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

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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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What is CX?

You might have an intuitive sense of what separates good CX, or customer experience, from bad. Imagine, say, you want a latte. When you visit the coffee shop, are staff members attentive? If you are a regular, do they greet you by your name? Was the store designed intuitively? Do they take your order promptly and hand you your cup with a smile? If you have a problem, is it promptly resolved, or is someone sent to help you? Do they proactively reach out to understand your overall experience?

All of those questions touch on elements of customer experience. The four components of CX are brand, product, price, and service.

Basically, CX refers to everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers. And it’s crucial in an age when how a business delivers for its customers is just as important as—if not more important than—the products and services it provides. In a digital world, where customers review and share their experiences with a company in public forums, it has become vital for companies to connect with customers across their journeys at an emotional level. Not only is customer experience the right thing to do for customers but it also results in 3x returns to shareholders .

The COVID-19 pandemic was a test of how to connect with customers in times of crisis . And many did surprisingly well in providing good CX, for instance, by swiftly reorienting their efforts to meet customers’ primary needs with respect to safety, security, and everyday convenience. Take, for example, e-commerce companies and food delivery services that developed methods of contactless delivery to keep customers and drivers safe as the virus spread.

This article offers a brief overview of customer experience-related topics and answers questions such as:

What are customer journeys?

How to measure customer experience, what is the consumer decision journey, what is customer care, how to improve customer experience.

A customer journey  describes the customer’s end-to-end experience, as opposed to their satisfaction at various individual transactions or touchpoints. These can include many things that occur before, during, or after the customer experiences a given product or service. Examples of customer journeys include bringing a new customer on board, resolving a technical issue, or upgrading a product.

Consider onboarding a new customer. At one company , this process took about three months and on average entailed nine phone calls, a technician visit, and interactions via both the web and mail. While there was a 90 percent chance, at any given touchpoint, of the interaction going well, average customer satisfaction fell nearly 40 percent over the course of the journey. More important than solving issues at the level of individual touchpoints was to reimagine the approach to service operations  around the most crucial CX journeys.

Attending to full customer journeys instead of touchpoints can drive stronger business outcomes. For instance, a McKinsey survey  found that customer satisfaction with health insurance is 73 percent more likely when the entire journey works well than when only touchpoints do. Looking to the hospitality industry, customers of hotels that get the entire customer journey right may be 61 percent more willing to recommend those hotels than customers of hotels that just focus on touchpoints.

If your company is looking to reinvigorate its customer experience, three efforts can help you move from touchpoints to journeys :

• Observe. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: What do they see? This can help organize and mobilize employees around customer needs. In addition to identifying and understanding the customer’s journey, you’ll need to quantify what matters to customers and define a clear aspiration and common purpose.
• Shape. When you design customer experiences, interactions must be reshaped into different sequences. Even if your effort starts small, it can swiftly become much larger and entail the digitization of processes, the reorientation of company culture, and nimble refinements in the field.
• Perform. Making the transition to prioritize journeys can be a journey in itself that takes years and requires deep engagement from everyone in the company, from corporate leaders right down to the front line.

Learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales  and Operations  practices.

You might have a hard time imagining how you measure something as ephemeral as the magic your company creates for customers. But it can be done. Best practice calls for three guiding principles to help optimize customer-experience measurement :

• Measure the customer experience at the journey level, rather than at the level of touchpoints or overall satisfaction.
• Invest in hardwired technology that captures feedback on a daily basis from multiple channels, integrating survey results and other data into comprehensive dashboards.
• Cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement at all levels.

Depending on the level of CX adoption within an organization, consider the power of predicting CX , which can help you stay ahead of customer churn and dissatisfaction. Why? Survey-based systems alone don’t necessarily meet the needs of today’s companies; they’re limited, reactive, ambiguous, and unfocused. Predictive customer insight may unlock more powerful insights to improve customer experiences.

