric mindset. When employees understand the importance of the customer experience and how it basically pays their salaries in the bigger picture, they are more likely to align their efforts with delivering exceptional service.
• Faster Adaptation Change: CX research helps organizations stay responsive to changing market conditions and customer preferences. It provides early warning signs of shifts in customer behavior/ preference and allows for proactive adjustments, while the rest of the market catches up.

Learn more: What is Customer Experience (CX) Design?

Customer Experience (CX) Research Methods 

Conducting customer experience (CX) research relies on various methods and techniques to gather insights into customer interactions and perceptions. Here are some common CX research methods:

• Customer/ User Tests and Surveys:

User testing and CX surveys are structured data collection tools that involve asking customers a series of predefined questions to customer/ users. They can be administered online, via email, or in person. These tests and surveys are useful for gathering quantitative and qualitative data on customer interaction and preferences and align product/ service experience to match/ exceed these expectations.

• Usability Testing :

Usability testing involves observing users as they interact with a product or website while performing specific tasks. Researchers assess ease of use, navigation, and user satisfaction . Usability testing is a critical research asset to identify user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) issues and provides insights into how customers navigate and interact with apps, websites, e-commerce portals, and SaaS products.

• In-Depth Interviews:

In-depth interviews involve one-on-one conversations with customers and product users to gather qualitative data. These interviews can be structured with specific questions or unstructured to allow for open-ended discussions. Interviews provide qualitative insights into customer experiences, allowing for a deeper understanding of motivations, pain points, and emotions.

• Focus Groups:

Focus groups involve small groups of customers/ users discussing their experiences with a moderator. It’s a qualitative method that encourages participants to share experiences across several user journey touchpoints and build on each other’s perspectives. Focus groups are helpful for exploring a range of opinions, uncovering shared sentiments, and generating ideas for customer experience improvements. Focus groups can also be used among employees to understand common CX issues across customer facing departments such as marketing, sales, account management and customer service.

• Heatmaps and Clickmaps:

Heatmaps and clickmaps are solutions to visualize user interactions with a website or app, highlighting areas of high and low activity, clicks, and scrolling behavior. These visual tools help organizations understand user engagement, identify popular content, and optimize layout and user experience design .

Learn more: What is Customer Experience (CX) Optimization?

Customer Experience (CX) Research Best Practices for 2023

Customer Experience (CX) research is crucial for understanding and improving the interactions between your customers and your organization.

Here are the best practices for conducting effective CX research:

• Clearly Define Objectives and Goals: Start with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your CX research. Define specific objectives and goals that align with your organization’s strategic priorities.
• Segment Your Customer Base: Recognize that different customer segments may have varying needs and expectations. Segment your customer base based on demographics, behavior, or other relevant factors to tailor your research approach.
• Choose the Right Research Methods: Select research methods that align with your objectives and the nature of your customer interactions. Common methods include surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, and journey mapping.
• Collect Quantitative and Qualitative Data: Quantitative data (e.g., surveys and analytics) provide statistical insights, while qualitative data (e.g., interviews and open-ended questions) offer in-depth understanding. Combining both types of data can provide a comprehensive user feedback on customer experience design .
• Align Real-Time and Periodic Feedback: Incorporate real-time feedback mechanisms, such as post-interaction surveys or chatbots, to capture immediate insights. Additionally, conduct periodic, more in-depth research to gain a holistic perspective.
• Implement Customer Journey Mapping: Create customer journey maps to visualize the end user customer experience. This helps identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and touchpoints that matter most to customers.
• Leverage Customer Feedback Platforms: Utilize customer feedback platforms and tools to collect, analyze, and manage customer feedback efficiently. These tools often provide sentiment analysis and reporting features.
• Measure Key CX Metrics: Key CX metrics include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Monitor these metrics to track changes in customer sentiment over time.
• Incorporate Employee Feedback: Employees play a critical role in delivering a positive customer experience. Collect feedback from front-line staff and others who interact with customers to identify operational challenges and training needs.
• Maintain a Customer-Centric Culture: Ensure that everyone in your organization, from leadership to front-line employees, is aligned with a customer-centric mindset. CX research findings should inform decision-making at all levels.
• Continuously Iterate and Improve: CX research is an ongoing process. Continuously gather feedback, measure performance, and refine your CX strategy based on changing customer needs and market conditions.
• Ensure Data Privacy and Security: Protect customer data and comply with privacy regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA. Use secure methods for data collection and storage.
• Benchmark Against Competitors: Compare your CX performance against industry benchmarks and competitors. 
• Share CX Insights Across the Organization: Disseminate CX research findings and insights throughout the organization to create a shared understanding of customer needs and foster collaboration in improving the customer experience.

Learn more: What is CX Management?

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Customer Experience Research 101: A Comprehensive Guide

February 7, 2024

Every customer expects quality treatment from the company they interact with, seeking positive interactions to nurture lasting relationships. The key to ensuring this consistency at every touchpoint lies in customer experience research. By understanding and addressing the customer's journey, identifying gaps, and actively working to fill them, your brand can guarantee a positive experience every single time.

Keep reading to explore more about CX research, understand its importance, and find effective strategies for its successful implementation.

What is Customer Experience Research?

Customer Experience Research is a systematic and comprehensive approach to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to customers' interactions with a company's products or services. It encompasses various research methods, such as surveys, interviews, and feedback analysis, with the goal of understanding, improving, and optimizing the overall customer experience.

​​CER is essential for enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and gaining a competitive edge. It empowers businesses to make informed decisions, delivering better-tailored solutions and fostering loyalty. Positive customer experiences, guided by CER insights, not only ensure brand loyalty but also contribute to a favorable reputation, attracting new customers and establishing the company as a customer-centric leader in the market.

Types of Customer Experience Research

Now that we have understood what is customer experience research, let us explore popular customer experience research methods.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires involve structured sets of questions designed to gather quantitative data about customer experiences. These can be distributed through various channels, including online platforms or email.

Benefits: Surveys allow for the collection of large-scale, quantitative data, providing measurable insights into customer satisfaction, preferences, and trends.

When to Use: Surveys are effective when seeking to quantify specific aspects of the customer experience, such as overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, or feedback on specific products or services.

Example:  Airbnb utilizes Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gather valuable feedback from both guests and hosts. By employing this customer-centric approach, Airbnb gains insights into user satisfaction, identifies areas for improvement, and hones in on the elements that resonate positively with their community.

In-Depth Interviews

In-depth interviews involve one-on-one conversations between a researcher and a customer, allowing for open-ended discussions about their experiences. These interviews provide qualitative insights into customer perceptions and emotions.

Benefits: In-depth interviews offer a deep understanding of individual perspectives, motivations, and underlying reasons behind customer behaviors.

When to Use: Use in-depth interviews when you need detailed, nuanced insights into customer experiences, especially for complex products or services.

Example: As per the  State of UX in the Enterprise survey conducted by UserZoom, in-depth interviews have emerged as the preferred UX research method, surpassing A/B testing, surveys, and focus groups. This underscores their effectiveness in capturing valuable insights directly from users.

Customer Feedback and Reviews Analysis

Analyzing customer feedback and reviews involves collecting and interpreting data from various online platforms, such as social media, review sites, and customer support interactions.

Benefits: This method provides real-time, unfiltered insights into customer sentiments, opinions, and concerns, helping businesses stay attuned to customer feedback and make timely improvements.

When to Use: Customer feedback and reviews analysis is valuable for continuous monitoring and responding to customer sentiments. It is particularly useful for identifying emerging issues and trends.

Example: Amazon utilizes advanced Generative AI to analyze extensive customer feedback , identifying patterns, sentiments, and emerging trends in real-time. This technology provides deeper insights into customer preferences, informing strategic decision-making for product development and customer service improvements.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping involves visualizing and understanding the entire customer experience, from the initial interaction to post-purchase support. It helps identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

Benefit: Customer journey mapping provides a holistic view of the customer experience, enabling businesses to optimize interactions at each stage and create a seamless and satisfying journey.

When to Use: Use customer journey mapping when you want to identify and improve specific touchpoints within the customer journey or when launching a new product or service.

Example:  Starbucks leverages customer journey mapping to enhance the overall customer experience. By visualizing the entire customer journey, Starbucks identifies and refines key touchpoints, streamlining processes and improving specific interactions. This approach guides informed decision-making, contributing to Starbucks' success in delivering exceptional and seamless customer experiences.

Why Is Customer Experience Research Important?

In the fiercely competitive business landscape, where  companies lose $1.6 trillion annually due to customers switching brands because of poor customer experience (CX), the significance of Customer Experience Research (CER) cannot be overstated. Successful organizations prioritize customer loyalty, understanding that strong correlations exist between delivering exceptional CX and increased sales. A staggering  87% of customers who perceive a great experience with a company express their likelihood to make repeat purchases.

CX Research is crucial for businesses, serving as a strategic tool to gauge satisfaction, identify needs, enhance CX, and foster increased loyalty.

Other key benefits of customer experience research include:

• Increased Customer Retention: CER helps businesses understand the reasons behind customer churn and provides actionable insights to improve customer retention.
• Improved Customer Experience: Through CER, businesses identify customer pain points, enabling the development of targeted strategies for enhancing overall customer experience.
• More Effective Marketing: CER aids in understanding customer behavior, leading to the development of effective marketing strategies.
• Improved Customer Segmentation: CER assists in identifying distinct customer segments and developing strategies to target each segment effectively.
• Increased Sales: By identifying customer needs and crafting strategies based on deep customer understanding, CER becomes a catalyst for increased sales..

Key Metrics in Customer Experience Research

Here are three key  contact center metrics that will help you in customer experience research.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS, or Net Promoter Score®, gauges customer satisfaction by asking, "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend company/organization X to family, friends, or colleagues?" Widely used and recognized, NPS provides a quick snapshot of a brand's overall image. A low NPS score means more Detractors than Promoters, suggesting customers are dissatisfied with a company's overall performance.

​​While NPS provides a valuable numerical benchmark for gauging customer loyalty and satisfaction, complement it with qualitative feedback for a deeper understanding of customer sentiments and actionable insights.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT measures post-purchase or post-service satisfaction, predicting loyalty and revealing customer experience weaknesses. It uses a quick survey with a simple question like, "How satisfied are you with your recent experience with or purchase from company X?" often employing a five-point scale.

While CSAT offers a prompt measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty, it enhances its effectiveness by incorporating qualitative research through feedback. This deeper insight into customer sentiments provides actionable insights, enriching decision-making and driving continuous improvements.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES is an index measuring the effort customers invest in their interactions with your company. Respondents rate their effort on a 5- or 7-point scale. A higher CES is favorable, indicating an effortless experience.

Map Customer Journeys for Targeted Improvements - Identify high-effort points in the customer journey, map these touchpoints, and focus on streamlining processes or providing additional support to enhance the overall customer experience.

How to do Customer Experience Research?

Improve customer experiences with this 7-step guide, offering a thorough and organized approach to successful Customer Experience Research.

Step 1: Team Building

Form a diverse team with members from CX, UX, and market research, fostering collaboration and leveraging varied perspectives.

Step 2: Objective Setting

Clearly define research objectives, outlining what you aim to achieve and the specific information you seek to uncover about the customer experience.

Step 3: Context Establishment

Understand the broader market context to align research objectives with market dynamics, providing a comprehensive understanding of your business landscape.

Step 4: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Identification

Identify  contact center KPIs such as Likelihood to Recommend, NPS, Overall Satisfaction, Response and Wait Times, and Overall Value Delivered.

Step 5: Timeframe and Scope Definition

Set specific timeframes and scope objectives to maintain focus and ensure a manageable research process.

Step 6: Research Method Selection

Choose appropriate research methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer feedback analysis, field research, online collection, and data analysis.

Step 7: Data Gathering and Analysis

Implement chosen research methods to collect qualitative and quantitative data. Utilize data analysis tools to identify trends and insights, translating data into actionable strategies for improving customer experience.

This comprehensive guide ensures you can effectively navigate the complexities of understanding and improving customer experiences.

Five9: Your Ally for a Successful Customer Experience Research

Five9, a premier cloud-based contact center solution, is your ally for successful CX research. It ensures efficient and focused customer feedback analysis through:

• A unified platform supporting diverse channel
• Real-time analytics for proactive insights
• Seamless  CRM integration for a holistic customer view
• Predictive dialing optimizing survey data collection
• Workflow automation streamlining processes

Together, these features empower organizations to excel in customer experience research, leveraging comprehensive capabilities of Five9. Discover more about Five9 through  success stories showcasing how companies have elevated their CX. 

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May 24, 2024

Customer research: Methods for better products and happier customers

Learn key types of customer research, how it stands apart from UX and market research, and how to nail it in just five steps.

Armin Tanovic

Only by knowing your customers' pain points, values, and motivations inside and out can you create a product customers actually want to use. In fact, it’s a lack of proper research that former business owners cite as one of the main reasons for startup failure —highlighting just how important customer research is for success.

In this article, we look at exactly what’s meant by customer research, and why it’s vital for your organization’s success. We also run through five steps for conducting customer research, so you can start planning your research initiatives today.

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Conduct customer research, analyze data instantly, and uncover insights to fuel your product development.

What’s the difference between customer research, customer experience research, and market research?

Customer research, customer experience research, and market research may all sound like the same thing, but while overlap exists, each of these terms has its own meaning.

This article’s focus, customer research, is the process of learning your customers’ pain points, motivations, preferences, and needs . It helps you develop an in-depth understanding of your customers—who they are, what their needs and struggles are—so you can create user personas for them, reflect on the customer journey, and tailor your product or user experience to their unique expectations.

Here’s how customer experience research and market research are different from customer research:

• Customer experience research: Looks at all the touchpoints throughout the buyer journey, and helps improve customer experience through insights and customer experience KPIs , such as customer satisfaction scores
• Market research: Collects information on the wider market landscape, including potential customers, industry trends, market needs, and product gaps

Customer research is specifically concerned with who your customers are , while customer experience research is about how they interact with your product. Market research is easier to differentiate, focusing on the market itself, rather than customers.

Why is customer research important?

Customer research is important as it gives your company the insights necessary to tailor your products and services to buyers’ preferences. By thoroughly understanding your customers, you can steer major product decision-making in the right direction, create better products, and fulfill business goals.

Customer research also helps your business attract new customers: over 80% of buyers state they're more inclined to do business with an organization that delivers tailored brand experiences. Alongside this, it helps your business get more referrals—with 70% of buyers more likely to recommend a brand that offers personalized experiences.

When should you conduct customer research?

Customer research is beneficial at various stages of product development . From planning new products and services to personalizing your marketing strategy, here’s some times to conduct customer research:

• When creating buyer personas: By thoroughly understanding buyers, you can create comprehensive user personas with demographics, brand perceptions, behaviors, and pain points
• When you aim to improve products or services: Understanding preferences means you can improve your products or services to match your customer’s expectations
• While crafting brand messaging and content that resonates: Customer research provides clarity on customer motivations and pain points, which you can use to personalize messaging and communicate effectively with your customers
• To identify new opportunities: Discovering new things about your audience opens up the chance to create products, services, and features your team hasn’t considered before
• For guiding your business decisions: Knowing what your customers want, and how they want it, serves as a signpost for making major business decisions—for example, positioning your brand, allocating resources, and signing off on major UX design and development changes

What are the types of customer research?

There’s more than one way to get the scoop on your customer’s deepest desires, expectations and motivations. You might be surprised to learn you can gather useful customer insights from what your users are already saying about your brand. All you need to do is tune in.

Here are the four types of customer research.

1. Primary research

Primary research is research that you conduct alone or with the help of your team. Here, you select your own research methods , design your project, and analyze data to gain specific insights on topics you’ve outlined beforehand.

Primary research is beneficial because it gathers the customer insights and knowledge you need. However, unless you’re conducting guerilla testing and meeting your customers in real-life situations, primary research can be resource-intensive.

This brings us to our second way to do customer research.

2. Secondary research

Secondary research entails investigating data provided by someone else. Yes—you can do that! All you need to do is find the forums, communities, and review sites where your customers hang out and discuss their needs, preferences, and satisfaction levels. You can use Voice of the Customer tools, or one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback is by linking up with your customer success and support teams—tune into client meetings, read up on feature requests, and follow Slack channels to hear on-the-ground feedback.

You can also conduct secondary research by revisiting data from previous research studies your product or UX research team may have conducted, or looking at industry trend studies done by other companies—for example, our Future of User Research Report . If your organization has an existing research operations team or central UX research repository , you can garner a lot of first-hand insights that already exist.

Secondary data can be a quick and easy way to conduct customer research. But since it's done by other parties, you have no control over the amount of data or the exact insights you’re getting. It’s also important to consider any confines of the data you’re looking at—for example, the research questions asked, or research objectives being pursued when the insights were collected.

But what about the different data types that result from customer research?

3. Quantitative research

Quantitative research uncovers numerical data, statistics and trends about your customers. The number-based insights work best for identifying patterns and gathering broad understandings of preferences, opinions, or how many people fall into a certain category.

Quantitative research is best done with UX research methods like heatmaps or UX surveys with Likert scales, close-ended questioning, and multiple-choice questions. It aims to answer ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ with objective metrics, collected indirectly—often through a UX research tool .

4. Qualitative research

Qualitative research entails collecting and analyzing descriptive, contextual, and interpretive data. This non-statistical data looks at the ‘why’, aiming to uncover customer opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.

Typically obtained through research methods like focus groups, user interviews , and open-ended question surveys, qualitative research helps you get deeper insight into your customers’ motivations and pain points. To give customers space and the opportunity to provide rich, descriptive feedback, qualitative research methods will typically have open-ended ‘why’ questions.

5 Customer research methods for uncovering insights

There are plenty of research methods that can uncover and collect the customer insights you’re looking for. Here’s our top five recommended methods for conducting customer research.

1. Customer interviews and focus groups

Nothing uncovers rich, descriptive, contextual insights better than sitting down with your customers and asking them the questions that matter. That’s exactly what customer interviews and focus groups do.

For interviews, you can prepare a list of open- and closed-ended questions, connect with customers one-on-one, and transcribe your answers with the help of a specialized research tool—like Maze Interview Studies .

With a focus group, you’re sitting down with no more than ten customers to gather a collective opinion of a market segment with representative sampling.

Both interviews and focus groups are especially helpful for uncovering customer:

• Experiences

While interviews and focus groups do go in-depth, conducting them can be time-consuming. If you’re short on time or resources, surveys and questionnaires can save you time and effort.

2. Research surveys and questionnaires

Customer experience surveys and questionnaires are a quick and easy way to gain insights with a list of open- and closed-ended questions . Instead of sitting down with your customers, you can send surveys through channels like email, social media or in-product pop-ups .

Surveys and questionnaires are especially versatile due to the many types of questions you can include; from open-ended questions to collect qualitative data, to close-ended questions, rating scales , and multiple choice for quantitative customer feedback.

3. Usability testing and product analytics

Both usability testing and product analytics are common customer research methods, and should form a big part of your customer experience strategy .

With usability testing , you give customers a task to complete and see how accomplish it with your digital product and service. Note down any friction points: where did customers find it difficult to progress during the digital experience? You can follow up usability testing with a quick survey or longer user interview to gather more context on their experience.

Identifying where customers struggle, and seeing this first-hand, gives you insight into their preferences and needs.

Product analytics show you how customers interact with your product by tracking metrics such as time spent on your product, success rates, heatmaps, and click rates. This analytical data helps you common problems and patterns, and identify which customer segments are having the hardest time using your product.

4. Social media and online review mining

Instead of meticulously creating tests to gather customer insights, social media and online review mining lets you collect already existing data from and about your customers. By finding reviews, comments, and ratings online and through social media, you can hear from customers in their own words, to identify where your product falls short, and where it matches their exact expectations.

So, where will you find this treasure trove of valuable insights? Look toward:

• Public review sites such as Capterra and G2Crowd
• Niche communities and forums where your customers gather such as Reddit, Slack, and Quora
• Comments and hashtags on your company’s social media channels such as LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook

5. Competitive analysis and market research

Customer research helps you understand who your customers are. Competitive product analysis and market research give insights into the space in which you and your customers exist, and provide you with more context on their preferences.

With competitive analysis, you’re not just looking at how customers react to your product but also to your competition . Look for which customer needs or expectations other companies fulfill; where they fall short, and how you can leverage data to understand your customers and create better products and services.

For example, maybe a competitor’s newest helpdesk offer tracks customer resolution times for airline services, but customers are complaining about the platform's lack of reporting options. This could indicate that your product’s major differentiator and competitive advantage should be extensive reporting options and in-depth analytics.

You can also apply your customer research strategy to the market and study bigger industry trends. Market research helps you better understand demand, what customers are willing to pay for a product or service, customer demographics, and segmentation.

How to do customer research: 5 steps for success

Understanding your customers will tell you almost everything you need to know about how to create a product or service that exceeds their needs. It’s the daunting task of collecting these insights that often stops organizations from investing in customer research —but it shouldn’t.

While conducting customer research can feel a lot like navigating a maze, having a solid UX research strategy sets you up for success.

We’ve put together five steps to guide your research process , to ensure you don’t spend valuable resources on dead ends.

1. Define your customer research objectives

As with any other initiative, effective customer research starts with defining the grounds for success. Your mantra to meditate on always starts with: “What do I want to accomplish with these customer insights?”

This question will help you set the course and choose the appropriate method for your customer research project.

Some example objectives:

• I want to create comprehensive customer personas to help us personalize our product
• I want to craft compelling brand content, copy, and communications based on our customers’ biggest pain points
• I want to introduce a new feature that I’m sure customers will want to upgrade their account to use

Once you’ve set your target, defined any specific customer experience metrics you want to track, and gained clarity on what you want to know, it’s time to decide who you’re going to ask.

2. Identify your customer segment

At first glance, it might seem obvious that you’re going to reach out to customers to recruit participants for your research . However, your customer segments may be widely different, each with a unique set of preferences and expectations. Before you conduct research, identify a single segment and tailor your research methodology and questions to them.

Your chosen segment should be large enough to be representative of most of your brand’s customer base. Consider key characteristics in current customer data. What demographic categories do your customers fall into? Are there any preferences and motivations that you already know of?

3. Select a customer research method

The customer research method you opt for should align with your overarching goals. Let’s say you want to understand customer motivations in order to create an empathy map and customer personas.

Such a goal warrants conducting customer interviews and focus groups for contextual, qualitative insights. Perhaps you want to know your customer segment’s single greatest pain point and target that in the next bug-fix sprint. A quick survey with Likert scales and closed-ended questioning may reveal that 87% of your customer segment struggles with inefficient workflows that lead to lost time.

Running low on resources for customer research? Guerilla research tactics are an informal and cost-effective way to gather insights by meeting your customers face-to-face where they’re likely to use your product, and asking them questions in short 5–15-minute sessions.

4. Conduct your customer research

Once you’ve settled on the appropriate testing method, you’re ready to contact customers and begin your research project.