The consumer decision journey  (CDJ) is a reconceptualization of the traditional marketing funnel. In this approach, the way customers make decisions is framed as a circular process involving four phases where customers can be gained or lost:

• initial consideration
• active evaluation, or the process of researching potential purchases
• closure, when consumers buy brands
• postpurchase, when consumers experience those brands

And conceptions of the consumer decision journey continue to evolve , especially in light of the new technologies and capabilities available to consumers. Today, it is important for brands not only to react to customers but also to actively shape their decision journeys. This may mean compressing or even eliminating the consideration and evaluation phases to drive competitive advantage . To foster an accelerated customer loyalty journey , four distinct but interconnected capabilities are crucial:

• Automation can be used to streamline the customer journey (for example, being able to snap a photo of a check and deposit it via your bank’s app rather than physically visiting a bank branch).
• Proactive personalization uses a customer’s information to instantly customize CX.
• Contextual interaction uses knowledge about where a customer is in a journey to deliver them to the next set of interactions.
• Journey innovation finds new sources of value, such as new services, for both the customer and the brand. This involves companies mining their data and insights about customers to figure out what other services they might appreciate. The best companies also design customer decision journeys that allow open-ended testing and frequent prototyping of new services or features.

Learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales  practice.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

Customer care generally happens within contact-center operations. These are sometimes referred to as call centers, and people working at these organizations support customers throughout their journeys with a company’s products or services—no matter where customers need help (in-store, online, via mobile apps, etcetera). This is as all part of providing an omnichannel customer experience. Contact centers play an important role in customer care, and a forward-looking vision for these centers could entail hyperpersonalization to meet customers’ expectations  in a way that’s both strategic and experience oriented.

How has COVID-19 changed customer experience?

COVID-19 changed customer experience in several ways. Many companies needed to shift the ways they worked with customers, for example, by providing alternative digital experiences when it was not safe for physical stores to be open. More broadly, how your company interacted with customers throughout the pandemic may have triggered an immediate and lingering effect on customers’ sense of trust and loyalty. In times of crisis, meeting customer needs with empathy, care, concern, and connection is important. It can help frame short-term responses, build longer-term resilience, and prepare for success after a crisis passes by keeping a pulse on how preferences are changing in real time. And it’s worth noting that more than three-quarters of consumers changed their buying habits  during the pandemic—and in addition to value and convenience, purpose also drives shopping decisions.

What does digital customer experience mean?

Digital customer experience refers to elements of the experience that happen online or with the support of digital and analytics. This can facilitate interactions that are holistic, predictive, prioritized, and focused on value.

Consider the example of a leading airline that built a machine-learning system to track and prioritize customers  who might choose a different carrier because they experienced multiple flight delays or other issues. The system, built in three months, drove an 800 percent increase in customer satisfaction and also reduced churn for priority customers by 60 percent.

When it comes to digital customer experience, companies are increasingly aiming to transition to predictive insights that could represent the future of CX . Some CX leaders are pushing on predictive CX platforms, which consist of three key elements:

• a customer-level data lake, with customer, financial, and operational data to develop a rigorous understanding of customer experiences
• predictive customer scores using analytics that track what’s influencing customer satisfaction and business performance
• an action and insight engine that’s shared with a broad set of employees, via tools such as customer-relationship-management platforms, through an API layer

These platforms can play a powerful role in linking CX to value and building clear business cases to improve CX. Of course, companies must stay attuned to customers and the privacy imperative . And it will also be crucial to build security into the digital customer experience .

Learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales , Digital McKinsey , and Risk & Resilience  practices.

What about customer experience and loyalty?

If you offer a good CX, chances are your customers will be loyal to you or your brand. But that doesn’t happen without real effort. “Consumers are changing, and consumer trends are driving this,” says former McKinsey partner Jess Huang on the new generation of customer loyalty programs . “With the move to digital over the last ten years, consumers are spending more and more time on their phones and various digital channels. This makes it much easier to access the consumer, but there is also a lot more noise. Brands are trying to figure out the right way to break through that noise and develop a relationship with the consumer.”

Loyalty programs are vital to doing so, but two-thirds of them fail to deliver. Focusing on eight elements  can help your loyalty programs perform better:

• Don’t be afraid to offer customers incentives to redeem their loyalty points.
• Consider the customer segments where there’s “breakage” (people whose points expire), and think about potential opportunities for improvement.
• Enlist strategic partners to enhance offers and rewards.
• Offer points-plus-cash options.
• Measure success based on engagement, not just accruals.
• Segment customers into groups you can handle.
• Personalize test-and-learn across customer segments.
• Create a standard P&L to accurately measure the incremental impact of loyalty programs.

Is customer experience the same in B2B and B2C contexts?

Much of CX in B2B isn’t the same as in B2C. Here’s why :

• relationships often go deeper in B2B
• longer, more complex B2B journeys involve more individuals
• customization is more widespread in B2B than B2C
• the stakes are usually higher in B2B deals, as individual B2B customer relationships are often worth millions of dollars

Nevertheless, more B2B customers say they would like a better customer experience—one that is more  like those of B2C customers. And in complex B2B sectors like industrial services—think aftermarket service contracts  for jet engines, industrial robots, or utility-transmission equipment— better customer experience is increasingly critical for growth . In a survey of 1,000 B2B decision makers, lack of speed in interactions with their suppliers emerged as the number-one “pain point” and was mentioned twice as often as price.

Keeping a finger on the B2B pulse can help you understand and respond to emerging B2B customer needs , especially in light of the shift to omnichannel . Adjusting your approach for the mix of traditional, remote, and self-service sales channels is increasingly important—and 94 percent of B2B decision makers  say new omnichannel sales model are as effective or more effective than prepandemic sales models. For even more, here’s a case study  of how a B2B organization in China became more customer-centric.

How do different industries approach customer experience?

Because customer needs and expectations vary by context, different industries may approach CX in different ways. Here are just a few examples of how industries grapple with the issues:

• Automotive. Car companies are putting customer experience in the driver’s seat —whereas manufacturers once competed on their engineering capabilities, CX is now a true differentiator, and customer-centric innovation is crucial.
• Travel. The COVID-19 pandemic turned travel upside down, and travelers’ customer experience is emerging as a challenge during the recovery. Doing better could entail aiming higher on experience, understanding customers more deeply, and moving faster operationally.
• Retail. Retail and consumer CX likely needs to account for a variety of omnichannel operational considerations . Retailers also need to stay attuned to the rise of the inclusive consumer  and make adjustments to serve their needs. And preparing for the future of shopping , where technology is everywhere, will also be important.
• Banking. CX transformation in banking  can pay off by delighting customers and, in turn, delivering revenue and cost improvements for banks themselves. And in regions like Asia–Pacific, digital innovation in banking offers some insight on whether or how banks should rethink customer engagement . Keeping up with customer trends can also unearth new opportunities, for instance, as we’ve seen with buy now, pay later  financing models. Fintech players may be on the vanguard when it comes to taking the friction out of financial services  for customers.
• Insurance. Many insurers have invested heavily  in digitizing customer journeys and processes to improve the experience. A user-first, omnichannel approach could rely on the availability of online purchasing capabilities, the ease of navigating online journeys, and seamless integration of sales support and advice. The rise of insurtechs  has also helped the industry address some customer pain points.
• Healthcare. In coming months and years, “Care at Home” could reshape the way health systems deliver patient-centered care . The rise of telehealth could also affect CX in healthcare . Focusing on whole-person care  could improve outcomes for patients with behavioral-health conditions. Monitoring healthcare consumer insights  will remain important, and providing compassionate, personalized care  can benefit both patients and healthcare organizations.
• Utilities. Transforming CX in utilities  helps customers and can allow utilities themselves to drive out costs. Self-service and digital channels are crucial in this context.
• Government. Prioritizing and improving customer experience in government  can offer big benefits for customers. It can also give employees greater purpose—and improve agencies’ reputations.
• Service businesses. Are customers of industrial-services businesses happy? The bar is rising, but for industrial OEM customer experience , organizations will need to better understand what customers want and need.

What are the differences between customer experience and employee experience?

While the design thinking that transformed customer experience is now also transforming employee experience (EX) , there are some differences between the two:

• A customer journey is often a lot quicker than an employee journey. It might take months or even up to a year for employers to hire a new employee. That’s a lot longer than most customer journeys.
• Many employers’ interactions with their employees continue to be top-down instead of being a constant, two-way iterative process—as successful customer journeys have become. For instance, while many companies are exploring hybrid work options, others are considering a full return to the office, even though many of their employees would prefer to continue working from home.

But happy employees are crucial to providing good CX—meaning that CX and EX are related. In that regard, improving employee experience in service of building a customer-centric culture  can have a powerful effect. Just consider how much mindsets matter here: some employees, for instance, might think, “I’m not involved in asking for customer feedback.” But in a customer-centric culture, reframing that so employees feel empowered to create opportunities to ask for customer feedback can pay dividends.

Learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales , People & Organizational Performance , and  Operations  practices.