If you’ve chosen surveys or questionnaires, you’ll need to choose a distribution channel such as email or social media. Consider offering customers incentives for completing interview—you can offer free upgrade trials, access to exclusive features, discounts, or brand merchandise.

While conducting research without a tool works, it can be time-consuming. A research tool like Maze lets you create surveys, interviews, and usability tests and automatically analyzes your data for actionable insights. Product analytics capabilities also provide you with heatmaps, click rates, and scroll analytics for an in-depth look at how customers interact with your product.

Using specialized AI tools can also help you streamline tasks throughout conducting research, such as ensuring you don’t ask leading questions.

5. Analyze your data and draw findings

Your customer research will return responses, transcripts, and customer feedback in the form of qualitative or quantitative data. But data by itself is unusable—you need to create UX reportings and conduct data analysis before you can get the insights you’ve been hoping for.

If you’ve done interviews or focus groups, perform thematic analysis or affinity mapping to make sense of these large amounts of qualitative data. For surveys and usability testing, conduct statistical analysis to arrive at insights.

Once you have your insights, highlight key findings, connect them back to your overarching customer research objective, and share with your team.

Get customer research insights with Maze

Customer research opens the door to better products, happier customers, and a more successful business. It may feel like a large task, but breaking it down into bitesize steps and enlisting an all-in-one research tool can turn this large task into part of your everyday workflow.

Not sure where to start?

Maze’s comprehensive suite of user research methods make collecting customer insights (qualitative or quantitative) simple. From Interview Studies to Feedback Surveys , Usability Testing to Card Sorting —it’s a holistic research platform for gathering decision-driving data.

Frequently asked questions about customer research

Who conducts customer research?

Customer research isn’t a strictly defined role for one professional or team. Market research teams most frequently conduct customer research, but it can also be conducted by product management, marketing, and user experience teams.

Why does customer research matter?

Customer research provides decision-makers and product teams with extensive information on customers’ pain points, expectations, desires, and motivations. You can leverage this information to create customer personas, personalize brand messaging, identify new opportunities, and tailor products and services to your customers.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research consists of gathering information on consumer needs and preferences in relation to a product or service. It’s similar to customer research, but a consumer is any person who uses a product or service, while a customer is the person who pays for the product or service.

Customer experience: fundamental premises and implications for research

• Review Paper
• Open access
• Published: 13 January 2020
• Volume 48 , pages 630–648, ( 2020 )

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• Larissa Becker 1 &
• Elina Jaakkola 1  

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Customer experience is a key marketing concept, yet the growing number of studies focused on this topic has led to considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. To move the field forward, this article develops a set of fundamental premises that reconcile contradictions in research on customer experience and provide integrative guideposts for future research. A systematic review of 136 articles identifies eight literature fields that address customer experience. The article then compares the phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions prevalent in each field to establish a dual classification of research traditions that study customer experience as responses to either (1) managerial stimuli or (2) consumption processes. By analyzing the compatibility of these research traditions through a metatheoretical lens, this investigation derives four fundamental premises of customer experience that are generalizable across settings and contexts. These premises advance the conceptual development of customer experience by defining its core conceptual domain and providing guidelines for further research.

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For the past decade, customer experience has enjoyed remarkable attention in both marketing research and practice. Business leaders believe customer experience is central to firm competitiveness (McCall 2015 ), and marketing scholars call it the fundamental basis for marketing management (Homburg et al. 2015 ; Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ). Such attention has also prompted calls for research (e.g., Ostrom et al. 2015 ) and special issues devoted to customer experience, with a resulting dramatic increase in academic publications pertaining to this concept across many different literature fields and significant advances in scholarly understanding.

Yet this trend has also produced considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. No common understanding exists regarding what customer experience entails. Some studies assert that customer experience reflects the offerings that firms stage and manage (Pine and Gilmore 1998 ), but others define it as customer responses to firm-related contact (Homburg et al. 2015 ; Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ; Meyer and Schwager 2007 ). The concept has been used to describe anything from extraordinary (Arnould and Price 1993 ) to mundane (Carú and Cova 2003 ) experiences. Some researchers delimit the scope of customer experience to a particular context, such as service encounters (Kumar et al. 2014 ) or retail settings (Verhoef et al. 2009 ), and others view it more broadly as emerging in customers’ lifeworlds (Chandler and Lusch 2015 ; Heinonen et al. 2010 ).

The lack of a unified view creates considerable challenges for theory development (Chaney et al. 2018 ; Kranzbühler et al. 2018 ). The diverse conceptualizations of customer experience mean that its operationalization differs from study to study, creating measurement and validity concerns. Confusion also prevails about the scope and boundaries of the customer experience construct, its antecedents, and its consequents. Researchers have difficulty defining which insights they can combine, thus limiting replication and generalization across contexts. These challenges also hinder researchers’ ability to disseminate meaningful implications for managers seeking to foster superior customer experience.

To mitigate these challenges and move the field toward a more unified customer experience theory, an integrative understanding is needed. With this article, we seek to develop a set of fundamental premises that reconcile contradictions and dilemmas in the current customer experience literature and provide integrative guideposts for future research in the field . As integrating such fragmented research requires understanding the distance between the phenomena addressed by different studies as well as the degree of compatibility in their underlying assumptions (Okhuysen and Bonardi 2011 ), we pose two research questions to guide our efforts: (1) What is the nature of the customer experience phenomenon and the underlying metatheoretical assumptions adopted in literature that addresses customer experience? (2) What are the common elements of customer experience that are applicable across contexts and literature fields?

To address these questions, we started with a systematic literature review to identify customer experience research in eight key literature fields: services marketing, consumer research, retailing, service-dominant (S-D) logic, service design, online marketing, branding, and experiential marketing. We then analyzed the compatibility of these fields with a metatheoretical approach, which supports comparisons across fragmented, scattered literature pertaining to a particular concept (Gioia and Pitre 1990 ; Möller 2013 ). On the basis of this comparison, we integrated these eight fields into two higher-order research traditions, defined by their approach to customer experience as either (1) responses to managerial stimuli or (2) responses to consumption processes. Through these analyses, we explicate the underlying assumptions of each research tradition and also provide a state-of-the-art description of how customer experience has been studied so far.

Furthermore, we identify commensurable elements that are applicable to both research traditions and across contexts to define four fundamental premises of customer experience that provide solutions to problems in the current research on this concept. These premises provide an integrative definition of customer experience, reveal a multilevel and dynamic view of the customer journey, highlight contingencies for customer experience, and determine the role of the firms in influencing customer experience. Each fundamental premise offers guidelines for future research as well as managerial practice. Our delineation of the conceptual domain of customer experience advances research by reconciling contradictions found in the literature and bridging different research fields and traditions, allowing them to speak the same language, and offering a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon (MacInnis 2011 ). This view complements existing reviews of customer experience (Table 1 ) that tend to focus on narrowly selected sets of articles, that seldom consider the metatheoretical underpinnings of the reviewed studies, and that do not integrate the dispersed studies. The fundamental premises proposed herein can support more rigorous studies, whose results will have more meaningful implications for firms.

The next section presents our research approach, followed by the results of the metatheoretical analysis, including a description of the key phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions embodied in each literature field, as well as a derived theoretical map of customer experience in marketing. Subsequently, we develop four fundamental premises of customer experience by integrating compatible assumptions across research traditions. In the conclusion, we detail the theoretical contributions and managerial implications of this study, as well as its limitations.

Research approach

Developing an integrative view of customer experience requires organizing the scattered literature into groups and analyzing their compatibility (MacInnis 2011 ). This analysis involved three phases: (1) a systematic literature review of customer experience that groups individual studies into eight distinct literature fields, (2) organization of the eight literature fields into two distinct research traditions on the basis of the customer experience phenomena addressed and the underlying metatheoretical assumptions adopted, and (3) forming an integrated view of customer experience by building on the compatible elements across research traditions.

Phase 1: identifying and grouping relevant customer experience research

We conducted a systematic literature review to select relevant articles that study customer experience in marketing, according to strict guidelines (e.g., Booth et al. 2012 ; Palmatier et al. 2018 ). A systematic literature review enables overcoming possible biases in comparison to traditional reviews because it uses explicit criteria and procedures for selecting and including articles in the sample (e.g., Littell et al. 2008 ). We identified 142 articles that we subjected to a two-step process: identification of literature fields and classification of the articles (see Appendix 1 ).

We started with four literature fields—S-D logic, consumer research, services marketing, and service design—that were previously identified as relevant domains for customer experience research (Jaakkola et al. 2015 ). When the articles did not fit these fields in terms of their primary research foci (the aspects of customer experience studied), we added a new category, ultimately resulting in four additional literature fields: retailing, online marketing, branding, and experiential marketing. For example, branding emerged as a clearly distinct field that focuses on brand stimuli, such as logo and packaging (e.g., Brakus et al. 2009 ).

We then classified the articles into these literature fields according to three criteria: the primary customer experience stimuli studied, the customer experience context, and the key references used to define customer experience (e.g., citing Arnould and Price ( 1993 ) to substantiate the definition of customer experience indicates an article is likely to belong to the literature field of consumer research) (Table 2 ).

To be classified into a specific literature field, an article had to meet at least two of these three criteria without considerable overlap between fields. We excluded 12 articles that did not fulfill these criteria. However, we added 6 additional papers, identified through a bibliography search (i.e., back-tracking) (Booth et al. 2012 ; Johnston et al. 2018 ), resulting in a total sample of 136 articles (see Web Appendix ). The iterative process of reading the articles, identifying the literature fields, and classifying the articles stopped when we reached theoretical saturation (i.e., the majority of articles could clearly be categorized in one of the fields).

Phase 2: Analyzing the nature of the customer experience phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions in the literature fields

Following Okhuysen and Bonardi ( 2011 ), we analyzed these eight literature fields in terms of the focal phenomena addressed and the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions adopted (Table 3 ) (see Appendix 2 for a more detailed account of the analysis). Using these elements, we compared the literature fields and sought to identify broader groups. By situating the eight literature fields in a theoretical map, we could navigate across them and develop conclusions about their compatibility (Gioia and Pitre 1990 ; Möller 2013 ; Okhuysen and Bonardi 2011 ). In turn, we identified two distinct research traditions that encompass all eight literature fields.

Phase 3: Developing an integrated view of customer experience

To integrate the two research traditions, we used a method analogous to triangulation (Gioia and Pitre 1990 ). By juxtaposing the two research traditions from a metatheoretical perspective, we sought to identify customer experience elements that are common to the two traditions, distinct yet compatible elements, and unique elements that do not fit with the assumptions from the other research tradition (Gioia and Pitre 1990 ; Lewis and Grimes 1999 ). The integration of compatible elements resulted in the development of four fundamental premises of customer experience.

Results of the metatheoretical analysis

In this section, we first describe the nature of the phenomena addressed and the metatheoretical assumptions adopted in the customer experience literature. We then position each literature field on a theoretical map of customer experience to establish two higher-order research traditions.

Customer experience phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions in the literature fields

Table 4 presents the description of the key customer experience phenomena addressed and the metatheoretical assumptions adopted in the eight identified literature fields. A discussion on the similarities and contradictions between them follows (cf. Möller 2013 ; Okhuysen and Bonardi 2011 ).

Customer experience phenomena addressed

As Table 4 shows, there are considerable differences between the literature fields with regard to the scope and nature of customer experience as a research phenomenon. The literature on experiential marketing tends to view experience as the offering itself. However, the most prevalent view within other fields sees customer experience as a customer’s reactions and responses to particular stimuli. Some studies focus on customer responses to stimuli residing within the firm–customer interface , with the goal of understanding how firms can use different types of stimuli to improve customers’ responses along their customer journey, the series of firm- or offering related touchpoints that customers interact with during their purchase process (e.g., Patrício et al. 2011 ). For example, services marketing focuses on service encounter stimuli, such as the servicescape, employee interactions, the core service, and other customers (e.g., Grace and O’Cass 2004 ), the retailing literature focuses on retail elements, such as assortment and price (e.g., Verhoef et al. 2009 ), and online marketing focuses on the elements of the virtual environment (e.g., Rose et al. 2012 ).

In contrast, S-D logic and consumer research consider stimuli related to the customer’s overall consumption process , encompassing factors beyond dyadic firm–customer interactions (e.g., Chandler and Lusch 2015 ; Woodward and Holbrook 2013 ). These studies consider customer experience to also emerge through non-market-related processes (e.g., eating dinner at home; Carú and Cova 2003 ), affected by a range of stakeholders such as customer collectives (Carú and Cova 2015 ) and even institutional arrangements such as norms, rules, and socio-historical structures (e.g., Akaka and Vargo 2015 ).

Metatheoretical assumptions

In terms of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions present in the customer experience literature, our analysis reveals some clear divides (Table 4 ). On a general level, services marketing, retailing, service design, online marketing, branding, and experiential marketing assume that particular stimuli likely trigger a certain response from customers. Thus, their view resonates with the idea of an objective, external, concrete reality (Burrell and Morgan 1979 ). Researchers employ hypothetic–deductive reasoning to study the relationship between customer experience and other variables, typically with surveys and experiments (e.g., Srivastava and Kaul 2016 ). In theoretical models, contextual factors usually appear as moderating variables (e.g., Verhoef et al. 2009 ). These fields hence tend to adopt a positivist epistemological approach, seeking to explain an external, concrete reality by searching for regularities and causal relationships in an objective way (Burrell and Morgan 1979 ).

In contrast, consumer research and S-D logic take a subjective view and adopt an interpretive epistemology. Research in these fields sees the customer experience as embedded in each customer’s lifeworld and interpreted by that customer (Helkkula and Kelleher 2010 ). External reality does not exist but instead serves only to describe the subjective reality, which is a product of individual consciousness (Burrell and Morgan 1979 ; Tadajewski 2004 ). Neither S-D logic nor consumer research aims to generate universal, generalizable laws; instead, they seek to understand how customers in their unique situation experience an object (Addis and Holbrook 2001 ). Therefore, these researchers consider customer subjectivity, highlight the role of contextual factors, and prefer qualitative methods (e.g., ethnography, phenomenological interviews) (Schembri 2009 ). Most consumer research studies employ an interpretive and inductive approach that is used to capture the symbolic meaning of consumption experiences (Holbrook 2006 ). In S-D logic, empirical studies often adopt a phenomenological approach, aiming to understand how value emerges during service use in the customer’s context (Helkkula and Kelleher 2010 ).

Theoretical map of the customer experience in marketing

The preceding discussion highlights that the scope of the customer experience phenomena addressed in the research ranges from narrow and dyadic to a broader ecosystem view. In terms of metatheoretical assumptions, we identify a continuum from more positivist to more interpretive approaches. Footnote 1 Our comparisons of these elements produced a theoretical map of customer experience where we group the eight literature fields into two higher-order research traditions (Fig.  1 ), which we define as groups of studies that share general assumptions about the research domain (Laudan 1977 ; Möller 2013 ).

Theoretical map of customer experience

The first research tradition combines experiential marketing, services marketing, online marketing, retailing, branding, and service design. These fields view customer experience as responses and reactions to managerial stimuli . As noted, each literature field addresses different stimuli; for example, brand-related stimuli include packaging, advertising, and logos (Brakus et al. 2009 ), whereas retailing elements include price, merchandise, and store facilities (Verhoef et al. 2009 ). The general goal across this research tradition is to examine how firms can affect customer experience by managing different types of stimuli, typically focusing on firm-controlled touchpoints. To test these relationships, researchers usually adopt a positivist philosophical positioning.

The second research tradition comprises consumer research and S-D logic that view customer experience as responses and reactions to consumption processes . This tradition adopts a broad view on experience as it addresses any stimuli during the entire consumption process, potentially involving many firms, customers, and stakeholders, all of which can contribute to the customer experience but are not necessarily under the firm’s control. Research following this tradition tends to see customer experience as embedded in a customer’s lifeworld and interpreted by the customer, such that it reflects an interpretive philosophical positioning (e.g., phenomenology). Finally, service design lies at the intersection of the two research traditions as it is inherently managerially focused but recent studies increasingly incorporate a more systemic view of stimuli for customer experience.

By building on the common elements across traditions and reconciling the distinct but compatible elements, we next develop fundamental premises of customer experience that provide opportunities to extend research within both traditions.

Fundamental premises of customer experience

Many authors highlight the need to build bridges across research traditions to establish a comprehensive understanding of a research domain (e.g., Gioia and Pitre 1990 ; Lewis and Grimes 1999 ; Okhuysen and Bonardi 2011 ). The pivotal question for developing a more unified customer experience theory is: To what extent can the literature from these two traditions be combined?

Our analysis revealed two research traditions that differ in terms of their metatheoretical assumptions, affecting how customer experience is understood and studied. A juxtaposition of these research traditions allows us to identify common elements, distinct yet compatible elements, as well as elements that are incompatible. From this analysis we developed four fundamental premises of customer experience that build on the shared assumptions and help in solving the key discrepancies in the extant literature. These premises may generalize across settings, allowing each research tradition to offer complementary results that collectively provide a comprehensive understanding of the same phenomena (cf. Gioia and Pitre 1990 ). Together, these premises (P1-P4) cover the “big picture” of what customer experience is, what affects it, its key contingencies, and the role that firms can play in it (Fig.  2 ). For each of these premises, we delineate guidelines for future research to move the field forward.

Conceptual framework for customer experience

Definition of customer experience

The metatheoretical analysis conducted revealed a myriad of definitions for customer experience that ultimately suggest different phenomena (see Table 4 ). The current literature on customer experience does not agree on the definition of customer experience nor on its nomological network. Confusion prevails as to whether experience is response to an offering (e.g., Meyer and Schwager 2007 ) or assessment of the quality of the offering (e.g., Kumar et al. 2014 ). This means that in some studies, customer experience overlaps with outcome variables such as satisfaction or value, while in others it is an independent variable leading to satisfaction, for example. Furthermore, some studies view experience as a characteristic of the product rather than as the customer’s response to it (e.g., Pine and Gilmore 1998 ), which is in deep conflict with the interpretive tradition that always views experience as a subjective perception by an individual and even as synonymous with value-in-use (Addis and Holbrook 2001 ).

To resolve this confusion, we suggest customer experience should be defined as non-deliberate, spontaneous responses and reactions to particular stimuli. This view builds on the most prevalent definition across the two research traditions, but separates customer experience from the stimuli that customers react to as well as from conscious evaluation that follows from it. This view rejects suggestions that evaluative concepts such as satisfaction or perceived service quality could be a component of customer experience (Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ).

Another conceptual confusion in the extant literature relates to assumptions held regarding the nature of experiences. As Carú and Cova ( 2003 ) note, much of the marketing research assumes that good experiences are “memorable,” if not “extraordinary.” The extant research tends to treat ordinary and extraordinary experiences as different phenomena (e.g., Arnould and Price 1993 ; Klaus and Maklan 2011 ). However, these studies typically focus on the extraordinary or ordinary nature of the offering, such as river rafting or experiential events (Arnould and Price 1993 ; Schouten et al. 2007 ) or routine and mundane offerings (Carú and Cova 2003 ), rather than on the customer’s response to these stimuli. As customer responses can range from weak to strong (Brakus et al. 2009 ), we propose this intensity better marks the difference between an ordinary and extraordinary customer experience. It follows that this classification can be leveraged as a continuum instead of a dichotomy; the weaker the customer responses and reactions, the more ordinary the experience, and vice versa (cf. Carú and Cova 2003 ). A customer can thus have an extraordinary experience as a response to a mundane offering.

In sum, to reconcile confusion in the extant research, we propose the following:

Premise 1a:

Customer experience comprises customers’ non-deliberate, spontaneous responses and reactions to offering-related stimuli along the customer journey .

Premise 1b:

Customer experience ranges from ordinary to extraordinary representing the intensity of customer responses to stimuli.

Implications of Premise 1 for future research

Following Premise 1a, researchers should distinguish customer experience from stimuli (e.g., the offering) and evaluative outcomes (e.g., value-in-use). For example, when operationalizing customer experience, researchers should not build on evaluative scales or use satisfaction and service quality as proxies, as is currently often done (see, e.g., Kumar et al. 2014 ; Ngobo 2005 ). Instead, the operationalization of customer experience should focus on the customer’s spontaneous responses and reactions to offering-related stimuli. The current customer experience literature offers a few solid measures that can serve as a starting point for further development (e.g., Brakus et al. 2009 ; Ding and Tseng 2015 ). We recommend building the measures on the most common experience dimensions used in the extant research—cognitive, affective, physical, sensorial, and social responses (e.g., Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ; Schmitt 1999 ; Verhoef et al. 2009 )—to facilitate the accumulation of knowledge and eventually enable comparing the weight of each type of response across different contexts. The extant research implies that the relevance of different types of customer responses may vary across contexts (McColl-Kennedy et al. 2017 ), but a lack of a common definition and measures for customer experience has prevented building this knowledge effectively.

Defining customer experience as spontaneous responses and reactions suggests that the issue of timing is relevant for its measurement. According to our literature review, most studies use research instruments where the respondents have to rely on memory to report their experience (e.g., Trudeau and Shobeiri 2016 ). To improve the validity of the findings, we recommend research designs where customer responses are captured right after the interaction with the offering-related stimuli has taken place. Some methods and technologies for capturing customers’ reactions in real time have been developed, such as the real time experience tracking method (Baxendale et al. 2015 ) and wearable devices for emotion detection (Jerauld 2015 ). Surprisingly, none of the 136 studies in our review used such technology to investigate customer experience in real time. Future studies should further explore the applicability and consumer acceptance of such methods and technologies.

Following Premise 1b, researchers should also change the way they address extraordinary vs. ordinary experiences. The current literature tends to assume that the higher the score on a customer experience scale, the better the customer experience is (e.g., Brakus et al. 2009 ). Future studies should address contexts where ordinary experiences (i.e., weak or neutral responses) are desirable in order to complement current research that predominantly focuses on contexts where firms try to strengthen customers’ responses rather than to keep them to a minimum (e.g., Ding and Tseng 2015 ). Such studies would help firms in designing customer journeys that, at some points, minimize certain types of responses, while increasing particular responses at other times.

Stimuli affecting customer experience

Delineating the conceptual domain of customer experience also requires defining the stimuli that affect its formation. Key discrepancies in the current literature relate to the source of the stimuli considered and the level of analysis. Our review revealed that most studies focus on a particular set of firm-controlled touchpoints and an integrative view is missing. This is problematic in many respects: customer journeys in today’s markets are “multitouch” and multichannel in nature with new types of stimuli emerging every day, suggesting that firms need to understand a broad range of touchpoints within and outside firm control, both in offline and online settings (Bolton et al. 2018 ; Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ). Furthermore, empowered customers are increasingly in charge of selecting individual pathways to achieve their goals (Edelman and Singer 2015 ; Heinonen et al. 2010 ; Teixeira et al. 2012 ). This means that journeys become increasingly complex and individualized, and the current literature silos focusing on a selected set of stimuli and touchpoints will fail to capture what the customer really experiences. The literature fields that consider customers’ holistic experiences in their lifeworld take a broader view but lack precision and insight into how experiences related to particular offerings emerge.

To resolve this dilemma, we propose integrating the currently disparate perspectives into a multilevel framework that draws on different fields of the customer experience literature and considers the stimuli at multiple levels of aggregation: First, cues refer to anything that can be perceived or sensed by the customer as the smallest stimulus unit with an influence on customer experience, such as product packing and logo design (Bolton et al. 2014 ; Brakus et al. 2009 ). Second, touchpoints reflect the moments when the customer interacts with or “touches” the offering (Patrício et al. 2011 ; Verhoef et al. 2009 ). These contact points can be direct (e.g., physical service encounters) or indirect (e.g., advertising) and comprise various cues (Meyer and Schwager 2007 ). Third, the customer journey comprises a series of touchpoints across the stages before, during, and after service provision (Lemon and Verhoef 2016 ; Teixeira et al. 2012 ). Fourth, the consumer journey level captures what customers do in their daily lives to achieve their goals, implying a broader focus than that of the customer journey and accommodating consumer interaction with multiple stakeholders beyond touchpoints with a single firm (Epp and Price 2011 ; Hamilton and Price 2019 ; Heinonen et al. 2010 ).

The extant literature has tended to measure customer experience either in one touchpoint or as an aggregate evaluation of the brand. However, recent research indicates a need for a more dynamic view: Kranzbühler et al. ( 2018 ) argue that customer experience is based on an evolving evaluation of a series of touchpoints, Bolton et al. ( 2014 ) suggest that some stimuli have multiplier effects, and Kuehnl et al. ( 2019 ) state that the connectivity of stimuli across touchpoints is an important driver for positive customer outcomes. These findings suggest that customer experience emerges in a dynamic manner and benefits from a multilevel analysis.

We present Premise 2 that addresses these shortcomings in the existing research and integrates insights across research traditions:

Premise 2a:

Customer experience stimuli reside within and outside firm-controlled touchpoints and can be viewed from multiple levels of aggregation.

Premise 2b:

Customer experience stimuli and their interconnections affect customer experience in a dynamic manner.

Implications of Premise 2 for future research

Premise 2 guides future research to study diverse offering-related stimuli through multiple levels of aggregation. Most of the reviewed research has examined a narrow scope of stimuli and touchpoints (e.g., Grace and O’Cass 2004 ) and a lack of insight into touchpoints beyond firm control is particularly glaring. We recommend cross-fertilization between the two research traditions: Researchers within the managerial research tradition could expand their research foci by drawing from consumption process studies that offer a broad outlook on the various stakeholders contributing stimuli that affect customer experience (e.g., Akaka and Vargo 2015 ; McColl-Kennedy et al. 2015 ). The research tradition focusing on experience as responses to consumption processes could adopt the more detailed analysis on journey composition offered by the managerial tradition and “zoom in” on the journey, focusing on the meanings that emerge at specific touchpoints, for example.

As extant studies often focus on measuring customer experience on the cue or touchpoint level (e.g., Grace and O’Cass 2004 ), the literature is unclear about how the interplay of diverse stimuli affect customer experience. Future research should thus study the interaction between types of stimuli and their dynamic effect on customer experience. Longitudinal research designs would be particularly useful for creating new insight into the evolving effects of stimuli configurations for the formation of customer experience as well as the interaction between the types of customer responses at different touchpoints. In addition, future research could investigate how the combination of responses and reactions that emerge over time lead to evaluative outcomes such as satisfaction.

The effective study on the emergence of customer experience necessitates the development of more dynamic measurement instruments. Current measures of customer experience often only provide a snapshot (e.g., Brakus et al. 2009 ; Ding and Tseng 2015 ). Considering the multitude of potential relevant customer experience stimuli and the active role of customers in forming their own journey (Edelman and Singer 2015 ; Heinonen et al. 2010 ), a possible avenue for research would be the development of self-adaptive scales or surveys where respondents can self-select parts of the journey that they found relevant and the types of responses they experienced. Research supporting the development of such instruments is available (e.g., Calinescu et al. 2013 ) but has not as yet been applied in the customer experience context. While a measurement instrument that captures a complete multilevel framework of the customer journey would become unmanageable, a self-adaptive scale would allow respondents to focus on touchpoints and even on specific cues that are the most relevant for the customer experience. A more dynamic measurement of customer experience would also enable analyzing what types of customer responses emerge in different touchpoints or phases of the customer journey.

Key contingencies for customer experience

Researchers generally agree that customer experience is subjective and specific to the context. This means that contextual variables related to the customer and the broader environment influence customer responses to stimuli and evaluative outcomes of customer experience. However, the current research on these contingencies is fragmented and lacks a uniform view. Within the managerial research tradition, the role of contextual variables is rather peripheral. These studies often investigate a limited number of contextual variables or dismiss their effect altogether. Some typical contextual variables that are studied include consumer attitudes, task orientation, and socio-demographic variables (e.g., Ngobo 2005 ; Verhoef et al. 2009 ). The research tradition that views customer experience as responses to consumption processes places a greater emphasis on the customer context, acknowledging the role of complementary offerings and service providers, institutions and institutional arrangements, and the customer’s goals in the consumption situation (Akaka and Vargo 2015 ; Tax et al. 2013 ; Woodward and Holbrook 2013 ).

Again, insights across research traditions have seldom been combined. To reconcile this shortcoming, we categorize the contingencies used in the extant studies and identify the key ways in which they operate. Our literature review enabled the identification of three groups: (1) customer, (2) situational, and (3) sociocultural contingencies. Customer contingencies refer to the customer’s characteristics such as personality, values, and socio-demographic characters (e.g., Holbrook and Hirschman 1982 ), resources such as time, skills, and knowledge (e.g., Novak et al. 2000 ), past experiences and expectations (e.g., Verhoef et al. 2009 ), customer participation and activities during the journey (e.g., Patrício et al. 2008 ), motivations (e.g., Evanschitzky et al. 2014 ), and the fit of the offering with the customer’s lifeworld (e.g., Schmitt 1999 ).

Situational contingencies are those related to the immediate context, such as the type of store the customer is interacting with (e.g., Lemke et al. 2011 ), the presence of other customers and companions (e.g., Grove and Fisk 1992 ; Schouten et al. 2007 ), and other stakeholders that contribute to the customer experience, such as other firms (e.g., Tax et al. 2013 ). Sociocultural contingencies refer to the broader system in which customers are embedded, such as language, practices, meanings (e.g., Schembri 2009 ), cultural aspects (e.g., Evanschitzky et al. 2014 ), and societal norms and rules (e.g., Akaka and Vargo 2015 ; Åkesson et al. 2014 ).

Our literature review indicates that these contingency factors can affect the customer experience through two alternative routes. First, these factors can make some stimuli more or less recognizable; in other words, they play the role of a moderator between offering-related stimuli and customer experience (Jüttner et al. 2013 ). Second, such contingencies can affect the evaluative outcomes of particular customer responses (Heinonen et al. 2010 ). For example, a feeling of fear can have negative effects in a dentist’s office, but in a context such as river rafting, that response may have positive implications (Arnould and Price 1993 ). Therefore, any particular response to offering-related stimuli is not “universally good” or “universally bad”; its evaluation instead depends on its fit with the customer’s processes and goals.

Altogether, this discussion organizes the fragmented literature around contingencies for customer experience, as summarized in Premise 3:

Customer experience is subjective and context-specific, because responses to offering-related stimuli and their evaluative outcomes depend on customer, situational, and sociocultural contingencies.

Implications of Premise 3 for future research

While the extant literature agrees on the subjective nature of experiences and recommends that managers ensure their customer experience stimuli have a good fit with the customer’s situational context (e.g., Homburg et al. 2015 ; Kuehnl et al. 2019 ), it does not offer much guidance on the identification and role of key contingencies for customer experience. More systematic research is thus needed on the relevant contextual variables and their effects on the strength and direction of the relationships between offering-related stimuli, customer experience, and evaluative outcomes. The extant empirical research has addressed a relatively narrow set of contextual contingencies, and new insights can be generated, for example, by drawing from research within the interpretative research tradition that has placed a strong emphasis on sociocultural factors beyond the firm–customer interface (e.g., Akaka and Vargo 2015 ; Åkesson et al. 2014 ). In particular, researchers could study the role of institutions and institutional arrangements, as they direct the customer’s attention to particular stimuli in the environment (Thornton et al. 2012 ), but are seldom studied as contingency factors in empirical research on customer experience. Future research could look beyond customer experience research to identify potentially relevant contingencies for customer experience formation.

Customer experience research is often preoccupied with the question of how to provide “good experiences,” simply assuming that higher scores on a customer experience scale are always better (e.g., Ding and Tseng 2015 ). As Premise 3 suggests, it is more relevant to ask for whom a particular experience is good . Future studies should aim to identify relevant key contingences that drive particular customer responses to stimuli and influence a customer’s evaluation of their responses. This insight will aid managers in developing a more individualized set of offering-related stimuli for their different target groups and user personas, which is deemed important in current markets (Edelman and Singer 2015 ).

Role of the firm in customer experience

The fourth premise seeks to settle a seemingly profound discrepancy between the two research traditions: Can firms manage the customer experience? Some studies refer to the customer experience as something created and offered to customers (e.g., Hamilton and Wagner 2014 ; Pine and Gilmore 1998 ), but others emphasize its emergence in customers’ lifeworlds and suggest it cannot be managed directly (Heinonen et al. 2010 ; Helkkula and Kelleher 2010 ). This discrepancy can be solved by building on the common ground of the two research traditions that sees customer experience emerging as customer responses to diverse stimuli. As firms cannot control customer responses, they cannot create the customer experience per se, but they can seek to affect the stimuli to which customers respond.

Studies within the managerial tradition provide guidance on designing and integrating stimuli in firm-controlled touchpoints to ensure positive customer experience (e.g., Brakus et al. 2009 ; Grace and O’Cass 2004 ; Pine and Gilmore 1998 ). Although this research tradition acknowledges that touchpoints outside the firm’s control (e.g., other customers) might greatly influence customer experience (e.g., Grove and Fisk 1992 ), it says very little about what firms can do regarding these stimuli.

Studies that view customer experience as responses to consumption processes offer some guidelines for addressing the uncontrollable touchpoints. For example, Carú and Cova ( 2015 ) advise firms to monitor and react to customers’ collective practices with other consumers. Tax et al. ( 2013 ) suggest that firms should identify other firms that are part of the consumer journey, then partner with these organizations to improve the overall customer experience. Some authors suggest that firms should try to identify all stakeholders that influence the customer journey (e.g., Patrício et al. 2011 ; Teixeira et al. 2012 ). Mapping offering-related stimuli as holistically as possible helps firms design offerings that better fit into customers’ lives (Heinonen et al. 2010 ; Patrício et al. 2011 ). Thus, firms can use their knowledge of external stimuli and contextual factors to their advantage, even though they cannot control such factors.

In sum, to reconcile the disparate streams of extant research, we propose the following:

Firms cannot create the customer experience, but they can monitor, design, and manage a range of stimuli that affect such experiences.

Implications of Premise 4 for future research

Only few attempts have been made to delineate what customer experience management entails (e.g., Homburg et al. 2015 ), and this topic remains insufficiently understood despite its practical relevance. The extant research offers some guidelines for “well-designed journeys” (e.g., Kuehnl et al. 2019 ), but more research is needed to specify management activities that are suited to different types of touchpoints.

According to our literature review, a particularly critical gap in extant knowledge relates to the firm’s possibilities of affecting touchpoints outside of the firm’s control. Service design research offers tools for mapping a broader constellation of touchpoints, but there is scant research on how firms can deal with touchpoints external to the firm–customer interface. Potential future research topics include, for example, how firms can design touchpoints that are adaptive to stimuli residing in external touchpoints and whether firms can influence how customers respond to stimuli at external touchpoints along their journey.

We recommend that future research should ground customer experience management models on a more nuanced conceptual understanding of experience. These models should not consider “good experience” as the goal of customer experience management, but instead define the content of the intended customer experience (cf. Premise 1). In our sample, only a few studies address the specific responses and reactions that firms want to trigger: For example, Bolton et al. ( 2014 ) show three types of intended experiences (e.g., emotionally engaged experiences) and give suggestions on how to trigger them. By focusing on the “good vs. bad” dichotomy of customer experience, studies about customer experience management seem to skip this important step and focus directly on the stimuli to which customers respond (cf. e.g., Lemke et al. 2011 ). A focus on intended responses and reactions would complement this research and provide more precise implications on the management of firm-controlled stimuli.

Another critical gap in the research knowledge on customer experience management relates to the issue of contextual factors. The effect of managerial action depends on how well it resonates with the customers, their situation, and sociocultural context (Heinonen et al. 2010 ); hence, insights into the environment where customers interact with the offering-related stimuli are critical. The extant knowledge on the relevance and fit of particular management activities with particular contexts, situations, and types of customers is very scarce. For example, future research could explore how customer contingencies for customer experience formation (see Premise 3) can be used in segmentation and how management processes should be adapted to ensure the desired effects.

Table 5 summarizes the developed premises that conceptualize customer experience as well as guidelines and suggestions for future research.

Conclusions

Theoretical contributions.

This study undertakes a rigorous development of an integrative view of customer experience, captured in four fundamental premises that can anchor future customer experience research. We highlight four specific conceptual contributions. First, this study differentiates the customer experience concept and the bodies of research that study it (MacInnis 2011 ) (Table 4 ). Then it defines two distinct research traditions that study customer experience: customer experience as responses to managerial stimuli and customer experience as responses to consumption processes (Fig. 1 ). This differentiation facilitates comparisons across research streams and creates the conditions for their integration (MacInnis 2011 ). The metatheoretical analysis makes different assumptions underpinning customer experience research visible and articulates the key differences between literature fields and research traditions, providing a state-of-the-art description of research in the customer experience domain (cf. Palmatier et al. 2018 ). This helps researchers make sense of the conflicting research findings in the previous literature, position their research, and take note of the conceptual boundaries of their chosen literature field.

Second, we integrate the customer experience literature and draw connections among entities, then provide a simplified, higher-order synthesis that accommodates this knowledge (MacInnis 2011 ). Specifically, our analysis provides four fundamental premises of customer experience that integrate common and distinct yet compatible elements across the previously distinct bodies of research, solving key conflicts in the existing research (Table 5 ). Previous literature reviews (Table 1 ) have highlighted differences across customer experience characterizations (Helkkula 2011 ), contextual lenses (Lipkin 2016 ), and theoretical perspectives (Kranzbühler et al. 2018 ), but our study is unique in that it seeks to transcend these individual differences and reconcile the disparate literature. The integration of extant knowledge in a conceptual domain is an important step for advancing science (Palmatier et al. 2018 ); it is particularly valuable for the fragmented customer experience domain hosting a great variety of definitions, dimensions, and analysis levels that create considerable challenges for researchers and hamper the conceptual advancement of the field (Chaney et al. 2018 ; Kranzbühler et al. 2018 ; McColl-Kennedy et al. 2015 ).

Third, the fundamental premises we propose delineate the customer experience concept; they “describe an entity and identify things that should be considered in its study” (MacInnis 2011 , p. 144). The proposed premises serve to reconcile and extend the research domain, as well as resolve definitional ambiguities (Palmatier et al. 2018 ), by delineating what customer experience is, what it is not, how it emerges, and to what extent it can be managed. We argue that the four premises establish the core of the conceptual domain of customer experience and are generalizable across settings and contexts. Few, if any, earlier studies have offered general guidelines for the rapidly growing field of customer experience research, let alone such that are based on a systematic, theoretical analysis of the body of experience research.

Fourth, this paper provides clear guidelines and implications for continued research on customer experience (Table 5 ). Each premise explicates the constituents and boundaries of the customer experience concept and what they mean for its study. We also explicate how researchers within each research tradition can enrich their studies by learning from previously somewhat overlooked experience research conducted within the other tradition.

Applying the premises developed in this study in continued research should facilitate the advancement of science and the generalization of the findings by enabling the different fields and research traditions to speak the same language and establish a more complete view of the conceptual domain. Naturally, customer experience researchers from various fields will continue to hold different assumptions about the nature of reality and how customer experience should be studied; however, these differences should not mean that the concept of customer experience means different things in the marketing literature. The integrative understanding offered in this study is the needed step toward the development of a more unified customer experience theory.

Managerial implications

A better delineation and integration of customer experience research also benefits managerial practice. We determine that customer experience comprises many types of customer responses and reactions that can vary in nature and strength (Premise 1). Instead of just seeking to create “positive” or “memorable” customer experiences, firms should define their intended customer experience with finer nuances. Depending on their value proposition, firms can determine which customer responses and reactions they hope to trigger. For some firms, a weak or mitigated response will be preferable for some touchpoints, such as a hassle-free cleaning service that the customer does not need to think about, or a dentist’s office that reduces excitement and fear. Other value propositions may aim to trigger strong, extraordinary emotional or sensorial experiences, as in the case of an amusement park (Zomerdijk and Voss 2010 ). Firms should thus develop unique customer experience measures to capture different types of customer responses. Using perceived quality or customer satisfaction as proxies to measure customer experience limits the understanding of the true nature of the customer experience that the offering evokes.

After establishing the intended customer experience, firms should map the consumer journey to identify which offering-related stimuli are likely to influence these customer responses and reactions. We propose an integrated view of versatile sources of stimuli along this journey, which is broader than what any single literature field can provide. A useful starting point would be to analyze offering-related stimuli at multiple levels of aggregation (Premise 2). Firms should be careful not to focus exclusively on individual touchpoints (e.g., a physical service encounter) or cues (e.g., website functionality) but rather should consider the multiplicity of and connectivity between stimuli and touchpoints customers encounter along their journeys. Such an effort may require collaborative collections of customer data with partners in the service delivery network. Ethnographic research can be used to understand stimuli in external touchpoints, and ultimately how offerings fits with customers’ lifeworlds. For example, Edvardsson et al. ( 2005 ) describe how IKEA designers observe customers in their houses, then create offerings that match those customers’ everyday experiences.

When mapping the consumer journey, firms should be aware that customer responses to stimuli also depend on customer, situational, and sociocultural contingencies (Premise 3). Therefore, customers in different situations and positions, with different resources, will likely react to particular stimuli in varied ways. Moreover, contextual factors may influence the evaluative outcomes of particular stimuli, such as the degree to which a particular reaction leads to satisfaction and loyalty. We urge firms to conduct customer research to learn about the connections among customer personas, usage situations, and responses to stimuli. These insights can be used as a basis for segmentation and to design different types of journeys for distinct customer types and situations.

Firms should also consider how norms, practices, and values in the customer’s context affect their experiences (cf. Akaka and Vargo 2015 ). Presenting offering-related stimuli that clash with such higher-order institutional arrangements will likely trigger strong reactions because they deviate from norms. The famous Benetton UnHate campaign is an example of an advertising stimulus that triggered strong affective and cognitive responses by creating surprising confrontations with prevailing institutions (cf. Hill 2011 ).

Determining intended customer responses and relevant stimuli for achieving them thus are prerequisites for managing customer experiences (Premise 4). The integrative view of customer experience offered in this study highlights the importance of both controllable stimuli (e.g., servicescape; Grace and O’Cass 2004 ) and those that exist outside the firm’s control (e.g., customer goals, ecosystems; Akaka and Vargo 2015 ). Firms should make an effort to design controllable touchpoints to facilitate the intended customer experience, but also develop methods to understand, monitor, and respond to stimuli their customers face in touchpoints that are beyond firm control. Firms can potentially adopt a facilitator role in some external touchpoints, for example, by providing platforms where customers can interact (e.g., Trudeau and Shobeiri 2016 ) or partnering with stakeholders that control external touchpoints (e.g., Baron and Harris 2010). Firms should constantly monitor the stimuli their customers confront in external touchpoints—for example in social media—and consider opportunities for adapting firm-controlled touchpoints accordingly, to leverage external stimuli supportive of the intended experience and mitigate stimuli causing dissonance.

Limitations

The results should be understood in light of some limitations. First, our systematic literature review did not capture studies that might address customer experience-related phenomena but that use different terminology or that focus on particular customer responses without connecting them to customer experience. However, the procedure of back-tracking articles reduced the risk of excluding seminal research on customer experience. Second, the decision to adopt strict criteria for article inclusion may have limited the results (e.g., excluding book chapters or papers published in languages other than English). Although this approach allowed us to analyze the 136 articles with greater rigor, we also acknowledge that the results may have differed if we had considered related concepts or adopted looser inclusion criteria. Despite these limitations, we are confident that the development of these fundamental premises of customer experience and their research implications will help scholars address this extremely important managerial priority.

We recognize that this is a simplistic division. We do not categorize researchers as positivists or interpretivists but approximate researchers’ assumptions as more positivist or more interpretive to varying degrees.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the colleagues from Turku School of Economics for commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript as well as the Editors and three Reviewers for their highly constructive and useful feedback.

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Appendix 1: Conducting the systematic literature review

Figure 3 presents an overview of the systematic literature review process.

Systematic literature review process

After reading articles about customer experience to familiarize ourselves with the phenomenon and help us decide on the methodological procedures (Booth et al. 2012 ; Littell et al. 2008 ), we established the criteria for the systematic literature review. We searched articles in the EBSCO Business Source Complete and Science Direct databases with the following keywords, separated by the term “OR”: “experiential marketing,” “service experience,” “customer experience,” “consumer experience,” and “consumption experience.” One of these keywords had to be present in the title, abstract, or keywords (e.g., Danese et al. 2018 ). We conducted the search in early May 2016 and did not set any temporal limits.

In the screening phase, we excluded all articles that were written in a language other than English, were outside the marketing scope, were not published in peer-reviewed journals, and were editorials, comments, or repeated articles. Then, we evaluated the relevance of each article to our study according to three criteria, such that it had to (1) refer to business-to-customer or general customer experience, (2) include customer experience (or related terms) as a central concept (Danese et al. 2018 ), and (3) provide a definition and/or characterization of customer experience (Helkkula 2011 ). In applying these criteria, we first reviewed the title and abstract, and, if necessary, skimmed or read the full article (Booth et al. 2012 ; Littell et al. 2008 ). These processes resulted in 142 articles to be analyzed.

Appendix 2: Metatheoretical analysis

We used content analysis to analyze the articles (Booth et al. 2012 ), reading them in chronological order within each literature field. The first step involved extracting material from the articles and transferring it to a codebook (Littell et al. 2008 ). To increase coding objectivity, we developed a frame of reference with explicit detailed procedures and coding rules (Littell et al. 2008 ). The codebook included variables that operationalized the key elements of the metatheoretical analysis; that is, phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions (see Table 3 ). To code the articles, we constantly went back and forth between the studies being analyzed and the frame of reference.

In the second step, we extracted material from the codebook to describe the phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions. To analyze the phenomena , we grouped similar codes to form theoretical dimensions. These theoretical dimensions aided our understanding of what customer experience is and how it is characterized in each literature field. For the ontological , epistemological, and methodological assumptions , we counted instances of codes to describe the metatheoretical assumptions in each literature field (contextualizing according to the understanding obtained by reading articles in each literature field).