Three building blocks are essential in transforming or improving customer experience  throughout your organization:

• Build aspiration and purpose. A clearly defined CX aspiration should deliver on your company’s purpose and brand promise. Have you developed a customer-centric vision and aspiration, linked it to value, and translated it into a concrete road map?
• Transform the business. Here’s where you discover customer needs, design solutions, and deliver impact, whether that’s via customer journeys, products, services, or business models.
• Enable the transformation. After introducing a new experience for customers, your company needs to consider how to sustain its efforts. This involves transforming employee mindsets; building capabilities; stepping up on technology, data, and analytics; establishing cross-functional governance and an agile operating model; and deploying systems to measure and manage performance.

Improving customer experience can make a big difference. In over a decade of helping more than 900 companies design and implement enterprise-wide CX programs, approaches that rest on these building blocks  have delivered 15 to 20 percent boosts in sales conversion rates, 20 to 50 percent reductions in service costs, and 10 to 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction.

It’s also important to stay attuned to customer experience pitfalls  so your organization can avoid them. These include failing to link CX to value, taking a narrow view of CX, and applying limited creativity; don’t miss the examples of how other organizations have sidestepped these issues in transforming CX.

For more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Customer Experience  collection. Learn more about the Marketing & Sales , Operations , and McKinsey Digital  Practices, and check out customer experience–related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced include:

• “ Six customer experience pitfalls to avoid ,” March 17, 2022, Itai Miller, Kevin Neher , Rens van den Broek, and Tom Wintering
• “ Next in loyalty: Eight levers to turn customers into fans ,” October 12, 2021, José Carluccio, Oren Eizenman, and Phyllis Rothschild
• “ This time it’s personal: Shaping the ‘new possible’ through employee experience ,” September 30, 2021, Jonathan Emmett, Asmus Komm , Stefan Moritz , and Friederike Schultz
• “ How to boost growth in industrial services: Better customer experience ,” July 28, 2021, Hugues Lavandier , Senthil Muthiah, Kevin Neher , Stephanie Trottier, and Hyo Yeon
• “ Prediction: The future of CX ,” February 24, 2021, Rachel Diebner, David Malfara, Kevin Neher , Mike Thompson, and Maxence Vancauwenberghe
• “ The three building blocks of successful customer-experience transformations ,” October 27, 2020, Victoria Bough , Ralph Breuer , Nicolas Maechler , and Kelly Ungerman
• “ The human touch at the center of customer-experience excellence ,” October 8, 2020, Alex Camp, Harald Fanderl , Nimish Jain , Bob Sternfels , and Ryter von Difloe
• “ The CEO guide to customer experience ,” McKinsey Quarterly , August 17, 2016, includes interviews with Alfonso Pulido , Ron Ritter, and Ewan Duncan
• “ The consumer decision journey ,” McKinsey Quarterly , June 1, 2009, David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik

Want to know more about CX?

Related articles.

Six customer experience pitfalls to avoid

Next in loyalty: Eight levers to turn customers into fans

Prediction: The future of CX

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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. 

Related Articles

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Call 1-800-553-8159 to learn more about five9.

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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.

Mastery Customer Experience: Strategy, Metrics, Research

Looking to create a customer experience clients will love and spread the word about to others?

Want your product to deliver value customers won’t imagine replacing with other solutions on the market? Every business owner knows that if you want to continue to grow your company and allow it to prosper, you have to offer an excellent customer experience .

Don't worry, we gonna help you with this.

There are multiple touchpoints and they all affect the overall experience. One problem can sometimes ruin a positive experience and cause a person to choose one of your competitors instead of you or a loyal customer to leave you.

Providing high quality of customer experience is not only a popular trend but also something customers expect from you.

With the growing number of companies offering similar products and services, providing great CX can become your competitive advantage and help you acquire new customers through referrals.

In this article, you will learn:

• What is Customer Experience? (+definitions by real CEOs & CX Leaders)

6 Reasons Why Customer Experience Matters

Basic rules of creating a good customer experience, how to create customer experience journey maps, how to create a customer experience strategy, 5 metrics to track for customer experience, how to get the most of customer experience research.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience (CX) is a sum of all experiences people have with your company – from seeing your ads, through visiting your website and talking to the support team, to becoming a customer and experiencing all post-purchase services. Now, by all means – that 100 % true.

But, being in the customer experience game ourselves, we’re not entirely satiated. At least not just yet.

We craved for a more personal take on the matter, and so we’ve reached out to CEOs & CX leaders including Hiten Shah (FYI) and Kevin Scheper (Drift), to reveal how they define customer experience.

Each and every answer below will let you in on how you yourself can think of customer experience beyond its formal definition.