Next, we developed a theoretical map, which we defined as a spatial allocation of different literature fields according to particular theoretical criteria. The description and comparison of the phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions in each literature field (i.e., the theoretical criteria) resulted in two higher-order research traditions: customer experience as responses to managerial stimuli and customer experience as responses to consumption processes.

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Becker, L., Jaakkola, E. Customer experience: fundamental premises and implications for research. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 48 , 630–648 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00718-x

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Issue Date : July 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00718-x

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Customer experience (cx) : definition and how to guide.

35 min read We've put together this comprehensive and thorough CX guide to give you the tools and information you need to manage, strategise, measure and impact all aspects of the customer experience for your business.

Author: Leonie Brown

Customer Experience (CX) is the measurement of your customers’ perception of their experiences with your organization. It should reflect their expectations compared to your brand promise. This measurement spans the full customer journey – every interaction, from what they first see on your advertising materials to how they feel about the conversation with your customer support team post-purchase. By delivering a consistently remarkable customer experience, your CX metrics will reflect this positive sentiment from customers.

Unlike customer service or customer relationship management, customer experience does not map neatly to a single area of your business. Essentially, customer experience (CX) refers to how a customer perceives your brand based on their exposure to it.

Customer experience management is now an established business discipline, especially when it comes to long-term strategy and planning. You set the overall context of a customer’s experience: your product or service, messaging, and interactions at the sale and post-sale stage. But the perception of how these touchpoints are experienced is the customer’s. It is not something you control (although you can certainly influence it). Instead, it is defined by your customers and their journey.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party. And we are the hosts.  It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Understanding AI: Your real-world CX playbook

The importance of customer experience

Most organizations recognise the importance of customer experience at its core: by delivering consistently on your brand promise, and providing customers an optimized experience, brings financial rewards. But that represents a shift from previous years, where brands chased after higher sentiment scores of satisfaction or recommendation, without connecting those scores to financial or operational performance.

As organizations evolve their CX mindset, they’ve recognised that CX is a means to an end. High CX metrics mean little without an associated uplift in financial performance.

5 benefits of improving CX:

• Drive revenue and customer lifetime value
• Increase brand value
• Boost customer loyalty and advocacy
• Understand changing behaviors and expectations
• Derisk and accurately prioritize investments by understanding customer impact

How CX leaders outperform CX laggards:

• CX leaders are more likely to report that their CX programs have significantly improved key business outcomes, including customer retention, cross-selling, employee retention and cost reduction.
• CX leaders are also more likely to say their financial results are “somewhat” or “significantly” better than competitors
• CX leaders are less likely to risk their revenue. Organizations that provide poor experiences risk around 7% of their revenue being lost.

Customer experience versus customer service

It’s worth taking a moment to differentiate customer experience from the idea of customer service. Customer service and customer experience management have an important shared goal – making customers happy – but they are not the same thing.

Customer experience is a much wider concept that includes all of a customer’s relationship with your organization. Customer service, or customer care,  is the quality of attention and care you provide for your customers who need support or information. It can be provided through customer touch points with staff, or via self service such as website support pages and customer service chatbots.

Customer service or care is a component part of customer experience, albeit a crucial one. In many cases it can even make or break a customer’s relationship with your organization – from being angry and frustrated into a fan – or the other way around. It is an important part of the customer experience, but not its whole.

We’ve touched on the fact that a customer’s experience isn’t totally within a brand’s control. There are a couple of reasons for this.

• Customer experience is made up of a wide range of factors, some of which are outside of the company’s direct influence (for example user-generated social media content, third party reviews).
• Customers create their own journeys , rather than following a prescribed process. They stop and start, move from one platform or channel to another, and sometimes retrace their steps. Customer experience derives from the journey as a whole, not the quality of each touchpoint.
• Customer expectations are not just set by your company but also by the actions of your competitors – if they change their offering they may reset customer expectations for that type of product or service in general.

So with this in mind, what does a positive customer experience look like, and how can you as an entire company know when you’ve met your goals for customer experience management?

As is often the case, the answer to understanding your customer experience is to ask your audience. In the upcoming sections we provide a range of customer experience metrics and a starter-list of foundational elements to a good customer experience management program.

In addition to tracking quantitative metrics like customer effort score ( CES ), customer satisfaction score ( CSAT ) and net promoter score ( NPS ), make sure you are set up to gather and act on qualitative experience data from customers, as this can be a valuable source of insights and can offer you a deeper understanding of what customers want and expect from you. As a result, you can better avoid a poor customer experience by understanding the drivers of customers’ perceptions.

A successful customer experience management strategy will put customers at the heart of its strategy and day to day decisions. This benefits your business as well as your customers, with improved customer satisfaction with their experiences leading to brand loyalty and reduced cost to serve.

Below are some best practice methods for building a framework for customer experience management, as well as the necessary steps for making CX management a business priority.

Build an experience management framework

Customer experience management (CXM) is your strategy for controlling customers’ perceptions of your brand, and understanding where and how to invest in improvement.

Experience management is the discipline of measuring and improving the four core experiences of a business: customer, employee, product, and brand.

As customer experience is part of experience management, companies should adopt the experience management Operating Framework , which is built on a combination of technology, culture, and six competencies.

6 experience management competencies

Using the six experience management competencies to manage customer experience

• Lead – Architecting, aligning, and sustaining successful customer experience efforts across different people and projects over multiple years
• Realize – Identifying and tracing the right metrics to ensure customer experience efforts achieve well-defined business objectives
• Activate – Making sure your organization has the appropriate skills, support, and motivation to achieve the desired customer experience results
• Enlighten – Capturing, analyzing, and distributing actionable insights
• Respond – Building organizational mechanisms to continuously take action based on insights
• Disrupt – Identifying and creating experiences that differentiate your organization from competitors

The XM Institute offers a Customer Experience Maturity Assessment that you can use to identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses across the six experience management competencies. Improve your market share and commit to business growth by identifying where you stand now, and where you could be.

Create center of excellence for customer experience strategy

Once you’ve developed a business-wide framework to support your team and provide a customer experience that meets expectations, you’ll then need to create a customer experience strategy that takes advantage of this framework. Your CX strategies should be able to not only collect feedback, but turn it into actionable insights to create positive experiences for customers.

There are three key pillars to this customer experience strategy, as listed below:

Listen to and understand your customers’ perspectives

Rather than waiting for the customer to initiate their discussions about their customer experience with your brand, be proactive and source feedback. It’s not just about sending customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction – you’ll also need to examine the valuable data in conversations they’re already having with you, such as with when a customer calls customer support or engages with your website chat function. You can use customer experience tools such as omnichannel conversational analytics to help you gather experience data and understand what it means, no matter where customers are sharing it.

Customer conversations are everywhere

Build customer profiles for better customer satisfaction

When your audience interacts with your brand, they expect a consistent experience and recognition at each customer touchpoint in the customer experience. From marketing preferences to discussions with your customer service teams, your customers want your brand to provide a personalized experience .

Building in-depth customer profiles , complete with data on every customer interaction, allows you to personalize every detail of a customer’s experience. Rather than offering a generic customer journey that feels impersonal, your audience has an experience that’s tailored to customer needs and customer expectations. This in turn increases customer satisfaction.

Customer data is often collected in disparate silos across a business, but with an experience management framework in place, aligning teams and departments and sharing customer information across your operations becomes an in-built process. Build strong customer profiles with details on every interaction they’ve had, how they felt about it and the likely behavior they’ll display next, and you’ll be able to create customer experiences with real impact.

Understanding how to balance different types of feedback data

There are four key combinations of data you can gather about your customers: solicited (you ask for it) and unsolicited (you listen for it), and that data could be structured (rating out of 5 stars) or unstructured (conversational data, comments, reviews). A best practice customer experience management program should include elements from each of these quadrants:

Types of feedback

To drive action in your organization, you will also need to make sure you are connecting experience data to operational or financial data, as this is what helps you understand the impact of changes, and to prioritize investments by identifying likely ROI improvements.

KPIs are drawn from the ‘structured’ side of feedback as these contain numeric values while nuance is more derived from the unstructured side. An example of this might be correlating CSAT to average order size – intuitively we know that ‘happy customers spend more’ but the key question is….how much more? Understanding the financial impact of changes in sentiment is the most powerful way to influence decision making across a broad range of stakeholders.

Act with empathy to quickly improve experiences

Your audience is continuously providing you with customer information, as well as their time and money. A positive customer experience strategy makes customer relationships a two-way street, with the brand giving as much as it gets.

Collecting customer feedback is important, but demonstrating to your audience that you’ve listened and have implemented change is key to becoming a CX leader. In our 2023 research , 62% of consumers said businesses needed to care more about them, indicating the opportunity for CX leaders to move to the forefront of customer preferences.

When you harness the customer data you collect, analyze customer experience data and take action on the insights you surface, you’re able to show customers that they, and their views, matter.  Real time insights allow you to make changes at lightning speed to ensure customers have a positive experience every time.

In return for demonstrating action and care, you’ll get more than just a great customer satisfaction score – you’ll get customers that consistently show brand loyalty in the face of market and economic change. They know they can trust your brand for a positive experience.

Integrate customer relationship management into your CX strategy

Often an organization’s priority is customer relationship management, ensuring customers convert from browsers into buyers. It can often focus on the quantitative facets of customers’ experience, rather than the qualitative aspects that drive customer experience. It’s sometimes more focused on transforming a poor customer experience after the fact, rather than delivering a positive customer experience right away.

However, this is a primary concern for Customer Care teams – they are seen as the ‘cleanup crew’, tactically resolving customer problems rather than helping to fix issues systematically in the first place. Understanding the correlation between overall CX and financial performance helps these frontline teams to quantify the impact of fixing a strategic issue weighed against the ongoing costs of high support traffic.

With an improved customer experience and a customer-centric approach, customer relationship management becomes simpler and more effective. Meeting new, evolving expectations for customer relationships best supported by a customer experience management strategy that turns valuable data into vital customer insights.

Key elements of your customer experience strategy

Delivering superior customer experience drives improved business performance. And understanding customer expectations of your brand – and what is crucial to their satisfaction – will help you set priorities and de-risk your investments. Here are some of the core foundations of any good customer experience strategy:

1. Customer journey mapping to understand customer journeys

The first step in understanding the current experience is often customer journey mapping :  understanding the experiences your customers are having at each touchpoint in their customer journeys. Often businesses deliver well on components of that journey, but without a customer-centric view they may fail at distinct points of customer interaction. Viewing the entire customer journey as whole via a map – not just the touchpoints – helps to frame the experience from the customer’s perspective.

A customer journey map not only outlines the entirety of the customer journey as it stands, but assists you in creating a new path for customers for better conversions and improved customer experiences.

Key benefits of a journey-centric approach:

• Improved connection of measurement reflecting the whole customer journey
• A shared sense of ownership of the journey across disparate teams in an organization
• Collective understanding of where key impact points are – the ‘moment that matters’
• Better collaboration on a shared scorecard/KPIs
• Reduced organizational silos

Customer journey mapping example

Using customer journeys as a way to visualize the program for cross functional stakeholders can be a powerful tool to drive action: showing how the customer moves through their experience (e.g. onboarding, or repair, or renewal) is a way to tell the story of the data and put insights into context.

2. Cross-functional collaboration

Consistent delivery across the journey can be a challenge, often increased by siloed departments and operations. Until every part of the business understands its impact on customers’ experience, progress will be limited.  For example, billing and credit operations might see themselves as removed from frontline delivery – but to a customer, difficult billing experiences can override positive store or digital experiences .

Cross-functional experience governance helps a business to break down those silos and improve the customer journey experience in meaningful ways. Committing to a customer-centric view helps to realign existing processes and allows the business to deliver improved experiences. An effective and productive customer experience strategy is built on that multi-disciplined engagement; making certain that employees understand that each person in some way touches customer experience.

3. Always-on listening

In order to design a customer experience strategy that is fully customer-centric, businesses need to understand where they currently are in delivery on the customer journey and to identify effective means of improvement.

In order to deliver consistently on the elements of the brand experience that customers most value, it is extremely productive to listen continuously. Soliciting data and reporting on unsolicited data for real-time customer feedback across the full range of touchpoints helps to identify and prioritize things to improve.

Unsolicited data can take many forms, such as conversations on social media platforms or comments on third-party review sites. It can also be hidden in phone calls to your contact center. This information can provide extra context to customer interactions, illustrating customer sentiment , emotion , effort, and intent.

Using a platform that can identify every signal from all communication channels and turn all data into meaningful insights is critical for getting the full customer picture. Equipped with text analytics powered by natural language understanding (NLU) , you can automatically collect and collate data for insights with context.

Conversation analytics with sentiment analysis

4. Communication – External and Internal

Communication of actions taken to improve the experience is essential: customers want to know that you are not just listening, but acting. And the positive word-of-mouth that results from direct customer engagement on communication channels, as well as problem resolution, is a huge contributor to how the business is seen by both current and potential customers. It’s vital for improved customer acquisition , as well as lowered customer churn.

Customer loyalty is earned by consistently delivering on your brand promise, as experienced by your customers. Doing well on the aspects your customers value the most is the key to CX success. And acknowledging and resolving experience failures builds trust in the brand.

Internal communication is critical – keeping stakeholders informed on progress, and tracking against planned improvements is just one aspect. Another central element is communication to the frontline staff who are delivering daily on your brand promises. This should be a two-way channel that communicates to the frontline and also collects feedback from them. Often, while a customer may tell you that something is wrong, a frontline agent will have more context on why customers are experiencing this issue and even suggestions on how to fix it. Leveraging this channel creates a positive loop of reinforcement – driving improvement and delivering timely insights.

Getting the full picture

The most important thing to remember about measuring customer experience is it’s not about the metrics themselves. Chasing a higher NPS or CSAT isn’t the purpose. The purpose of measuring your customer experience efforts is to:

• Track progress on actions taken
• Identify improvement areas
• Calculate the ROI of CX
• Prioritize your actions and invest in the right things

It’s crucial to combine any X-Data metrics like NPS with O-Data metrics like average spend and customer retention . Because your NPS could be sky-rocketing, but that may be because unsatisfied customers have deserted you. Getting the full picture with all your data is critical to see what drives the feedback you receive.

Hear the voice of the customer, and track your improvements

Here are some of the most common ways of soliciting customers for their views directly:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT helps you understand how satisfied your customers are with your company’s products and/or services. When you collect this data at various touch points, you can start to identify key drivers of positive or negative experiences at different points in the customer journey. Overall satisfaction (OSAT) can also be used to measure the customer’s overall relationship with your organization.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score can help you understand the basic functionality of your digital offering and its relevance to your customers’ needs. This metric focuses on the ease with which a customer can complete any given task. This metric is particularly useful for B2B organizations (as ‘recommendations’ aren’t so relevant – individual business users often don’t get a choice of vendor). It also performs well for tactical measures like digital experience where your competitors are just a click away and so even a small additional friction can drive customers elsewhere.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

There is a heated debate on the value of NPS , but at a basic level NPS gives you a snapshot of overall customer sentiment. However, within your entire organization you need to set expectations around its use and limitations. It doesn’t work as well at a transactional level, and there are issues with cultural differences and a lack of alignment between scores and interpretation (e.g. if someone gives you a ‘6’ rating, are they really a detractor?). NPS is designed to measure long term customer sentiment – it correlates with loyalty even though it asks about recommendations. It is a strong metric to use at strategic level due to its long term nature – particularly useful for senior leadership. When used in conjunction with other metrics , it can give long term insights compared to the more agile CSAT or CES.

See the context with indirect CX data

Using direct customer feedback from surveys is useful, but indirect customer feedback as mentioned can also be a vital tool for getting context. It also allows you to give customers options to reach out in ways they prefer, such as video feedback, social media direct messaging, review site comments and more. By using both indirect and direct feedback, you’re able to take action with full knowledge of customer motivations and emotion.

Measurement is just one step towards creating a brilliant customer experience every time. CX metrics can give you a solid indication of where action needs to take place in the customer experience and what you need to improve, as well as how. However, collecting customer experience insights isn’t enough – direct action is what will bring customers back time and time again.

1. Focus on delivering what your customers value most

It’s crucial to understand your customers’ view of your brand and the moments that matter most to them. A consistent, day-to-day delivery on your brand promise is crucial to retaining customers, cementing brand loyalty, and growing your base.

Understanding what elements are crucial to your customers helps you prioritize action and investment. In any list of experience elements, there will be ones that fall to the bottom. The key is to be sure that the lowest-performing elements are also the least important ones to your customers. That alignment – typically derived from key drivers – helps keep the business focused and KPIs relevant.

By identifying the loyalty behaviors you’re trying to improve, you can build models that will help you demonstrate to leadership how those behaviors drive changes in key CX metrics. This will help you secure buy-in for ongoing CX spend and ensure continued improvement.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

– Bill Gates

2. Listen carefully to what your customers tell you – and then act on that feedback

One very productive approach is to use closed-loop processes to respond directly to customer concerns. In B2B CX , it’s even possible to follow up with customers who give low satisfaction scores or are NPS detractors . Given you’ll usually get fewer responses than in B2C, and have a closer relationship with each customer, this kind of approach can be highly productive.

In B2C, you’ll often have a much higher response rate to any customer feedback surveys you send out. So while you should absolutely fix anything customers raise as an issue, following up with low-scoring individuals may not be as helpful. Especially if your managers haven’t been trained and coached for those discussions.

Also listen to what your employees are saying. Often employees can identify problems and opportunities faster and with more depth than what you will uncover through your customer feedback programs. In fact, companies that have mastered the employee experience by listening and acting on the voice of employees have the best CX.

3. Show you’ve taken action

Customer experience programs are ongoing discussions between a brand and its customers. As such, it’s crucial to demonstrate you are taking action on the feedback, even for those respondents who have not specifically asked for contact. Including a simple message alongside customer-led initiatives – e.g., “You spoke. We listened.” – demonstrates that providing feedback is not just a tick-box exercise within the business. Customers are far more willing to provide experience feedback if they believe the business takes it seriously and acts on it.

4. Focus on improvements, not measurements

Customer experience isn’t a metric; it’s an ongoing program that delivers substantial business benefits. And that means you shouldn’t chase numbers. Use measurements to drive improvements in your CX program that will result in tangible outcomes. Whenever presenting or reviewing CX metrics, pair them with key learnings and resulting action items.

To gain momentum for your CX program, make and share quick wins.

Communicating performance against a shared scorecard across the organization will help drive action – but make sure this focuses on direction of travel rather than specific numbers. Using the ‘delta’ – the amount of change – will also help to compare performance across divisions, product lines and regions, rather than trying to compare discrete numbers.

5. Build upon your success

XM Institute offers research and tools to help you design, deliver, and mature your CX program. If you’re just getting started, the Fundamentals of Customer Experience Launchpad provides helpful tips and resources. For those who are further down the path of CX maturity, the XM Institute Blog offers insight into key trends and best practices on all four elements of experience management – customer, employee, product, and brand.

Do what you do so well that customers will want to see it again and bring their friends.

– Walt Disney

Considerations for the digital customer experience

Businesses can improve their integration of the digital channel and optimize the brand experience by understanding key digital components. Here’s a few ways to approach digital CX optimization.

It’s the less shiny side of digital CX, but understanding operational data like page loads and purchase process barriers are crucial to digital conversion. Even if you offer a positive customer experience through your service and products, if customers aren’t able to quickly and smoothly get through the customer journey, they’ll feel negative about their interactions with your brand.

The tactical approach is diagnostic in focus and often will use metrics like customer effort scores (CES). That is, how difficult is it for your customers to use your digital channel effectively and whether they were able to complete their task. Making pinpointed changes to the functional experiences your customers have with your digital platforms means that the smaller points of friction that can lead to larger CX problems are taken care of. Your focus can then be on providing a more personalized, targeted experience.

Understanding the role your digital channel plays in the overall customer experience (from consideration to purchase) is more difficult – but absolutely crucial. Businesses often look at basket abandonment as a failed conversion. But understanding that a customer is not wholly abandoning, but may actually be mid-purchase can be strategically essential. Particularly in consumer products, customers may go online to review potential purchases but then go into a store to test or experience the specific product. That customer might purchase in store – but their digital experience would have had a significant impact on their purchase behavior.

Understanding your customer’s behavior and folding that knowledge into your customer experience strategy is a key part of taking the right actions. Taking this example further, basket abandonment could trigger retargeting emails and social media ads, or a survey to ask why the cart was abandoned. Offers for a discount in a store or a trial can be sent to entice customers put off by price or the commitment. With the right strategic approach, digital channels can augment in-person interactions and become an integral part of a brand’s presence.

Understanding the role each channel plays is crucial to maximizing the overall brand experience. Your customer doesn’t typically think in channels; they want to solve problems and find options. Multiple channel contact may be essential in conversion. Appreciating the different role each channel plays reorients your business to be more customer-centric.

Make sure you’re able to get feedback from customers across your frontline channels to capture customer experience data you might otherwise be missing. In-app prompts, post-call emails, pop-up surveys delivered directly after purchase and more can be quick ways to get the temperature of how your customers are feeling about their experiences in the moment.

Determining what would elevate customer experiences at that juncture – such as having a fast average speed of answer on calls, for example – helps you to dedicate time and resource to the actions that will actually matter. The overall customer experience can be enhanced by improving these smaller digital interactions.

Businesses are increasingly looking to implement an AI strategy to take advantage of its potential, but what is the best way to integrate it into your customer experience and your frontline operations?

Using AI directly with customers

Our research has found that 48% of consumers are comfortable interacting with an organization’s AI. However, this comfort isn’t a universal feeling – it depends on the context in which an AI is encountered.

For example, though AI can make simple, rote tasks easier and more efficient, customers are still looking to have human interactions when the stakes are high. We found 73% of consumers are happy to use AI to check an order status – but their top concerns when encountering AI are that there is a lack of a human to connect to and that interaction quality will be poor.

Consumers still prefer to interact on human-led channels over AI-driven channels for issues such as resolving a bill problem. The key to an AI strategy, then, is to understand when customers want to speak to a human specifically, and to ensure that all interactions (both human and AI-led) provide a high quality customer experience.

Creating human, personal experiences will drive satisfaction with customer experiences, keeping  customers loyal and ensuring they still want to spend with you. With one in two consumers reducing or stopping their spend with brands after a bad customer experience , it’s vital you focus on interaction quality.

Using AI to empower your teams and provide better customer experiences

Potentially the most powerful place to deploy AI isn’t in the customer-facing part of their digital experience, but in the back end. AI-powered analytics can quickly deliver insights to your human customer service team, such as details on sentiment, emotion and effort, to enable them to take effective action.

It can also automate rote tasks. The right AI tool can free up your agents’ time by automatically writing up post-call notes. It could also automatically score all agent interactions and provide evaluation and coaching plans, to allow for fairer, more effective performance reviews and to enable improvements in team performance.

Learn more about customer experience and AI

From insights to action: a comprehensive CX program

Throughout this guide we have given you some best practice frameworks – on competencies, on journey mapping, on data collection – but ultimately any program success is measured on business impact.

Designing an iterative, action-led program that focuses on capturing customer data and improving experiences with insights will have a demonstrable impact on your customer experiences and your business outcomes. Use the XMI Fundamentals of Customer Experience Launchpad   to further understand what customer experience (CX) management is and how you can start building your organization’s CX management capabilities.

Choosing the right customer experience management software

When creating your customer experience program, you’ll need the assistance of CX management software that can immediately flag customer experience issues and lead your frontline teams to the actions that will solve them.

To do so, the customer experience management software should be able to blend experience data, operational data and behavioral cues to build a comprehensive customer journey map. From first interaction to post-purchase recommendations on social media, your CX management software should be able to track customer experiences and reactions in real-time.

Better still, they should be able to deliver insights to teams across your business, giving your teams the understanding they need to eliminate customer friction.

Stop customer friction from becoming lost revenue with Qualtrics ® XM for Customer Experience TM .

Related resources

Ai and customer experience 17 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 18 min read, customer experience automation 11 min read, customer centricity 16 min read, customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, request demo.

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The basics of customer experience research

Improving customer experience needs a deep understanding of the entire customer journey and makes structured research the key to success. Customer experience is influenced by multiple online and offline channels, and often happens along a long time frame. These facts make it necessary to carefully evaluate what methods and tools are useful for each specific research and innovation goal.

This article will cover the following questions:

What is customer experience research?

• Why is customer experience research so important?

How to conduct customer experience research?

• Different methods for customer experience research

Customer experience (CX) is your customers entire individual perception of their experience with your brand, product or service. It is influenced by each interaction happening between your company, product or service and its customer. This includes for example ordering a product in your online shop, receiving the product via the counter or receiving a newsletter.

Customer experience research describes the collection and analysis of any type of data relevant to the experience your customers have when interacting with your company. The goal of customer experience research is to increase a company’s competitive advantage by better understanding customers needs and pain points and using these insights to improve the overall customer experience.  

Why is customer experience research important?

Customer experience research is essential for understanding and meeting customer expectations, driving business growth, and building long-term customer relationships. It allows businesses to continuously improve and adapt their strategies to deliver exceptional experiences that delight customers.

More specifically, CX Research helps you with:

• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Achieving competitive advantage
• Generating business growth
• Higher customer retention and reduced churn
• Improved product and service development
• Saving cost

Especially in times of social media, customer experience is becoming a crucial competitive advantage for organizations. Through the quick distribution of information on social platforms, a negative experience can cause enormous harm within a short period of time. At the same time, a positive experience can lead to loyalty and recommendation.

Researching customer experience can provide valuable insights for enterprises and help understanding customer needs, desires or pain points. With this information at hand companies can increase customer satisfaction and develop a customer-centric business model.

It all starts with defining who you want to research and what information you want to gain.

The why: develop a research question and scope

What is your aim with the research? Why are you pursuing this question? The starting point of successful research is a clear research question and a defined aim. You could ask questions like:

• Why do my customers rate the restaurant’s service negatively?
• How do my customers experience the booking process?
• What is the experience like for my employees during the weekend shifts?

Research can also have different scopes. For example: you’ll have a different scope if you look at a service which takes 15 days (e.g., the period from the booking until the flight), than if you look at a specific part of the service that takes 15 minutes (e.g., a customer gets in contact with your customer service in order to solve a problem with their flight booking).

State if you want to research a specific point or if you want to zoom out and look at your offering from a higher level.

Assumption vs. research-based work

Assumption-based work.

This is where the researcher sketches out what they think the customer journey looks like. Assumption-based customer journey maps can be useful as a first draft because they can help you plan your research. It also might help to highlight the assumptions that might have been made concerning a problem. When it comes to making decisions – base them on research.

Research-based work

To create research-based journey maps or personas, draw on the data you have. For example, with a customer based project – chances are you have knowledge about your customer through analytics, order history, CRM databases and so forth. Co-creative workshops with your customer or folks who have profound knowledge or lived experience of the subject matter can also be a way to create research-based personas or journey maps.

Of course, research-based personas or journey maps need more time and resources. Ultimately tools based on valuable research are better to reference when making important decisions and are much closer to reality.

Tip: It’s helpful to write the research question down or post it up in your work space so you can always look back to it and align your research with your aim.

The who: sample

Who are the relevant people for your research? Who will you talk to? Is it users? Customers? Employees? Other stakeholders? Do you want to get information about the interactions between these groups? This decision will make sure that you only get relevant data out of your time and financial resources.

A few aspects to consider when defining a research sample:

• The number of participants: what’s the right size for my purpose?
• The characteristics of participants: do I only want to focus on certain customers?
• Am I mainly interested in people who have used a specific service, during a specific time period?
• The type of technology participants use: are they okay with using a smartphone?
• The amount of time participants have.
• The way you invite participants: sometimes people participate together, e.g. one parent fills in reports representing the family. Also, do you want a random sample or would you prefer picking participants manually? The method with which you invite people will affect that.

Once your research question has been defined and the participants have been identified, you can focus on what research methods suit your subject best..

Triangulation

Triangulation is used in qualitative research to maximize the quality and validity of the research. The idea of triangulation is that every research you do has its advantages and disadvantages. Triangulating methods, data etc. helps you reduce bias and balance the types of learnings you generate. E.g., if one research method leaves some black spots behind, another research methods can help put some light on it. So even if you don’t manage to triangulate everything, make sure to at least have a second source of data that helps verify your findings from a different perspective.

You can triangulate these research methods:

• Methods (e.g., interview, survey, and observation)
• Data types (e.g., text, pictures, and video)
• Participants (e.g., customers, employees, and management)
• Researchers (e.g., customer service, marketing and developers)
• Environmental (e.g., different time/day/season)

Scroll down for a more detailed description of the potential methods.

Deciding a time frame is necessary in order to get valuable data. The time frame of your research will depend on your research question, the scope of your project, and the resources that you can allocate to the project.

Make sure your time frame is long enough to really tackle the research question holistically, but keep it as short as possible so you can start working with the generated data as soon as possible and have a few iterations instead of over-engineering things.

Tip: Qualitative research processes evolve. You might need to dig deeper into a certain area or shift focus once you find a specific user need or problem.

Customer experience research methods

In order to research your customers’ experience you can use qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Whilst qualitative research helps you to get actionable insights and provides your with in-depth knowledge, the quantitative counterparts can help you verify these learnings, check for generalizability and monitor KPIs over time.

The main difference between qualitative and quantitative customer experience research methods lies in the nature of the data collected and the approach used to gather insights. Here are the key distinctions:

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods provide rich, detailed insights into customer experiences and perspectives, using open-ended questions and smaller sample sizes.

• Data Type : Qualitative research methods gather subjective and non-numerical data. They aim to uncover rich, descriptive insights, opinions, and experiences from customers.
• Sample Size : Qualitative research typically involves smaller sample sizes, often consisting of a few individuals or small groups. The emphasis is on depth rather than breadth of understanding.
• Data Collection Approach : Qualitative methods use open-ended questions, interviews, focus groups, observations, or ethnographic techniques to explore customers' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These methods allow for detailed, narrative responses.
• Analysis : Qualitative data is analyzed through techniques such as thematic analysis, content analysis, or narrative analysis. Researchers identify patterns, themes, and recurring ideas to derive insights and develop an understanding of customer experiences.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research methods focus on collecting numerical data from a larger sample size, enabling statistical analysis and generalization of findings. Both methods have their strengths and can be used together to provide a comprehensive understanding of customer experience.

• Data Type : Quantitative research methods collect objective, numerical data that can be analyzed statistically. These methods aim to provide measurable and generalizable insights about customer experiences.
• Sample Size : Quantitative research typically involves larger sample sizes to ensure statistical validity and representativeness. The focus is on collecting data from a broader customer base to generalize findings.
• Data Collection Approach : Quantitative methods use structured surveys, questionnaires, or scales to gather data. Questions are often close-ended, allowing customers to select from predefined response options.
• Analysis : Quantitative data is analyzed using statistical techniques such as descriptive statistics, correlations, regression analysis, or inferential statistics. This analysis enables researchers to identify patterns, relationships, and trends within the data.

In general we suggest picking at least one qualitative as well as one quantitative research method. Qualitative methods, like interviews or focus groups, will provide you with in-depth knowledge about individuals, like their expectations or needs. Also they help to bring up topics you did not consider upfront. Quantitative methods will help you verify these learnings to see if the points also apply to other people.

An overview on the most common customer experience reseearch methods

There is a variety of research methods that can be used to collect customer experience data. All of them have their pros and cons, such as a certain bias that each method inherits or the specific types of data that it yields.

To level out potential biases – triangulate. Choose two or three methods that you think are most promising in collecting useful and actionable data.

Data collection

Participants are provided with a questionnaire

paper-based or digital

makes data and respondents comparable

Disadvantages

• static • respondents can only answer the questions that are asked

Researcher’s challenge

• asking the right questions • asking the questions right • participant recruitment

Participants are asked to talk about specific issues or experiences

• structured, semistructured, or unstructured • contextual or non-contextual Advantages depending on the grade of structure, respondents can express what is important to them

• time and cost intensive • interviewer effect: the interviewer influences the situation and consequently could impact the answers

• being aware of when they are guiding or leading the interviewee • remaining objective

Observation

‍ Data collection

Researchers watch and take notice of the behaviors of participants in a certain situation

• participatory, non- participatory, or somewhat in between • covert vs. overtAdvantagesmore objective view on behavior

• time and cost intensive • observer effect: people might behave in a way they think it is expected

• perceiving important information • being aware of the influence one has on the situation

Auto-ethnography

Participants observe themselves and reflect on their behavior, thoughts and so forth

diary studies, photos, videos, audio, artifacts, …

insights into the person’s inner thoughts

• bias caused by researcher’s prior knowledge and experiences • data might be highly subjective or contextual and need direct explanation by the participant

• researcher: briefing the participant correctly • participant: conscious reflection and report of situations

Cultural probes

Participants collect diverse material in the situation of interest

• abstract descriptions become more comprehensible • recall of information is supported

collection might take a lot of effort

collection/report of cultural probes

Mobile ethnography

Participants use their mobile to report experiences in real-time

open vs. structured approach

• mobile device • recall bias minimized through reports in real-time • minimal researcher bias

high effort for participants

You collected so much data, now is the time to structure it! This piece of content will help you to structure your customer experience data.

And now, what's next?

Now it's about implementing what you've just learned: start researching customer experience and create a repository of useful CX insights.

With the customer journey tool Smaply you can create a hub of CX research and take your innovation further from there.

Sign up now, it's free!

Antonia Cramer

Antonia keeps her eyes open for questions people interested in service design are looking to answer, and helps us provide resources to support their learning ambitions. With her background in digital communication she has great knowledge on how to create content that is easy to access and understand.

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• What is customer experience (CX)?

Last updated

15 February 2023

Reviewed by

Running a company is very difficult, and nearly every business owner wants their customers to be extremely satisfied with their experiences so that they regularly return. Fortunately, there are many ways to achieve this. 

• Customer experience versus customer service

Customer experience is drastically different from customer service: Customer service consists of how a business treats its clientele, while customer experience is composed of the actual experience customers had when they received your products or services.

• What is a good customer experience?

If you have a multitude of returning clients who rave about how much they adore your products and services, that means you have done an excellent job with the customer experience and have nothing to worry about. While it's always nice to continue improving, this means you are quite successful, and these buyers will probably have a positive impact on your bottom line as a result. 

• What is a bad customer experience?

If you have clients who are constantly posting negative reviews about your business, that is a cause for concern: They are having a bad experience at your company, whether this is because your employees are overly rude or your shelves are not regularly stocked with the necessary items. 

• Why does customer experience matter?

Regardless of the kind of business you run, customer experience matters because you will have to cater to your clients. Happy clients usually keep returning for items and services they love, while dissatisfied buyers tend to look elsewhere. Needless to say, this affects your bottom line: your company’s earnings, profit, net income, or earnings per share. 

• The top ten measures of customer experience

There are actually quite a few metrics you can use to measure customer experience. 

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction refers to how happy customers are with a given product, service, or interaction. You can measure your customers' sentiment with one simple question:  “How satisfied were you with [product/service/interaction]?” on a scale from 5 or 7 with opposing sides very dissatisfied to very satisfied. In short, if they enjoy everything you have to offer along with your incredible customer service, they are likely to continue doing business with you for a long time to come.

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric accounts for the ease in which your customer has to complete a transaction, resolve an issue or interact with your business This might include how quickly a customer’s questions are answered if they have an issue with one of your product’s for instance, and how swiftly returns are handled. The CES survey question, “[Company/Officer] made it easy for me to handle my issue”, with a 5 or 7-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree provides your benchmark over time. In short, the customer process should be as efficient and as convenient as possible. 

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A Net Promoter Score is based on a single question asked to consumers: How likely are you to recommend [service/product/company] to others?  On a 5 or 10-point scale your customers tell you if they are very unlikely or very likely to promote you. Your NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Of course, a score above zero is essential. 

4. Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

The Customer Churn Rate refers to the percentage of customers who have stopped purchasing your items during a certain amount of time. 

5. Customer Retention Rate

The Customer Retention Rate refers to the percentage of a company’s existing customers who remain loyal within a specific time frame. You can simply take a peek at the numbers on your back-end system to track this metric. 

6. Customer Referral Rate

This refers to the percentage of customers who have been referred to your products and services. More often than not, this is through a referral link by a social media influencer: If your customer referral rate is 1%, for instance, that might indicate that you need to improve this metric as a company. 

7. Monthly Active Users (MAU)

If you offer a particular product or service, this is an excellent way to track how many people are generally interested in doing business with you. This metric can help you have a sense of your typical sales and gauge which items and/or services are the most popular so you can have as many sales as possible. 

8. Average Resolution Time (ART)

This is another important metric, because a lot of consumers are impatient and want all issues to be resolved immediately. If you have a resolution time of about five minutes, this is excellent. That being said, a longer wait time could potentially lead to a decrease in both sales and customer satisfaction. 

9. Customer  Lifetime Value (CLV)

The Customer Lifetime Value measures approximately how much a customer is expected to spend with your business during the lifetime of an average business relationship. This is an important metric to measure financial return on your investments. 

10. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

Ideally, customer complaints would be resolved immediately during their first call. This means that your processes should be as streamlined as possible. 

These measures, generally speaking, will tell you how you are doing as a company and which areas you need to improve upon.

• How to improve customer experience

You can improve customer experience in several ways. 

You might consider: 

Doing UX research will help you craft usable, accessible, and delightful products with direct customer feedback

Using live chat tools, email-based support, social media or a self-service knowledge base to capture and analyze customer feedback in real time 

Analyzing the business and product in a design studio workshop whereby a cross-functional  team comes together to brainstorm, critique, and prioritize a set of ideas to optimize the entire customer journey

Hiring more people if doing so is in the budget, and your employees are spread thin so much so that it's affecting their performance 

Documenting customer data and interactions to deliver a personalized service or product through tailored messaging, offers of features will make your customers feel more valued and loyal 

• Examples of excellent customer experience

There are quite a few companies that provide a phenomenal customer experience. These include Netflix, Microsoft, and Chewy.

Netflix provides personalized recommendations to viewers, making their movie-watching experience tailored so that they feel considered and pampered. It's always nice to have a company take your preferences into mind, especially if it's an entertainment company. This also makes it easier for people to find something to watch in many cases.  

Microsoft does an excellent job collecting customer feedback, so they know which areas they need to improve on so they can take action.  While no company will ever be 100% perfect, it helps to identify your pain points and grow from there. An added benefit is that customers are usually more satisfied when they know a business is at least trying to improve and values their input, even if the progress takes longer than they'd like for it to.

Chewy stands out among many pet supply e-commerce companies because it goes to the trouble of sending flowers and hand-written cards to customers whenever their pet dies. This fosters a deep level of trust and loyalty because it signals that they care about these people's well-being and it's not just business.  

If your customers are satisfied, they are much more likely to continue doing business with you. If they are deeply dissatisfied, on the other hand, that could potentially impact your business in a negative manner. 

• What does customer experience mean in customer service?

It's important to figure out why your customers had a bad experience and if that had anything to do with bad customer service. If you operate a grocery store and the cashier is always grumpy because they're sleep-deprived, for instance, that might result in rude interactions with shoppers that lead to a bad customer experience. 

There are many ways to remedy this situation, including: 

Making sure your employees work reasonable hours so they can get enough sleep 

Considering benefits for your employees that might contribute to their well-being, such as free gym memberships (if that's feasible for your company) 

Considering a raise if that's within the budget 

Making sure your employees are adequately trained for all that they are expected to do during the day 

Hiring more people if your team is overly small and burnt out (if that's in the budget)

Always apologize when customers complain 

Sending out surveys to customers to collect feedback and striving to improve every single day 

• What is a customer experience strategy?

To implement a phenomenal customer experience strategy, you will need to intricately plan all sorts of elements of your business: If you are running a store, consider the layout of the floor, the position of the items on the shelves, and any decorative posters or signs that point people in the right direction. If you are running a hair salon, consider a shelf with inviting beauty products for your customers to purchase after their appointments.

You will need to have a creative vision for your business that draws people in and keeps them coming back for more. There are four key elements that go into an excellent customer experience strategy. 

These are: 

The Vision 

The Metrics 

The vision is arguably the most enticing element of a good customer experience strategy. Think about realtors, for instance: The best ones will stage the home for every potential buyer so that it looks as inviting as possible and they can see themselves living there. They might even bake chocolate chip cookies, so their clients feel more comfortable during the tour.

It is absolutely essential to know your audience: It's nearly impossible to please every single person from every single demographic, so you'll simply have to consider the majority of your clientele: 

Are they primarily female? 

Are they primarily male? 

What is their average socioeconomic status? 

Are they young or old?

What factors influence their buying decisions? 

These considerations will help you cater your products and services to the proper demographic and its behavioral pattern. For instance, you might want to raise your prices if you are running a hair salon and suddenly realize that most of your clients are quite well-off and can actually pay you a lot more than they currently are. 

The business landscape is extremely competitive, so you'll want to make sure you are striving to stand out in some way: Perhaps you would like to hire someone to create a gorgeous mural on the wall of the bar you run, for example. This is a creative way to differentiate your company.

Finally, it's important to measure how much progress you are making in the customer experience department consistently. You can use customer relationship management platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft to help you organize and consolidate this information if you wish. 

• The bottom line

Customer experience, or CX, is crucial when running a business because your goal is to attract customers who absolutely adore your products and services. Customers should feel welcome whenever they set foot in your store or checkout online thanks to your streamlined processes and excellent services. Last but not least, consider building your brand through enticing visuals and immersive experiences for your clientele.

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What Is Customer Experience — and How Can You Improve It? Start With These 5 Steps

Customer experience includes any interaction your customers have with your brand. Here’s how to make those touchpoints count — every time.

Martin DuPont

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The phrase “customer experience” gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it really mean? That’s not as easy to answer as you might think. The concept is tough to define because it includes so many different aspects of the customer journey from the contact center to the field — and beyond. 

But this much is clear: it can’t be ignored. Our research shows that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Let’s take a few minutes to review what customer experience really means, why it matters, and what you can do to make yours even better.

• What is customer experience?
• Why is customer experience important?
• Examples of good and bad customer experience
• How to measure customer experience
• 5 ways to improve your customer experience

Put AI, automation, and data to work

The right mix of customer service channels and AI tools can help you become more efficient and improve customer satisfaction. Our guide reveals how high-performing service orgs make it happen.

What is customer experience ? 

Customer experience (CX) includes every interaction a customer has with your brand, from the first point of contact to ongoing support. It’s the overall perception a customer forms based on their interactions with your marketing, products, services, and the way your team handles their needs. In other words, experience extends far beyond just service — from first impressions to long-term engagement.

Why is customer experience important? 

Whether you operate in the business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) realm, customers’ expectations have never been higher. In fact, 63% of business buyers say most of their experiences fall short of what they know is possible. That matters because a great experience isn’t just a feel-good thing — it’s a major contributor to the long-term success of your business. 

Here are just a few of the ways that a memorable customer experience can have a positive impact on your bottom line: 

• Customer loyalty and retention: Positive experiences build loyalty. When customers have a seamless and satisfying experience, they’re more likely to become repeat customers and advocates for your brand.
• Brand reputation: The customer’s perception of your brand is shaped by their experiences. A positive CX contributes to a positive brand reputation, while a negative one can lead to reputational damage.
• Competitive differentiation: In a competitive market, where products and services are often similar, customer experience becomes a key differentiator. Brands that prioritize and excel in customer experience stand out from the crowd.
• Increase revenue: Happy customers are willing to spend more. When customers feel valued and satisfied, they’re more open to upselling and cross-selling.
• Reduced customer churn: By applying the principles of customer service , you can reduce the likelihood of customers switching to competitors. This leads to lower churn rates and a more stable customer base.

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Essential elements of great experience .

Our survey data shows that 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs. But how can you make sure you’re meeting their expectations?

Here are a few examples of what many people would consider essential elements of a great customer experience, according to our research : 

• 77% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company. 
• 74% expect to be able to do anything online that they can do in-person or by phone.
• 70% expect all company representatives to have the same information about them.
• 79% expect consistent interactions across departments.  

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, here are some of the realities that many customers face:

• 56% of customers often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. 
• 55% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company. 
• 61% say most companies treat them like a number. 

The good news is that even a subpar customer experience can be turned around with the right customer support strategy. Our research shows that 75% of customers will forgive the mistakes of a company after receiving excellent customer service. 

How to measure for success 

By continuously assessing, adapting, and optimizing your service strategy, you’ll find new insights into the customer experience — and new ways to keep them coming back for more. Here are some of the most popular and useful methods for measuring CX: 

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) : CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with a specific interaction, product, or service. These surveys usually involve a simple question with a rating scale. For example, “How satisfied are you with your experience?”
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) : NPS measures the likelihood of customers recommending your brand to others. It involves a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
• Customer Effort Score (CES) : CES measures the ease with which customers can accomplish a task or resolve an issue. It often involves statements like, “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”
• Online reviews and feedback: Monitoring online reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, or industry-specific sites provides valuable insights into customer sentiment and areas for improvement.

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5 ways to improve your customer experience  

Improving the customer experience starts with asking the right questions. How can you bring your data together ? How can you stay one step ahead of the competition? And how can you equip your contact center and field service teams to meet customers’ changing expectations while also serving the needs of the business? 

Here are five best practices for combining people, processes, and technology to deliver faster, more effective service at scale — with generative AI assisting you every step of the way. 