Customer Experience Definition – CEOs & CX Leaders Perspective

Customer experience is a combination of copywriting, design, and the actual product.

"Customer experience is a combination of copywriting, design, and the actual product you create for your customers. In order to create an amazing customer experience, you need to deeply understand your customer’s most painful problems in addition to their motivations and psychology.

The more you know about your customers, the better the customer experience you can create for them. One that they can’t live without.

There is no other way, you have to be obsessed with your customers with the goal of providing the best possible experience for them. Something they can’t help but tell their friends about."

– Hiten Shah , Co-Founder at FYI , Crazy Egg , and KISSmetrics

Customer experience is a two-way street

"Most often, I see 'customer experience' being used to label an effort to design a beautiful and cohesive customer journey or simply to describe a customer support team.

The problem with the former is that it is tempting to boil the ocean and difficult to measure the ROI for any of it. The problem with the latter is that a support transaction represents only one element of a customer's overall interactions with a company.

I prefer to think about customer experience more practically. It's about empathy.

‍ Internally, we talk about teams - sales, success, product, etc. From the customer's perspective, it just you, the company.

Coordinating information, processes, and actions across all these teams so that customers have a cohesive and predictable experience is the bottom line goal with CX design. Obviously, there is a lot that goes into making this work well, but there are plenty of straightforward and non-controversial investments you can make.

Ultimately, it should look like this:

You treat your customers as partners. You take the time to know your customer so that you can anticipate their needs and be helpful when things don't go as planned. You are confident enough to guide your customer to use your product the "right way" and you are humble enough to learn from your customer when they give you feedback about that "right way.""

– Kevin Scheper , VP of Customer Success at Drift

Customer experience means creating super fans through partnerships

"Customer experience is one of the most vital elements to your business success. It affects your brand, your revenue, and your growth rates.

What customer experience means to Bonjoro, is creating super fans . Creating brand advocates.

What customer experience means to our team is building a "human" connection with our audience, trying to go above and beyond, and provide an experience that leaves people wanting to talk to their friends about it.

How do we do that? Personal video emails. Physical cards around the holidays. Congratulating clients on milestones. Coaching and supporting people on strategy, not just product adoption.

Customer experience is about creating a partnership, not just a transaction."

– Casey Hill , Growth Manager at Bonjoro

CX is about encouraging feedback and taking it all in

"I define great customer experience as one that requires encouraging feedback and taking it all in . I like to ask our customers for their feedback and encourage them to leave us reviews on sites like Yelp or our social media accounts.

We listen to everything our customers have to say and work hard to implement any necessary changes to create more and more satisfying customer experiences."

– Deborah Sweeney , CEO at MyCorporation.com

CX is more than just 'what' or 'how' – it's a 'why'.

"The customer experience is more than a what or how, it's a why . Why should your customers go to you for your product? Why not another company? Why are you different? What do they feel when they see your logo, interact with your website, a person, receive the product, etc.?

If you can answer these questions in-depth, you are well on your way to creating a customer experience that is cohesive and portraying what you want."

– Paul Farmer , VP Marketing at Woodtex

CX means: "Give me what, when, and how I want it, and don't tick me off"

Give me what i want.

Whether it's the appropriate data fields in 'Sort' and 'Filter' or the best product at the best price, I want to find the product I desire quickly. Give it to me in less than 3 clicks.

When I want it

‍ Not to inject my selfish inner ego, but I will want it when I want it.

I may wake this morning to be on the Keto diet only to be pushed into a decadent donut by 11 AM in order to secure a new client. As a consumer, I don't always know when I want something unless it's a planned purchase.

E-commerce companies in the kid's clothing market, for example, have an easier time marketing to parents. If Mom purchases an organic cotton onesie in size 0-3mos, the logical next trigger email will be for Mom to purchase size 3-6mos.

Other industries such as women's high-fashion footwear may have to prey on the psychodynamics of the unexpected breakup or general 'bad day'.

This is the wildcard, so businesses - be prepared.

Businesses won't understand this until they examine troves of analytics and navigation patterns. Also, they may never know that Sara bought a new pair of Sam Edelman strappy sandals after a bad day at the office.

How I want it

‍ I love a mobile app that gives me notifications only when they are relevant to me.

I love a cute notification from TikTok when my 14-year old niece is doing something weird and I love old school emails from the Pet Adoption 501c3 down the street.