• Understand the customer journey: Mapping the customer journey helps you identify touchpoints and potential pain points. A comprehensive understanding of the customer journey is foundational to enhancing CX.
• Empower your service teams from the contact center to the field: Invest in customer service training and empower your contact center and field service teams to handle a variety of situations with empathy and efficiency. A well-trained team can turn potentially negative experiences into positive ones.
• Leverage technology: Implement technology solutions like field service management software to enhance the customer experience. This could include chatbots for quick issue resolution, personalized communications powered by generative AI , and user-friendly interfaces for your digital platforms.
• Act on customer feedback: Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback from surveys, reviews, and other channels. Use this feedback to identify patterns, address recurring issues, and make informed decisions for improvement.
• Create a customer-centric experience : Foster a culture within your organization that prioritizes the customer. Ensure that every department understands its role in delivering a positive customer experience. This customer-centric mindset should permeate the entire organization.

Here’s the bottom line: customer experience isn’t just another buzzword. It’s more critical than ever to your ongoing success. By understanding what it means, how to measure it effectively, and what steps you can take to improve it, your team can lead the way to the future of customer service . 

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Martin DuPont is the Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Service Cloud, showcasing how Salesforce enables smarter, more personalized customer support. As a 15-year veteran in CRM and tech, Martin specializes in cloud solutions helping companies optimize customer service through AI and ... Read More digital transformation.

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What is customer experience research?

Customer experience, or CX, research gains insights into the interactions and perceptions of customers throughout their journey with a brand or organization. It’s about gathering data and feedback from customers to understand their experiences, expectations, and satisfaction levels at every touchpoint. Regularly conducting research allows organizations to monitor, measure, and improve the customer experience.

Why is understanding the customer journey key in customer experience research? Customer experience aims to map and analyze the entire customer journey. This spans initial awareness and consideration, right through to purchase, post-purchase, and ongoing interactions.

Identifying the touchpoints and channels through which customers engage with a brand is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of the customer experience. It enables organizations to understand the functional and emotional ways that customers have relationships with a brand.

How do you measure the customer experience? Collecting feedback directly from customers is crucial in customer experience research. This can be done through:

• Focus groups
• Online communities

By gathering feedback at different stages of the customer journey, organizations can gain insights into specific interactions or overall satisfaction levels.

What metrics are used to measure the customer experience? Customer satisfaction is a primary metric in customer experience research. It involves assessing customers’ perceptions and evaluations of their experiences with the brand. Satisfaction can be measured through various rating scales, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), or customer satisfaction surveys.

Understanding customer satisfaction levels helps organizations identify areas of improvement and assess the effectiveness of their customer experience efforts.

Why is CX important in marketing? Identifying pain points and opportunities is a vital aspect of customer experience research, and this is important for marketing too. By analyzing customer feedback and data, organizations can identify specific issues that negatively impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. This research also helps marketeers uncover opportunities to enhance the customer experience and gain a competitive advantage.

What are the benefits of CX analytics? Customer experience research, helps organizations to understand:

• Customer expectations : This plays a significant role in delivering a superior customer experience. Customer experience research helps organizations identify and analyze the expectations customers have at different touchpoints, such as product quality, customer service, ease of use, pricing, and brand reputation. By understanding and meeting these expectations, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience.
• Customer loyalty and advocacy: By assessing metrics like customer retention rates, repeat purchases, referrals, and positive word-of-mouth, organizations can gauge the effectiveness of their customer experience efforts. Loyalty and advocacy are strong indicators of customer satisfaction and overall brand perception.
• Employee perspectives: Employees who interact directly with customers can provide insights into customer interactions, challenges, and suggestions for improvement. By gathering employee feedback, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of the customer experience and identify areas for enhancement.
• Competitors: By benchmarking against competitors’ customer experiences, organizations can identify points of difference that can improve their own customer experience. This analysis helps organizations remain competitive.

By analyzing the collected data, organizations can identify trends, patterns, and actionable insights. This helps generate comprehensive reports that provide a clear understanding of the customer experience landscape.

Summary: why it’s important to conduct customer experience research Customer experience research is an ongoing process that involves understanding the customer journey. It encompasses collecting feedback, measuring satisfaction, identifying pain points and opportunities, understanding customer expectations, measuring loyalty and advocacy, incorporating employee perspectives, conducting competitive analysis, and analyzing data. This research enables organizations to enhance the customer experience, build strong customer relationships, and gain a competitive advantage for long-term sustainable success.

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Prediction: The future of CX

Companies of all stripes have invested heavily in tools and technologies to help them understand their customers more deeply and to gain the advantages of superior customer experience (CX). Yet as leaders strive to form a more complete picture of customer preferences and behaviors, they continue to rely on aging survey-based measurement systems that for decades have formed the backbone of CX efforts. Companies use these systems to track CX performance through brand or relationship surveys, “close the loop” on customer feedback via post-transaction surveys, and even plot strategic moves by attempting to mine the feedback from their regular surveys over time. Entire teams dedicate themselves to managing questionnaires and boosting response rates—and the resulting metrics can shape everything from employee bonuses and executive compensation to strategic investment decisions.

The trouble is, executives increasingly recognize that survey-based measurement systems fail to meet their companies’ CX needs—although surveys themselves are an important tool for conducting research. In fact, this article draws on our recent survey of more than 260 CX leaders from US-based companies of all sizes. 1 The online survey, conducted in collaboration with AlphaSights and Gerson Lehrman Group, was in the field from November 18, 2019, to January 15, 2020, and garnered responses from CX leaders at companies spanning more than a dozen industries including financial services, healthcare, high tech, logistics, retail, and travel. Ninety-three percent of these respondents reported using a survey-based metric (such as Customer Satisfaction Score or Customer Effort Score) as their primary means of measuring CX performance, but only 15 percent of leaders said they were fully satisfied with how their company was measuring CX—and only 6 percent expressed confidence that their measurement system enables both strategic and tactical decision making. Leaders pointed to low response rates, data lags, ambiguity about performance drivers, and the lack of a clear link to financial value as critical shortcomings.

A few leading companies are pioneering a better approach that takes full advantage of the wealth of data now available. Today, companies can regularly, lawfully, and seamlessly collect smartphone and interaction data from across their customer, financial, and operations systems, yielding deep insights about their customers. Those with an eye toward the future are boosting their data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify CX issues and opportunities in real time. These companies can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys. Their customers are reaping benefits: think quick compensation for a flight delay, or outreach from an insurance company when a patient is having trouble resolving a problem. These benefits extend far beyond the people typically thought of as “customers”—to members, clients, patients, guests, and intermediaries. Early movers in the world of customer-experience analytics herald a fundamental shift in how companies evaluate and shape customer experiences.

In this article, we explore how data and analytics are beginning to transform the art and science of customer experience. We present new research that brings clarity and a fact base to the shortcomings of survey-based measurement systems. We then examine how a few leaders have implemented data-driven CX systems and in turn reduced churn, boosted revenue, and lowered cost to serve. We end with insight on how to get started, including four key steps for CX leaders as they transition toward data-driven insight and action.

The benefits are not automatic. Those just starting out will face stumbling blocks and organizational resistance. But with commitment, even companies with rudimentary CX systems, limited data, and a shortage of data scientists can begin laying the groundwork to transform their CX programs and their customers’ experiences.

The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Evidence suggests that the advantages will be substantial for companies that start building the capabilities, talent, and organizational structure needed for this transition. Those that stick with the traditional systems will be forced to play catch-up in the years to come.

‘Survey says’: The shortcomings of traditional CX measurement

While surveys themselves are a valid means of gathering customer insight, they fall short as a management tool for measuring CX performance and identifying and acting on CX opportunities. For organizations to lead from a customer-centric position, they increasingly need a comprehensive view of the full customer journey, as well as the ability to obtain deep, granular insight on what is driving customer experience. They need immediate and individual signals in order to take action “in the moment” and to create relevant experiences for each customer, and they need to demonstrate that the experience enhancements they would like to invest in will result in positive ROI. Survey-based systems have four major flaws that make those critical tasks nearly impossible (exhibit).

• Limited: The typical CX survey samples only 7 percent of a company’s customers, providing an extremely limited view of what customers experience and value. In fact, only 13 percent of the CX leaders we surveyed expressed full confidence that their CX measurement system provides a representative view of their customer base.
• Reactive: Surveys are a backward-looking tool in a world where customers expect their concerns to be resolved increasingly quickly. Nearly two-thirds of respondents ranked the ability to act on CX issues in near real time as among their top three priorities, but only 13 percent of leaders expressed certainty that their organizations could achieve this level of rapid insight through existing systems.
• Ambiguous: Surveys often fail to reveal the root causes of customer sentiment. In fact, scores can vary based on many outside factors, including geographical bias and industry shocks, making it difficult to perform reliable root-cause analysis using surveys alone. Only 16 percent of CX leaders said that surveys provide them with granular-enough data to address the root causes of CX performance.
• Unfocused: As one executive at a large financial-services company put it, “The association between survey-based scores and business outcomes is not well understood, and, as a result, many parts of the organization simply claim a business impact from their CX initiatives with no real evidence.” Several companies have recently come under fire for basing investment decisions on a survey-based score alone. Remarkably, of the CX leaders we surveyed, only 4 percent said that their system lets them calculate the ROI of CX decisions.

Predictive customer insight is the future

Since survey-based systems became ubiquitous, the world of insight generation has transformed through impressive advances in the ability to generate, aggregate, and analyze data. Companies now have access to a broad array of data sets: internal data on customer interactions (both digital and analog), transactions, and profiles; widely available third-party data sets that cover customer attitudes, purchase behaviors and preferences, and digital behaviors, including social-media activity; and new data sets on customer health, sentiment, and location (in stores, for example) generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). Other business disciplines, including marketing and revenue management, have already transformed through the aggregation and analysis of these vast data sets. The contrast is stark: Why use a survey to ask customers about their experiences when data about customer interactions can be used to predict both satisfaction and the likelihood that a customer will remain loyal, bolt, or even increase business?

Why use a survey to ask customers about their experiences when data about customer interactions can be used to predict satisfaction?

Some CX leaders have taken the plunge and have begun making use of the data on offer, drawing valuable insights that can prompt alerts and guide swift action to improve customer experiences. While the specifics may vary across companies and industries, this approach centers on a predictive customer-experience platform that consists of three key elements:

Customer-level data lake

First, the company gathers customer, financial, and operational data—both aggregate data and data on individual customers. 2 Financial data could include historical spending, prices, and loyalty-program-redemption behavior, for example. The company processes these data and stores them in a cloud-based platform. Comprehensive, connected, and dynamic customer-level data sets allow the organization to map and track customer behavior across interactions, transactions, and operations. Whereas surveys reflect the views of a subset of customers at a single point in the past, these rich data sets encompass the full customer base and span the customer journey, thereby shedding light on the root causes of performance.

The data lake serves as the foundation for developing a rigorous understanding of customer experiences. The platform should be reliable throughout the organization, with clear and consistent mapping across all data sources and unique identifiers for customers, product lines, and other critical business input.

Predictive customer scores

The company develops analytics—often using several types of machine-learning algorithms—to understand and track what is influencing customer satisfaction and business performance, and to detect specific events in customer journeys.

The algorithms generate predictive scores for each customer based on journey features. These scores allow the company to predict individual customer satisfaction and value outcomes such as revenue, loyalty, and cost to serve. More broadly, they allow CX leaders to assess the ROI for particular CX investments and directly tie CX initiatives to business outcomes.

Action and insight engine

Information, insights, and suggestions are shared with a broad set of employees (including frontline agents) and tools (such as customer-relationship-management platforms) through an application-programming-interface (API) layer. For example, agents can receive alerts and notifications about the actions they should take to personalize customer experiences and improve CX outcomes. The API layer serves as a single source of truth, fueling recommendation engines based on both the data lake and customer scores. Importantly, the predictive platform, unlike survey-based systems, delivers timely insights and spurs swift action, both by employees and through digital interfaces.

Predictive CX platforms allow companies to better measure and manage their CX performance; they also inform and improve strategic decision making. These systems make it possible for CX leaders to create an accurate and quantified view of the factors that are propelling customer experience and business performance, and they become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases for CX improvement . They also create a holistic view of the satisfaction and value potential of every customer that can be acted upon in near real time. Leaders who have built such systems are creating substantial value through a wide array of applications across performance management, strategic planning, and real-time customer engagement.

Predictive CX platforms become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases for CX im­provement.

One leading credit-card company wanted to adopt a more omnichannel strategy and boost its performance in digital channels. It focused on building a CX data and analytics stack to systematically identify, improve, and track the factors influencing customer satisfaction and business performance across 13 priority journeys. It started by gathering interaction, transaction, and customer-profile data with a journey analytics platform to identify drivers of satisfaction for each journey, as well as areas where it could improve. The platform included data on repeat interactions, lead times, and how often customers hopped from one channel to another. It also encompassed more subtle factors, such as whether the company effectively handled negative outcomes and what communications took place at various points in time.

This analytics-driven approach gave the company a quantified and systematic view into the problems, opportunity areas, and channel interactions across millions of customers, enabling the organization to support a systematic journey-improvement cycle. The team used the analytics platform to focus its investments and operational efforts on the journeys and specific moments that made a difference for customers, and it ultimately reduced its interaction and operational costs by 10 to 25 percent as a result of the CX and digital transformation.

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Prioritizing CX efforts through intentional strategic planning is another promising use case for data-driven systems that allow CX leaders to understand which operational, customer, and financial factors are creating systemic issues or opportunities over time. One US healthcare payer, for example, built a “journey lake” to determine how to improve its customer care. The journey lake syncs four billion records across nine systems, spanning marketing, operations, sales, digital, and IoT. The resulting holistic customer view enabled the organization to identify operational break points—thresholds where patients often ask to speak with a supervisor or move to another channel to resolve an issue—and proactively reach out to patients through the website, emails, and outbound calls to settle the problem. It also used the data to develop a smarter digital migration strategy, targeting customers who had minimal engagement on digital channels and coaching them to use more self-service functions. The organization substantially increased digital adoption by focusing on the most significant pain points, such as prescription renewals; it reduced its costs by decreasing (by more than a quarter) the frequency with which customers turned to other channels after starting with digital.

Finally, thanks to the near-real-time nature of analytical insights, these new systems create a platform for proactive daily customer engagement. One leading airline built a machine-learning system based on 1,500 customer, operations, and financial variables to measure both satisfaction and predicted revenue for its more than 100 million customers every day. The system allowed the airline to identify and prioritize those customers whose relationships were most at risk because of a delay or cancellation and offer them personalized compensation to save the relationship and reduce customer defection on high-priority routes. A combined team of about 12 to 15 data scientists, CX experts, and external partners worked together for about three months to build the system and lead this first application, which resulted in an 800 percent uplift in satisfaction and a 60 percent reduction in churn for priority customers.

How to turn data into insight and action

The transition to predictive insight will not take place overnight. As our research shows, most organizations still rely on surveys to gauge customer sentiment. Leaders now have the opportunity to take their CX programs to the next level—starting from where their organizations are now. Based on our research on organizations that have successfully made the transition, we have identified four key steps to jump-start such CX transformations.

1. Work on changing mindsets: The transition will inevitably involve challenges, not least of which will be a mindset shift for both teams and CX executives. Leaders may feel that predictive systems are outside their purview, the domain of the IT department or a data-science team. But times are changing, and today’s CX leaders need to focus on data as they once zeroed in on a single CX score. Some may point to the fact that their organization has already done regression analysis on a few key performance indicators. It’s time to think bigger and bolder, and to build a system—not dabble in data.

The role of the CX leader is evolving, which means that executives will need to reposition themselves within their organizations. When asked about the biggest challenge with the current system, one chief experience officer responded: “People associate CX with marketing, not technology.” That is changing as more and more companies take up predictive analytics, and it’s up to CX leaders to help encourage the change in perception.

The CX team should define direction and strategy, but ensuring buy-in and excitement among the affected stake­holders will be key to scaling impact.

2. Break down silos and build cross-functional teams: CX functions often fall into the trap of creating their own silos within a company. To begin the transition, CX leaders need to better integrate with the rest of the organization.

Data owners will inevitably span operations, marketing, finance, and technology functions, so convening across senior leadership will be vital to ensure efficient data access and management. (And, of course, data scientists—not CX professionals—will be the ones writing the algorithms.) The CX team should define direction and strategy, but ensuring buy-in and excitement among the affected stakeholders will be key to scaling impact.

One travel-industry client, for example, began its data-driven system with a focus on delivering real-time enhancements to its customer-service operation because the CX team had a strong partnership with the service organization and could prove value quickly. The initial effort involved close collaboration: CX acted as the business owner, the data-science team developed the product, and the customer-service organization acted as the first recipient of an initial minimum viable product. Outside the core team, an advisory board including the COO, CFO, and chief marketing officer stayed informed of the progress and advised on future use cases so that when the initial pilot was successful, the COO was already on board for an additional use case in his organization. Even in the case of smaller-scale initiatives—for example, where an organization hires contractors rather than standing up an in-house data-science team—these strong, cross-functional relationships at both the development and steering-committee level will be vital to creating and scaling the CX insight engines of the future.

3. Start with a core journey data set and build to improve accuracy: Most organizations face challenges with data quality and availability—and without data, this transition is a nonstarter. The good news is that organizations can get started with basic customer-level data, even if the data are not perfect. The first step is to collect individual customer-level operational and financial data. A combination of customer profiles, along with digital and analog interactions, is usually a solid jumping-off point.

Teams should create a detailed journey taxonomy, including all the potential drivers of satisfaction for their customer base. The taxonomy can be used for hypothesis generation, leading to new measurable attributes for inclusion in the predictive model. These attributes—called data features in machine learning—can range from numeric properties, such as a customer’s annual spend, to binary properties, such as whether the customer purchased a product online or in a store. Over time, understanding which features are significant in the machine-learning model—and comparing those with the team’s hypotheses—can help organizations to recognize where data may be inaccurate or incomplete and to adapt their data-acquisition strategy accordingly. If data for certain features do not exist, teams can explore options to acquire new data sets (for example, credit-agency data) or apply new instrumentation to generate required features (for example, IoT sensors to map customer interaction points in physical environments). As the machine-learning algorithm ingests more data and generates its own insights, the data sets will become more robust—proving useful across multiple enterprise applications.

Ultimately, companies can look to integrate data from sources across the customer journey, including chat, calls, emails, social media, apps, and IoT devices. Regardless of the source, all data collection, storage, and use should follow privacy and cybersecurity best practices . (Notably, our colleagues have found that customer-data protection can serve as a source of competitive advantage as consumers become more careful about sharing data and avoid or stop doing business with companies whose data-security practices they don’t trust.) Organizations should follow regional data regulations and remove any variables related to protected classes, such as race and religion. All identifying information should be encrypted and anonymized before it is analyzed. Finally, regular risk reviews can help detect algorithmic bias  in CX systems. CX leaders are responsible for knowing what their organizations are doing to protect customer data, mitigate bias, and promote fairness in their predictive systems.

In the early days, it is important to have a clear view for how the insights will be applied and to focus on a few specific use cases that will create immediate return.

4. Focus first on the use cases that can drive quick value: Data-driven, predictive systems offer CX organizations a unique opportunity to tie CX strategies to tangible business value. In the early days, it is important to have a clear view for how the insights will be applied and to focus on a few specific use cases that will create immediate return. As a simple framework, organizations can review major sources of opportunity, pain points, or both across existing customer journeys and think through how a predictive system might create new solutions or enhance existing ones that may have a direct impact on loyalty, cost to serve, cross-sell, and up-sell behaviors.

For example, one company applied its predictive system to its issue-resolution journey after realizing that its contingency funds—which had previously been allocated uniformly across customers—could be applied more strategically. The company developed an algorithm that could identify high-priority customers as measured by lifetime value and recent experiences (such as the extent of delayed service the customer had experienced in the past month), and it used the algorithm to allocate contingency funds toward dissatisfied, high-value customers. This first use case proved successful, saving the organization more than 25 percent of its planned budget and paving the way for future applications. Leaders should ask themselves what use cases present a clear opportunity to drive value through a proof of concept so they can build momentum and gain support.

After years of serving as the benchmark for defining and refining a company’s customer-experience performance, survey-based systems are heading toward their twilight. The future of superior customer-experience performance is moving to data-driven, predictive systems, and competitive advantages are in store for companies that can better understand what their customers want and need.

Rachel Diebner is a consultant in McKinsey’s Dallas office, where Mike Thompson is a partner; David Malfara is a senior expert in the Miami office; Kevin Neher is a senior partner in the Denver office; and Maxence Vancauwenberghe is a partner in the New York office.

The authors wish to thank Victoria Bough, Harald Fanderl, Abhishek Gupta, Oliver Jakubiec, Marc Levesque, Nicolas Maechler, Evelyn Milde, Iwan Tanuwidjaja, Kelly Ungerman, and Elsa Yan for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Julia Arnous, an editor in the Boston office.

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What is Customer Experience (Cx) Research?

by Mike Deinlein

Customer experience (CX) is no longer a brand differentiator. Customer experience IS the brand. These days, customers demand more personalized, empathetic, and cross-channel experiences, and only the brands that can deliver on these elevated customer expectations will grow market share in an increasingly customer-first and hyper-competitive future. 80% of customers consider the experience a company provides to be as important as its products and services 1 . As a result, organizations are charged with creating exceptional journeys that deepen customer loyalty and provide more opportunities for customers to interact with their products and services.

So, what does customer experience really mean today? Customer experience is the lasting impression formed by a customer through all interactions with your products, services, people, and businesses 2 . It is every interaction – good or bad – that either enhances or diminishes a customer’s affinity towards your brand. This definition acknowledges that customer experience is living and evolving – not static and momentary. Consequently, customer experience research strives to be equally dynamic and capture expectations, motivations, and moments that matter across the customer journey.

Simply stated, customer experience research is customer listening at every touchpoint with your brand. Fortunately, customer voices can be more readily heard with ever expanding signals and customer data at your disposal. By leveraging traditional surveys, qualitative insights, text analytics, and social listening, and linking those to experience, behavioral, and operational datapoints, companies can have a more complete view of customers.

If customer experience research is customer listening, then the goal of customer experience research is to identify needs, expectations, and friction points across all your customer touchpoints, so that you can prioritize and execute solutions that elevate their experience.

Companies that really listen in a structured, intentional manner can build a best-in-class customer experience insights platform through 6 core building blocks:

• Define your vision and aspiration
• Map the customer journey
• Integrate data across the journey
• Measure the overall relationship
• Predict customer needs and actions
• Act on data in real time

By following this framework, you can ensure you listen and act on customer feedback and elevate how customers interact with your brand.

DEFINE YOUR VISION AND ASPIRATION

Before establishing a CX market research platform, you need to define the customer experience you want to create. What will your brand stand for? What unique position do you want to own? What experiences will you create to support that brand identity? Only after you answer these questions should you move to how you measure the success of those journeys and experiences.

Key Activities & Deliverables:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Blueprinting & CX vision workshops
• Stakeholder alignment workshops
• Final vision statement

MAP THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Now that you have your vision, it’s time to map your customer journey to reflect that vision.  Mapping the customer journey allows you to see every customer interaction, where there are friction points that frustrate your CX aspirations, and what “jobs to be done” customers desire throughout the journey. You can define the moments that matter and leverage direct feedback mechanisms to measure customer satisfaction in those moments. Mapping the journey also allows you to identify the indirect feedback signals that help measure journey success. Finally, the customer journey is the first step in delivering a service design blueprint that can align the internal processes, technology and data capabilities you need to deliver on your experience vision.

• Jobs to be done research
• In-depth interviews
• Journey mapping
• Service design blueprints

INTEGRATE DATA ACROSS THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

With your maps, you’re now ready to capture needs and expectations across the entire customer journey using three key data sources: direct feedback, indirect feedback, and observed behavioral data.

• Solicit direct feedback with event triggered surveys that measure your moments that matter, and always-on feedback surveys that allow customers to give you feedback on their time in their channel of choice.
• Go beyond traditional marketing research by incorporating indirect feedback like chat logs, social media, and customer service interactions and deploy AI powered text analytics to identify key themes.
• Overlay observed customer behaviors, digital clickstream data, point of sale, and CRM data with unified customer identities that can easily link back to your direct and indirect feedback mechanisms.

Linking all these data points provides you with a fully integrated customer database that serves as your source of truth for every customer across all your operational teams. No more data silos and uncoordinated customer outreach and service. This all-encompassing customer dataset also serves as your platform for predictive data analytics and machine learning, with more data at your fingertips.

To get the most out of your program, build in qualitative research to help build empathy that quantitative- and behavioral-only market research often overlooks. Hearing directly from your customers humanizes your data and provides a narrative that allows you to walk in their shoes and understand their pain points.

• Event triggered surveys
• Text analytics
• Social listening
• Chat transcripts
• Identity resolution
• Qualitative Empathy Maps
• Needs Focus Groups

MEASURE THE OVERALL RELATIONSHIP

While customer experience is defined by the journey touchpoints, make sure you don’t lose the forest for the trees. Overall relationship surveys help you benchmark and identify broader improvement opportunities that transactional and in-the-moment data collection can miss. Setting up a Survey and Signal Architecture can help you link your journey feedback mechanisms with your overall relationship surveys to help drive greater actionability. And remember, by maintaining unified customer identities and a cross-functional customer database, you can find better linkages between your in-moment signals and your long-term customer relationship.

• Customer Survey & Signal Architecture
• Relationship Key Driver Analysis
• Empathy In-Depth Interviews

PREDICT CUSTOMER NEEDS AND ACTIONS

You’ve now created a robust customer listening dataset and now it’s time to put it to work through custom insights, predictive modelling, and machine learning algorithms. Start by modelling your non-responders. Most of your customers will never take a survey. Leverage your data to predict their Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Customer Effort Scores so you can measure your entire customer base, not just those who take surveys.  Create customer churn models to understand the likelihood of attrition, model next best actions or products to grow your share of wallet or drive profitable behaviors, build dynamic attribution models to better allocate marketing spend. All of this is possible with a fully integrated customer database.

• Predictive Machine Learning
• Attribution Modelling
• Next Best Action Modelling

ACT ON DATA IN REAL TIME

Understanding your customers is worthless if you don’t act on the insight. Ensure your customer experience research is connected to your business operations. Establish a regular cadence of action planning workshops to review insights and align teams on what they can do to improve the customer experience through a people, process, and technology lens. For in-the-moment activation, set up case management systems for your customer service teams to proactively contact customers when their expectations are not met. Allow your marketing teams to link to your journey orchestration platform to create in-the-moment personalized offers. And lastly, quantify the value of your improvements through customer lifetime value and customer retention metrics to prove to business executives that CX is worth the investment.

• Action Planning and Resource Alignment
• Case Management
• Customer Service Automated Journeys
• Next Best Offer

Sound like a lot?  It can be, but we are here to help. Burke has partnered with operational unit managers, quality leaders, and others across countless industries to deliver superior customer experiences. We have a full suite of products and solutions that can help you bring your CX strategy to life. To learn more about how you can build a best-in-class customer experience research program, contact our team.

Mike serves as VP, CX Solutions at Burke Inc. and consults with clients on agile CX technology use, the removal of customer data silos, and the effective utilization of integrated insights to drive better customer experiences for clients.

As always, you can follow Burke, Inc. on our LinkedIn , Twitter , Facebook and Instagram pages.

Feature Image – ©A_B_C – stock.adobe.com

1. Salesforce.com. 2022. What Are Customer Expectations, and How Have They Changed? .

2. Carbone, Lewis & Haeckel, Stephan. (1994). Engineering Customer Experiences. Marketing Management.

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The Truth About Customer Experience

by Alex Rawson , Ewan Duncan and Conor Jones

Summary .   

Reprint: R1309G

Companies have long emphasized touchpoints—the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization on their way to purchase and after. But this focus can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. And it distracts from the more important picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience.

In their research, the authors—partners at McKinsey—have found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire customer journey reap enormous benefits: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.

To realize these benefits, companies need to embed customer journeys into their operating models in four ways. They must identify key journeys, understand how they are performing in each, redesign and support those journeys, and change mind-sets to sustain the initiatives at scale.

Journey-based transformations may take years to perfect. But they create a culture that engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom. It’s a culture that’s hard to build otherwise, and a true competitive advantage goes to companies that get it right.

Companies have long emphasized touchpoints—the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization and its offerings on their way to purchase and after. But the narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at those moments can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. It also diverts attention from the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end journey.

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What is customer experience research.

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Creating a product with staying power requires speaking to customers, understanding the issues they’re facing and ensuring a new product can effectively resolve them. In this article we will focus on the importance of research in the product development process. Research provides clarity and understanding so you can make evidence-based decisions and feel confident you are building a strategy on firm foundations. This will prevent your business from launching a new product that was created simply on a hunch or the assumptions of an internal subject matter expert, and instead ensure it meets the needs and wants of the consumer. 

Customer experience research is an essential part of the product development process. At Vervint, our design practice is built on three main focus areas: research, strategy, and experience. We spoke to Hillary Waters, a lead researcher on Vervint’s Design Team, to define three types of experience research and explain how organizations can use research to successfully create meaning from experience. 

What Are The Different Types of Research? 

There are three ways to think about the focus and purpose of research. 

• CX research guides decisions for the experience between customers and your brand – within and across the digital ecosystem. 
• Service Design research links a consumer’s experience with the structures and processes that enable it to the people, processes, and technologies happening behind the scenes over time. 
• UX research guides decisions on the ideal digital product experience, what features should be prioritized, and what pain points to solve. (Users here could either be customers or employees.) 

When creating a digital product, customer experience research can take on many different forms. It almost always involves a component of listening and observation. It may include in-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys, a diary study, or a digital ethnography. 

For example, if an RV company wants to know how a customer experiences a new innovative product, you might combine several methods. First, a researcher would conduct interviews before and after a real-world trial. Through interviews, you can uncover their expectations and the moments that stuck with them and influenced their long-term view of the product. During the trial, a researcher may run a digital ethnography (having users upload videos of them performing tasks or using the product) to observe in-the-moment reactions and usage. 

“Customer experience research transforms the product development process, bringing insights into product and customer strategy. This shifts focus from features to how a product can solve people’s problems or add to their lives,” Waters said. 

3 Essential Considerations for Successfully Designing a Product

Steps for successful customer research: .

• Listen to people, interview them in context, and observe how they do something or how they talk about your product to others. 
• Develop an acute understanding of customer pain point(s), how a customer behaves, and what motivates their behavior. Customer research, when done well, attaches meaning to solutions. 
• Collaborate with product and technical teams to create ease at every point of the process in product development, from purchase to unboxing, setup, installation — and beyond! 

For example, imagine a construction equipment manufacturer wanted to better understand how customers shopped both online and with dealers to create a streamlined shopping experience that would impact its customers positively and support long-term relationships between customers and their dealers. In this situation, customer research may include an observation of their shopping behavior and an interview focused on their motivations and pain points; researchers could also interview dealers to understand their role in the process using a service design approach. Finally, researchers would collaborate with design, product, and development teams to produce a recommendation aligned with customer needs, dealer needs, business strategy and technical feasibility. 

Or a company may have a specific hypothesis or assumption that it would like to prove or disprove. In this case, the research could focus on this particular hypothesis or part of the process. 

Create Meaning From Experience 

While customer research can be done in many ways, the most ideal way is to contextualize it. You need to see how a customer uses a particular piece of technology. Rather than simply asking them how they use it, ask them what features they would want or ask someone to predict if they would use it. 

“Contextualizing makes a huge difference in how we create meaning from experience,” Waters said. “When you don’t do customer research, you risk creating something that looks almost exactly like what people say they want to see, but it doesn’t do what people want it to do.” 

Customer research, when done well, attaches meaning to solutions. It involves asking questions such as: “What makes your life more meaningful? What are your frustrations and why?” All to learn how people behave and why. 

A great example of what happens when companies don’t do this can be seen with the current trend to create smart products simply to make them smart. There are a million ways to make a product smart or connected. But simply implementing the technology doesn’t ensure it will meet a customer’s needs. 

“If you don’t figure out why it’s creating a difference in someone’s life, you might automate the wrong things, or connect the right things in the wrong way and people won’t use it,” Waters said. “We all get to choose what we are going to spend our time using – and we choose things that make our lives better, more meaningful, or simply easier.” 

It’s about more than just the technology itself — it’s about creating meaningful customer experiences that last beyond novelty. 

The Service Design Process 

Successful customer experience research is the start of a successful product development process. Service design research is a natural next step. 

Organizations can drive better business outcomes by aligning processes, technology, and interactions to drive better customer journeys. At Vervint, we leverage service design to focus on customer touchpoints with business processes that generate value for the service user and provider. 

There are three components to the service development process: 

• What the user wants 
• The technical feasibility of building the product 
• The businesses’ desire 

When a business approaches Vervint for assistance in the service design process, they are usually doing so with an understanding of the technical feasibility and business viability. However, there may be a vague understanding of what the customer wants. The further a client gets in the process without proving or disproving the user’s wants and needs, the more technical debt they risk acquiring. 

Any design or research engagement begins by understanding where a prospective client is in the product development process. 

The four-step product development process: 

• Gain a deeper understanding of the user and their unmet needs 
• Product Ideation and road mapping 
• Prototyping and testing 
• Implementation 

There is one more critical component to consider – the mindset of those involved in the process. Designing a successful product involves constant evolution and preparedness to solve issues again and again. 

Optimize IoT with a User-Centric Data Analysis 

Improve the type and quality of IoT data collected from smart products and transform it into a better customer experience.

Ready to dive in and level up your customer research? Vervint is your perfect partner.  Contact us  today.  

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What is Customer Experience Research?

• March 6, 2015
• Angela Triplett

Traditionally, Customer Experience Research falls into two main categories.

In the first category, there are market research firms that take an academic or scientific approach to collecting data and presenting the findings. These providers emphasize the purity of their data and the rigor of their methods and processes for collecting that information.

In the second category, there are data collection firms that specialize in gathering, storing, and organizing vast amounts of data from a variety of sources. Through their proprietary systems and tools, they make their findings accessible and digestible to the end user.

What does customer experience research capture?

The two metrics most important to customer experience management are customer satisfaction and customer engagement , which exist on a continuum and influence each other in both directions.

Customer satisfaction is an immediate measurement of an experience, from something as small as an interaction with a customer service representative to the overall feeling a customer has that his or her expectations and needs are being met. This is arguably the starting point for all customer research.

Customer engagement is what keeps customers coming back. It captures the long-term equity that is built on satisfying experiences by measuring things like loyalty and how likely a customer is to refer others to their preferred brands and businesses. In this way, it’s a more useful measurement than simple satisfaction: customers who are strongly engaged over time are more willing to overlook or tolerate the occasional less-than-satisfying experience.

A great example of this comes from the consumer technology industry. Brands like Apple and Google each have dedicated, loyal audiences that will continue to buy their products and tout their benefits to friends and family, even when the products themselves fall short of 100% satisfaction (think: buggy software releases or smartphones so thin they bend in your back pocket). This is the kind of engagement every brand dreams of.

The Journey From Data to Information to Knowledge

Both the academic and data-collection approaches to customer experience research have value. Market research can reveal trends, insights, and patterns across large populations and broader spans of time. Data collection, meanwhile, has grown so sophisticated as to merit its own industry, aimed at helping the everyday business manager access intelligence about their customer – because it’s unlikely they have the expertise or time to sift through it all themselves.

Both methods also have their limits. Statistical research may be useful in an ideal world where all customers have the same expectations and needs, and all businesses face the same challenges in meeting those expectations. But in a real-world setting, the insights garnered from this research often ends up “watered down” and are unlikely to apply to each unique business or brand the same way.

It’s not unlike the idea of the self-help book, which can be a useful way to talk about people in general, but won’t always apply on an individual level. You can do everything “by the book” and still fall short of your goals if the book you’re going by doesn’t account for the nuances of your business or your customers.

In turn, data collection is exactly what it sounds like: collecting data and presenting it as information. But turning that into knowledge that you can act on? That part is up to you. These firms often step out of the picture at that point, leaving you to figure out how that information factors into your strategies and tactics, what merits your attention and what doesn’t, and what steps come next.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Reality

The shortfalls of traditional customer experience research are how businesses end up thinking they know their customers, without actually knowing them. There’s a break in the process that prevents them from getting to that next level of knowledge and using that knowledge to improve their customer experience.

In our 20+ years of customer experience research, CSP’s guiding principle has been to not only gather and present the information, but to then guide our clients in creating the roadmap to a better customer experience based on a thorough understanding of their unique customers.

Why should anyone have to figure this out from scratch? CSP has seen it all before, and we know what works and what doesn’t. Our experts are flexible enough to adapt to any given brand or business with a methodology that’s personalized every step of the way. Your specific questions about your customers, your market, and your competition are built right into the program, along with ongoing support, tools, and coaching to help you define and achieve your goals.

This level of customization and personal attention is hard to come by with traditional research models, but we believe it’s the key ingredient to successful customer experience management. We’re not passionate about data – we’re passionate about improving the customer experience, full stop.

For more information about CSP’s customer experience research methodologies and the programs we build to support them, contact us today by phone at (402) 399-8790 ext:101, via our website , or on Twitter @csprofiles . 

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Why Is Market Research Important for Customer Experience?

Our experts weigh in on how market research supports customer experience — and why faster marketplace insights give brands a competitive edge.

For some brands, market research can be a nice-to-have. But for brands looking to deliver the kinds of great customer experiences that contribute to overall satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention, it’s a must-have . At its core, this type of analysis helps brands better understand their customers — and customers-to-be.

How can market research support your customer experience program?

Market research reveals the cultural forces that are shaping a given industry, trends that are unfolding within the competitive landscape, and what’s happening across the customer journey and the non-customer journey alike — serving up a clearer picture of the marketplace as a whole. 

“Market research helps you better understand what your customers and your non-customers — or potential customers — are doing when they are not interacting with your brand, so leaders have insight into the biggest opportunities for improvement and growth,” explains Margaryta Rashev , VP of Product, Market Research at Medallia. 

As a strategic guide, market research makes it possible for brands to incorporate the voice of the customer (and potential customers) in everything they do — and validate whether the products, services, and campaigns they’re developing are having their desired impact. 

Savvy brands can use these insights to achieve the top two priorities for any organization: to drive growth and retention.

How is market research changing, and why is it becoming more important for CX teams?

Market research is becoming more agile , as businesses are feeling the pressure to conduct in-depth analyses faster than ever to move in lockstep with changing consumer behavior and evolving competitor dynamics. 

“One of the big things we’re seeing is the need for quicker time to insight,” says Cassie Wilcox , VP of Global Research and Insights at Medallia. “Brands don’t have weeks and weeks to sit around and wait for that report to come out. They need to get a question into the field and have answers within 72 hours.”

What brands can learn from market research vs. customer experience insights

While comprehensive CX programs are great at measuring experiences across channels, touchpoints, and interactions in the moment, brands also need a way to check in with customers over time to make sure that they’re staying on top of their changing needs.

Organizations can use market research to answer questions like:

• What don’t we know about our customers’ needs, interests, or preferences?
• What don’t we know about what’s happening in the broader industry and competitive landscape?
• What are the key expectations of our customers that we are not fulfilling today? 

Based on these insights, companies can adjust their ongoing CX programs to adapt to any market changes. 

“As consumers evolve, which they do all the time, brands are constantly being thrown new curveballs,” explains Wilcox. “Consumers are going to act, and interact, with brands differently. Being able to have the research capabilities to understand them better helps set up customer experience programs for longer-term success.”

Market research can help answer broad questions related to brand perceptions, awareness, and overall health, which can be used together with customer experience metrics — like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), overall satisfaction (OSAT), and likelihood to return (LTR) — to have a more holistic understanding of business performance and levers that can be pulled to drive revenue.

Market research can also help answer highly specific questions, such as exploring a given consumer demographic, like:

• Who is Gen Z, and what’s driving their behavior?

Market research offers a window into the factors that influence purchasing (and non-purchasing) decisions, such as household income, demographics, and social factors.

For example, if a brand’s NPS® score has been trending downwards in a given market, CX insights can tell the team that this is happening and uncover some of the reasons why — but market research can help provide a fuller view of the factors influencing this change, and shed light on the actionable next steps that can be taken to turn things around. 

In other words, CX insights tell us what happens when our customers are directly transacting and interacting with our brand. Market research tells us what our customers (and non-customers) are doing when they are not transacting with us.

“Market research is the other side of the coin of CX insights,” says Rashev. “When you’re trying to understand the totality of the experience, market research is critical.”

Launch a Market Research Study — Fast

Medallia’s self-service Agile Research capabilities enable brands to answer their biggest questions in a matter of clicks. Quickly launch branded surveys with an easy interface, get connected to millions of participants worldwide through our leading third-party panel provider, select your preferred demographic and behavioral criteria, launch your study, and gain insights in the moment with real-time reporting.

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AI in Customer Experience: Your Secret Weapon to Outsell Competitors

September 11, 2024

Share This Article:

We live in a materialistic world where people usually spend their money without hesitation. Especially, when they see value, or fancy in what they are purchasing.

In fact, with the growing e-commerce and more personalizing experiences, people are more likely to spend on products or services that improve their lives.

However, capturing the attention of your potential buyers and turning them into loyal customers requires more than just offering a solution.

You have to show them your brand is outstanding in both product and service. To do so, you need to deliver a great customer experience and exceed expectations at every interaction.

Leading companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are great at this because they always find new ways to give extra value with better experiences.

They use Artificial Intelligence in their marketing and services to create more advanced and personalized experiences, which helps them stay ahead of their competitors.

What is AI customer experience?

AI customer experience is the use of Artificial Intelligence such as machine learning, intelligent analytics, Autobots, and smart agents to improve customer interaction. It allows you to offer fast, efficient, personalized, and seamless experiences to users.

Furthermore, generative AI helps you to analyze advanced customer data by applying powerful algorithms to process large volumes of unstructured data, extracting key insights and patterns. 

As a result, you will get a clear image of your dream buyer’s avatar.

These reports can reveal deeper customer behaviors , preferences, and trends. Ultimately allowing businesses to make more informed decisions about marketing, product development, and customer engagement strategies .

Why should businesses need to focus on AI?

In modern business, AI is not just about customer service chatbots or personalized experience. It has the potential to improve how companies collect and analyze data, personalize product features, and improve overall service.

That’s why many businesses across the world are prioritizing machine learning as their key marketing strategy. 

For example, Amazon uses Artificial Intelligence to identify potential customers’ behavior and predict purchasing intent. As a next step, they are utilizing these reports to deliver personalized ads to the right buyer at the right time.

According to Reuters , “Amazon has increased their revenue by 13% ($143.5 billion in revenue in the first three months) in this present year, compared to the same period of the year 2023.” And all these happened because they were able to run more personalized advertisements for the people. 

Moreover, AI is not only transforming business operations but also creating a cycle of better service, increased engagement, and higher customer satisfaction . With its advanced analytical ability to deliver leads in real time, AI is transforming industries across the world.

A study by Accenture shows that “by the year 2035, AI can increase corporate profitability to 39%.”

Now, let’s discuss several phases of practicing Artificial Intelligence to improve customer experience and outsell your competitors.

How can you use AI to improve customer experience and outsell competitors?

We are now at the point where most of the businesses are trying to use AI from every possible aspect to outsell their competitors. But just implementing machine learning in your system is enough to get customers and generate a high volume of sales? 

Yes, you are right! Practicing a transformative technology without having a deeper understanding may not work. The worst case, if you use it in the wrong way then it may backfire on your sales and growth.

To help you understand the powerful use of Artificial Intelligence in customer experience, we will now discuss AI-driven approaches to transform your business.

Fun fact: We’ll help you use AI so efficiently that it gets itself out of the job.

Let’s dive in.

Using AI in research to develop products and improve customer experience

When you go out in the market with a product, you want people to buy and use it. But how many people have the intent to buy? In “Sell Like Crazy”, Sabri Suby demonstrates the 3% rule that “ only 3% of a market is actively looking to buy something, while the rest are in different stages of awareness.”

That means the fewer people have buying intent, the more they’ll miss out on seeing the value of your product . So, building a valuable product and finding the best-fit market is essential for any business to stand out. 

However, the process is going to become more data-driven and easier with the continuous advancements in AI.

And here’s how.

1. Analyzing customer data for targeted insights

Knowing your audience is not just about knowing the preferences of one individual. Every potential customer can have different choices. So, what you can do is use AI for data analysis and break down your research into a functional hypothesis.

AI can help you filter your customer data, from purchase history or support tickets, and present you the targeted insights. These insights allow you to target your potential buyers and create personalized experiences that align perfectly with customer preferences. 

2. Predicting market trends with AI analytics

A business always needs to keep up with the market trends to survive and grow. But with the basic human limitations, it’s not always possible. For a long period of time, people have used two methods to predict the market. 

• Fundamental analysis: It includes running competitor analysis, creating industry needs, and overall economic conditions report. 
• Technical analysis: Analysis of the patterns of trading activities and uses statistics to run hypotheses for future needs.

While these methods may have been useful, they also have problems. Too much data and fast-moving marketing are always obstacles for these methods to keep up with. Also, there’s a common saying that people aren’t perfect.

This is where machine learning algorithms are great at doing things that traditional methods struggle with. AI systems are able to automate large amounts of data and quickly spot market patterns that help you predict the exact market needs. 

3. Personalizing product development based on AI insights

Creating a product that your audience wants is crucial for any business. As machine learning can easily capture how people are using your product, you can decide the best possible features and direction for your business.

For example, Zomato, an Indian food delivery company, noticed that food lovers wanted to try dishes from other cities. To meet this demand, Zomato launched “ Intercity Legends ,” a service that uses airports and delivery networks to bring customers their favorite foods from different cities. 

Furthermore, Zomato used AI to identify popular dishes and combine them with stories. Like connecting butter chicken to its origins in Old Delhi. This approach helped Zomato create a service that customers were excited to use.

Integrating AI features into the product to elevate the customer experience

As we already discussed AI-driven research for market trends and product development. The second phase of this AI customer experience is the integration of AI features into your product.

As AI-based products are growing rapidly in the online market, personalized product experiences with AI-driven recommendations are essential. With those vital data to customer needs and market trends, you need to synchronize your products with machine learning to enhance usability.

1. Enhancing product usability with AI-powered interfaces

AI-powered interfaces have become increasingly popular among businesses and screenagers. It makes businesses or be more specific towards their customers’ needs, as well as allowing customers to enjoy more personalized experiences. 

For example, Netflix employs artificial intelligence to keep note of what each user watches, what they like, and what they rate highly. Then based on this information, it suggests other shows and movies that users are likely to find interesting. This personalized touch is a big reason why Netflix is such a hit!

2. Boosting Product Efficiency with AI Automation

Customers always prefer fast and seamless experiences, and AI automation takes it to the next level. It is the future of user experience, where tasks are completed effortlessly. 

Imagine controlling your home with just a simple voice command. Google makes it possible with its futuristic AI-based automation. You can control your AC, dim your lights, adjust the thermostat to the perfect temperature, and more. These kinds of seamless experiences can be seen with technologies like Google Home. 

And now, many big brands are also on the verge of introducing these kinds of automation in their products. Because it will allow them to touch the highest point of effortless customer experience.

3. Leveraging AI for Real-Time Customer Insights

Real-time customer insights help businesses to understand and address customer needs quickly. This leads to faster problem resolution and happier customers.

AI enhances these insights in several ways by leveraging advanced technologies to provide deeper and more actionable information.

For instance, chatbots provide instant answers to common questions, while predictive analytics help anticipate future needs. Contextual recommendations give agents useful suggestions based on current issues, and customer journey mapping tracks interactions to improve service.

For instance, Fluent Support uses AI to summarize customer tickets and analyze their tone. This integration helps agents respond more effectively and efficiently for better customer experience.

Enhancing Customer Service with AI for a Better Customer Experience

The final need to improve customer experience is to provide exceptional service. And, there is no question that customer service is about to take a massive leap forward with the enhancing power of AI.

By leveraging AI-driven chatbots, insights, reports, etc. your helpdesk will get a massive boost in customer satisfaction.

But before that, you have to analyze the approaches of AI in customer service to figure out which your business is lacking at the moment. 

1. Use AI-Powered Customer Support to boost agent productivity

AI doesn’t do all the work for your service representatives. But it can help them to provide more personalized customer service.

By providing quick ticket overviews, generative answers, sentiment analysis, etc. can allow your reps more time on complex issues.

This boosts their productivity and reduces customer support burnout . As a result, you will get faster resolutions and happier customers.

2. Implementing AI Chatbots for Instant Support

Nowadays, AI chatbots are broadly adopted among online businesses. It enables 24/7 support at a low cost. Through these chatbots, your support team can handle a large amount of customer queries without sacrificing quality or response times.

Furthermore, these chatbots are available to collect all the customer data while interacting which allows you to know your customers’ needs and create future strategies.

3. Utilizing AI for Predictive Customer Service

What if you could resolve your customers’ issues before they even reach out to you? AI makes this possible through predictive customer service. 

By analyzing customer behavior and reporting data, AI can anticipate problems and offer solutions at the same time. This can keep your customers happy and reduce the need for reactive support.

Wrapping up

While AI enhancing customer experience, it’s important to remember that overusing AI can also be harmful. You can not fully be dependent on machines to do everything for you. There’s always a fundamental need for human touch. 

A perfect example of this is the movie WALL-E . In this sci-fi, the whole human race has become entirely dependent on AI and automation for their every need. People were physically inactive and socially disconnected. They no longer have to make decisions for themselves, and this over-dependency leads to a decline in their overall well-being.

Similarly, In business, relying wholly on AI can disconnect you from your customers. If AI manages every aspect of your customer’s experience, it can feel impersonal. 

So, it’s crucial to balance automation with human interaction to keep the customer experience personalized and empathetic.

Start off with a powerful ticketing system that delivers smooth collaboration right out of the box.

Prosanjit Dhar

Hi, I’m Prosanjit Dhar, a digital marketer, customer service expert, and organic growth enthusiast. Apart from this, I’m a disciple of literature and a fps gamer.

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Customer experience gap in digital banking: why it matters and how to close it.

Banks and financial institutions are under immense pressure to innovate and modernize their services. The goal is clear: enhance customer experience (CX) to stay competitive in a market where customer expectations are higher than ever. However, significant investments and hard work do not always translate into success. This article explores a real-life example of a bank that faced unexpected challenges after launching a new mobile app, highlighting the critical importance of recognizing and bridging the customer experience gap.

Embarking on a Digital Transformation Journey

Several years ago, a reputable European bank recognized the urgent need to modernize its digital offerings. In particular, their existing mobile banking application was outdated and held a mediocre user rating of  3.5 out of 5 . To improve their image and competitiveness in the digital market, the bank's management decided to develop a new, modern-looking and frictionless mobile app. They ambitiously set a  six-month timeline for the design and development process, aiming for a swift launch to capture market share.

Despite the initial plan, the project timeline extended significantly. The bank ended up spending one year and eight months —three times longer than anticipated—developing the new application in-house. This prolonged development period not only delayed the app's release but also substantially increased costs.

Contrary to the bank's expectations, the launch of the new application did not enhance customer satisfaction. In fact, it had the opposite effect. After the release, the app's user rating plummeted from 3.5 to 2.4 and continued to decline even a year later. Instead of delivering an improved user experience, the new app significantly worsened it, leading to widespread customer dissatisfaction.

Analyzing the Failure: The Experience Gap

This situation raises a critical question: How could such a significant investment aimed at improving user experience result in decreased customer satisfaction?

The core issue lies in what is known as the customer experience gap . Despite the dedicated efforts of dozens of the bank's top professionals over 20 months and substantial financial investment, the product failed to meet user expectations. This gap often goes unrecognized within organizations, as companies tend to attribute such failures to external factors:

• Market Changes : Shifts in the financial landscape.
• Competitive Activity : Aggressive strategies by rival banks.
• Technological Innovations : Rapid emergence of new technologies.
• Consumer Behavior Shifts : Changes in how customers interact with digital services.

While these external factors can influence outcomes, relying on them as scapegoats prevents organizations from addressing internal shortcomings. The most critical measure of a company's adaptability and effectiveness is how well its services meet or exceed customer expectations . Companies unaware of the gap between their services and customer expectations are ill-equipped to adapt and thrive.

Additionally, the bank's management was confident in the significant improvements made and invested heavily in advertising the new app. Marketing campaigns promoted it as a brand-new, modern, innovative, and user-friendly mobile app , which raised high expectations among consumers. However, upon release, customers found that the app did not live up to the hype. In fact, it was less user-friendly than the previous version.

This disconnect led to a massive wave of negative reviews, not only on the App Store and Google Play but also across social media platforms. Customers expressed their frustration and disappointment publicly, with many sarcastically commenting on the bank's failed digitalization efforts. The bank's reputation suffered as a result.

Unawareness: The Main Threat

The critical issue here is the bank's unawareness of the customer experience gap . Such gaps are often unnoticed within organizations because their causes are not immediately apparent and exist at multiple levels simultaneously. Their subtle influence can lead to destructive consequences unexpectedly, and by the time the impact is realized, it may be too late to prevent market failure.

One of the main challenges in bridging the experience gap is that awareness diminishes higher up the organizational hierarchy . The root causes often lie at the top levels of management, where decision-makers may be disconnected from the day-to-day realities faced by customers and front-line employees. Conversely, employees on the lower rungs of the hierarchy, who interact directly with customers, are more acutely aware of the problems and gaps. However, they often lack the authority or means to address these issues due to organizational culture and constraints.

In this particular case, the support department was inundated with thousands of calls daily from customers struggling with the new app. Due to fragmented business processes and internal silos, support staff were unable to escalate or resolve these issues effectively. Their hands were tied by bureaucracy and a lack of responsiveness from higher management.

Internal Resistance to Change

As customer frustration grew, users faced issues that made it difficult to perform even the simplest everyday banking tasks. Instead of receiving assistance, customers were told by bank employees that they were "not the only ones struggling" and that the bank was currently focused on developing new features rather than fixing existing problems. This response further alienated customers, who felt their concerns were not being taken seriously.

Complicating matters further, the internal processes contributing to the experience gap were rooted in the same mechanisms that had previously facilitated the company's survival and growth. Organizational inertia, supported by entrenched beliefs and values, created resistance to recognizing and addressing the gap. Efforts to identify and close the experience gap were hindered by:

• Cultural Resistance : A company culture that did not prioritize customer feedback or frontline employee insights.
• Siloed Departments : Lack of communication and collaboration between departments, leading to fragmented efforts.
• Management Disconnect : Leadership that was out of touch with customer needs and employee feedback.

To effectively bridge the gap, the issue needed to be addressed at the management level . Without leadership acknowledging and prioritizing the problem, frontline employees remained powerless to enact meaningful change.

The 7 Specific Types of Experience Gaps in Banking CX / UX

According to Forrester's research top challenges to delivering a good CX are internal struggles: the lack of a cohesive strategy across teams (48%) and silos of various CX operations and functions across the organization (38%). The main experience gap may be caused by blindspots in one or several of the seven levels (culture, feedback, execution, design, value, brand promise, emotional connection) in the financial organization.

1. The Culture Gap

The lack of customer-centricity at the level of culture prevents employees from bringing service closer to customer expectations and causes a "culture gap". The processes and activities that contribute to customer-centricity in a company with a "culture gap" will not have priority and resources will not be allocated to them.

2. The Feedback Gap

Lack of data about customer expectations and their experience with a product or service creates a "gap of feedback". Here, financial companies often even collect the data but it's not analyzed and no action is taken to improve the situation.

3. The Design Gap

Even if a customer-centered approach is a priority and a large amount of data about customer expectations is collected, there could still be a gap concerning the design competence and methodology. Having the right expertise in place allows to build a high-quality ecosystem of digital products that will provide the best possible service according to customer needs.

4. The Execution Gap

This gap is associated with poor design execution. If user-centered product design is not a priority, decisions and efforts to create the final product and service are of low quality and efficiency. This determines the company's ability to create competitive services and products in the digital age.

5. The Value Gap

The value gap can form if the design ecosystem is not in compliance with user expectations at the five levels of the User Experience Value pyramid: functionality, usability, aesthetics, status, mission.

6. Gap of Overpromise

As my example with the bank demonstrates, if a company aggressively promotes its service, promising something that the product is not able to provide, it will lead to even higher disappointment in user expectations. As a result, the negative assessment of the service could double since the advertising promises don't meet reality.

7. Emotional Gap

If brand communication is purely informational, focused on functional features, then an emotional connection with users can't be formed. Since humans make decisions based on emotions, building service value on an emotional basis has a positive effect on customer expectations and the end user experience.

Detect Digital Customer Experience Gaps in Your Company

This survey is designed to help financial companies identify gaps in their digital customer experience. By assessing various aspects of your organization's culture, processes, and customer interactions, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Instructions:  For each statement below, please indicate your level of agreement based on the following scale:

1 -  Strongly Disagree 2 -  Disagree 3 -  Neutral 4 -  Agree 5 -  Strongly Agree

Scores 4 and 5  indicate strengths in that area.

Scores 1 and 2 suggest potential gaps that need addressing.

Section 1: Culture Gap

Purpose:  Assess the level of customer-centricity within your organization's culture.

• Our leadership emphasizes the importance of customer satisfaction in all business decisions.
• Employees at all levels prioritize customer needs over internal metrics.
• We foster a culture that encourages innovation to improve customer experience.
• Customer-centric values are embedded in our company's mission and values.
• Resources are primary allocated to initiatives that enhance customer experience.

Section 2: Feedback Gap

Purpose:  Evaluate how effectively your organization collects and utilizes customer feedback.

• We regularly collect customer feedback through surveys, interviews, or focus groups.
• Customer feedback is systematically analyzed and shared across departments.
• Action plans are developed based on customer feedback to improve services.
• We have easy-to-use channels for customers to provide feedback or report issues.
• Feedback from customers directly influences our product development and service improvements.

Section 3: Design Gap

Purpose:  Determine the effectiveness of your digital product design and UX methodologies.

• Our digital products are designed using user-centered design principles.
• We involve actual users during the design and testing phases of product development.
• Our design team has the expertise and tools needed to create high-quality user experiences.
• Usability testing is a standard part of our product development process.
• We have a clear design strategy that aligns with our brand and user expectations.

Section 4: Execution Gap

Purpose:  Assess the quality and efficiency of executing design and development projects.

• Projects are delivered on time and meet the defined quality standards.
• There is effective collaboration between design, development, and marketing teams.
• We have efficient UX tools and customer-centered processes in place to execute digital initiatives.
• Our team can quickly adapt to changes in project scope or market demands.
• We conduct regular reviews to improve our execution processes.

Section 5: Value Gap

Purpose:  Evaluate whether your products deliver value across all levels of the Value Pyramid.

• Our digital products fulfill the basic functional needs of our customers effectively.
• Users find our digital platforms intuitive and easy to navigate.
• The UX/UI design of our products enhances user engagement and satisfaction.
• Our products offer features that align with the needs, lifestyles, and aspirations of our target audience.
• We communicate a clear mission that resonates with our customers and inspires them.

Section 6: Overpromise Gap

Purpose:  Check if there's alignment between marketing promises and actual customer experience.

• Our marketing accurately reflects the capabilities of our products and services.
• Customers feel that our digital products meet or exceed their expectations.
• We avoid making unrealistic promises in our advertising campaigns.
• Marketing and product teams collaborate to ensure consistent messaging.
• We monitor customer satisfaction to ensure our promises align with their experiences.

Section 7: Emotional Gap

Purpose:  Assess the emotional connection between your brand and your customers.

• Our brand messaging evokes positive emotions in our customers.
• Customers feel a personal connection with our brand.
• We engage with customers on an emotional level, not just transactional.
• Our customer service interactions are empathetic and personalized.
• We foster a community where customers feel valued and connected.

By completing this survey, you will gain insights into areas where your organization excels and areas that may require improvement to enhance your digital customer experience. Analyzing the results can help you develop targeted strategies to close these gaps, leading to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business performance.

This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.

Banking Strategy, Digital and Transformation

Latest thinking in respect to Banking Strategy, Digital and Transformation. Harnessing our collective wisdom to make banking better. Ambrish Parmar

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Forrester’s US 2022 Customer Experience Index: Nearly 20% Of Brands See Drop In Customer Experience Quality

Brands’ lack of customer focus reverses CX momentum gained during the pandemic  

NASHVILLE, Tenn. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 6, 2022 — According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) US 2022 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) rankings, CX quality fell for 19% of brands in 2022 — the highest proportion of brands to drop in one year since the inception of the survey. In addition, CX quality has fallen back to early 2020 levels, reversing gains made in 2021. The drop stems from companies’ waning focus on customers even though customers expect more from digital and hybrid experiences. In 2022, only 3% of US companies are customer-obsessed — putting customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations — a decrease of 7 percentage points from the prior year.  

Industries such as airlines, auto manufacturers, and hotels suffered losses in their average CX Index scores, brought on, in part, by environmental factors like rising costs, supply issues, and staffing shortages. The investment industry is the only industry to see CX improvement in 2022. This year’s elite brands — the top 5% of brands in the entire CX Index — had a 15-point advantage over others in providing emotionally positive experiences for customers. Elite brands include Chewy.com, Navy Federal Credit Union, USAA, Etsy, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, HEB, Edward Jones, and Trader Joe’s.  

Emotion continues to be a key driver for delivering high levels of CX performance. Fifty-four percent of customers who report positive emotions like feeling happy, valued, and appreciated are willing to forgive brands that make mistakes. Also, the quality of brand interactions is integral to building customer trust. In 2022, an average of 59% of customers trust the brands they interact with, 2 percentage points higher than the 57% of customers who trusted brands in 2020.  

“CX quality in the US, which reached new heights in 2021, has fallen to pre-pandemic levels due to brands losing their customer focus,” said Rick Parrish, VP and research director at Forrester. “This is unfortunate for businesses that survived the worst of the pandemic but are now losing CX-driven customer loyalty gains. For brands to regain CX momentum, leaders will need to refocus their behavior on helping their companies become customer-obsessed.”  

Conducted for the seventh year in a row, Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, which collects data to calculate Forrester CX Index scores, is based on more than 96,000 US customers across 221 brands and 13 industries. Forrester’s proprietary Customer Experience Index methodology provides the data and insights needed to assess CX quality, understand how CX impacts loyalty intentions, and prioritize improvements that drive revenue. Even a minor improvement to a brand’s customer experience quality can add tens of millions of dollars of revenue by reducing customer churn and increasing share of wallet. Forrester’s Customer Experience CX Index rankings and results reports are accessible within the Forrester Decisions portfolio of research services. Clients of Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience and Forrester Decisions for B2C Marketing Executives have access to the CX Index Extended Data Benchmark to help prioritize improvements based on industrywide trends and impact on customer loyalty.

Resources:  

• Read more about the results of Forrester’s US 2022 CX Index.  
• Download Forrester’s US 2022 CX Index report and learn more about what’s causing brands’ drops in CX quality (client access required).  
• Visit here to learn how firms can evaluate their existing CX and improve upon it.  
• Learn about Forrester Decisions for customer experience leaders.  

About Forrester Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We help leaders across technology, marketing, customer experience, product, and sales functions use customer obsession to accelerate growth. Through Forrester’s proprietary research, consulting, and events, leaders from around the globe are empowered to be bold at work — to navigate change and put their customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations. Our unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; 70 million real-time feedback votes; and the shared wisdom of our clients. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.  

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25 Inspiring Customer Experience Quotes to Elevate Your CX Strategy

Estimated Reading Time : 6 mins

Customer Experience is the new business battleground. As a digital-first lifestyle offers hyper-personalized, effortless experiences, customers expect engaging journeys across business interactions. This demands that you invest in building a CX-first culture, but how can you add one more priority without impacting your budget or current operations?

Here’s the good news: Taking inspiration from top customer experience quotes and building a CX culture doesn’t require you to disrupt what’s working for your business. It is a parallel pursuit that can enhance processes, optimize your operations for results, and lead to stronger customer relationships. At a business level, strong CX is key to aligning spending to customer-centricity, revenue increase, and business growth.

Why you should care about inspiring customer experience quotes

Are you a leader just starting on your CX-building journey or a manager struggling to meet your CX goals? Customer experience quotes from successful leaders can be the catalyst you need. They can offer valuable insights for CX goal setting, motivating employees to see the big CX picture. They can also help you understand what’s missing in your current CX approach.

For instance, you might have all the tools for powerful CX management. Yet, you might be unable to move the needle on CX metrics. The right inspirational customer experience quote might help you to reflect on what’s missing, like a clear purpose.

Similarly, if you have a clear CX vision but one that deviates from real-time customer needs, then again, a powerful quote can remind everyone on the team why customer-centricity matters.

Top 10 inspiring customer experience quotes

Cx quote #1.

This serves as a powerful quote in a digital-first environment where businesses are leading with the product.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs

CX Quote #2

Just the quote when you want to make a case about how customer-centricity ensures long-term profitability.

“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” — Jeff Bezos

CX Quote #3

A truly inspiring customer experience quote that makes the point in simple words.

“Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.” — Bill Gates

CX Quote #4

This client experience quote is a great starting point when dealing with too many questions on how to get started with CX.

“Make the customer the hero of your story.” — Anne Handley

CX Quote #5

Customer Experience is already playing out. This quote tells us why we cannot afford to delay transforming it into exceptional CX.

“The best way to control your customer experience is to intentionally create it.” – Elle Robertson

CX Quote #6

Aligning to customer needs is the first step to a stellar customer experience.

“Stop selling, start helping.” – Zig Zaglar

CX Quote #7

The best products and services in the world demand customer-centricity to ensure a viable business.

“Everything we do starts with the customer.” – Mark Parker

CX Quote #8

This inspiring customer experience quote reminds us how to make CX a priority despite budget challenges.

“We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing.” – Tony Hsieh

CX Quote #9

This client experience quote reminds us why it is important to measure customer experience beyond traditional metrics .

“The feeling our customers have when they leave our stores determines how soon they’ll be back.” – Sam Walton

CX Quote #10

If you are having trouble getting your team to adopt a customer-first culture , this quote will nail it.

“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie

Top 10 customer experience quotes about customer service

Customer service is the first step to a memorable customer experience. As a business leader, you cannot achieve exceptional CX without flawless customer service, each time. This demands that you inspire everyone on the team to deliver customer service with a singular goal – elevate the customer experience. Even as you put together an ecosystem that enables them to deliver such service, introducing and reiterating inspiring customer service quotes can go a long way. They can remind your team of the value iconic leaders have attached to the hard work being put in by them.

“Always deliver more than expected.” – Larry Page

“I think it is very important to have a feedback loop, where you are constantly thinking about what you have done and how you could be doing it better.” – Elon Musk

“Every great business is built on friendship.” – J.C.Penney

“The customer isn’t always right but he is the customer.” – Henry Ford

“The purpose of a business is to create customers.” – Peter Drucker

“Customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.” – John Jantsch

“Never start a business just to make money. Start a business to make a difference.” – Ratan Tata

“Opportunities lie in the place where complaints are.” – Jack Ma

“Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.” – Lauren Freedman

“Customer service is not a cost center. It is a revenue generator.” – Micah Solomon

Top 5 customer experience quotes about customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is the impact every business leader strives for when investing in CX management. Introduce your team to top customer experience quotes related to customer loyalty. This can help them see the value in orchestrating a unified customer experience that enhances customer loyalty and lifecycle value. When delivered consistently, delightful customer experiences can bring down your cost of acquisition, drive organic customer retention and referrals, and transform brand value.

“Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.” – Janet Robinson

“It is not your customer’s job to remember you, it is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.” – Patricia Fripp

“There is a big difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer.” – Shep Hyken

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter

“It takes months to find a customer… seconds to lose one.” – Jeffrey Gitomer

Identifying customer experience quotes that resonate with customers

A key differentiator in how effective leaders align to inspiring customer experience quotes is this: They spend time understanding which quotes best strike a chord with their high-paying customers before internalizing them. This allows them to identify their customers’ unique expectations and deliver the same. By leveraging intelligent CX feedback ecosystems , CX leaders discover the top customer quotes that clients expect brands to bring alive for them. They follow this up by curating these to define CX priorities for the team.

For instance, your customers may align with quotes about resolving complaints over those about forging deeper connections. This lets you focus your CX inspiration exercise around a resolution-first approach. Similarly, when you probe customer sentiment around loyalty, it lets you understand gaps and the ideal CX quote to stir team progress.

What are the most inspiring customer experience quotes?

Which cx quotes resonate most with industry leaders, how can customer experience quotes be used to motivate teams.

Inspiring customer experience quotes from top leaders can motivate teams in more ways than one. Firstly, they validate the need to offer great customer experience; if iconic leaders have said it, their words hold value. Additionally, they can serve as powerful reminders at high-intensity customer experience touchpoints. Lastly, they help bring a greater sense of conviction to your customer experience framework and goals.

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