As a consumer and an e-commerce junky, I want businesses to listen to me by tracking my shopping patterns, frequency rates, abandoned carts, device logons and more. That way, you can send me smart emails that tell me exactly when the new Gucci belt is on discount on The RealReal.

Don't tick me off

‍ Is live chat really live chat if you're chatting with a bot?

Let me checkout as a guest. Let me unsubscribe quickly. Let me call and speak to a human.

I'm the first to download the latest 'E-commerce Trends White Paper', but when I sign up to receive such collateral, I am not signing up to receive daily emails or phone calls or text messages.

I don't mind the once-off cold call, but don't take up my precious iMessages with unwanted spam."

– Kathryn Kerrigan , Owner at KS5 Consulting

Customer experience is about enjoyment based on customers' opinions

"Customer experience is no longer about customer satisfaction – that was the low bar that businesses used to strive for when 'over promise and under deliver' was a standard business practice.

A competitive customer experience today is about authenticity, transparency, ease-of-use, saving time, quality of life, and enjoyment based on the customer's opinions, not a company's opinions. "

– Tara J. Kinney , CEO at Atomic Revenue

CX has two dimensions – table-stakes & maximizing the "wow" moment

"We think of customer experience across two dimensions.

The first is table-stakes. More specifically, does our product meet the customer's expectations and solve their problem?

The second dimension, in our eyes, is about maximizing the "wow" moments. Essentially, these are the moments in the customer journey where they realize that our product is something special (and become evangelists).

Interestingly, we've found the other opportunity to create "wow" moments is when we mess up. Specifically, we've found that by going above and beyond to correct a problem quickly and be transparent with customers about what happened. We can actually create a level of trust above and beyond what was there prior to the problem.

I certainly wouldn't advocate making mistakes on purpose (ha!), but it happens to all companies. And when it does, there really is truth to the maxim: 'Never let a good crisis go to waste' ."

– Aaron Rubens , CEO at Kudoboard

Every touchpoint a user has with your company IS the customer experience

"Customer experience and user touchpoints are one of the primary ways in which a brand can communicate and solidify who they are in the minds of their customers.

The majority of our clients are SaaS and other tech companies, and I always tell them that CX is not JUST your product .

How did they find you? What was that experience like? Were you a breath of fresh air? Were you the answer to their pain points? What was the experience of learning about you like? Was it easy and straightforward? How was their first interaction with you?

Each and every touchpoint a user has with your company IS the customer experience. Every touchpoint tells your brand's story."

– Nathan Hall , CEO at SimpleStory

CX is about everything that led up to the conversion, and the experience afterwards

"Customer experience requires a holistic approach, which is increasingly complex. Luckily, there are new software tools available to help us manage the customer journey because we all know it's not about the destination, but the process.

To that end, customer experience isn't about the transaction or conversion. It's about everything that led up to that moment, the purchase itself, and their experience forever afterward.

‍ If you treat your customers as well or better than when they were prospects, your sales funnel becomes cyclical, churn and CAC decrease, and both team and customer morale shoot upward."

– Reuben Yonatan , Founder & CEO at GetVOIP

Customer experience means focusing on customer pain points

"Customer experience means focusing on customer pain points in order to provide the best experience possible. What problems are customers facing when trying to order? How can you make ordering as streamlined as possible? Those are included in the countless questions I ask when providing the best customer service.I create an empathy ma p of my customer with how they think and feel, what they hear and say and their pains and gains are. This helps me get inside my customer's shoes and understand them better. I then do a service design blueprint to document my customer's journey through the process of purchasing items in my store.Other methods include using the Lucky Orange heat maps to see where the customer is clicking the most on my store's websites. I learn how I can optimize my store's landing page to appease the customer and provide better conversions."

– Rebecca Beach , eCommerce Owner at MomBeach.com

CX is about having empathy and making sure your customers feel "wowed"

"Being customer-centric is not just trying to help the customer; it's going the extra mile.

Have empathy and passion around ensuring that your customers walk away from their experience with you our someone on your team feeling 'wowed'.

This needs to be the case whether or not their problem was solved. The pursuit of ‘wowing' your customer will always win. "

– Jamey Vumback , CEO & Founder at Get The Referral

CX is success beyond all the price wars

"Today’s global marketplace is extremely competitive and full of price wars that have deteriorated profits. Savvy businesses have now turned to customer experience as a way to acquire and retain customers. Especially because there is no room to continue lowering prices.

What is customer experience all about? For me, positive customer experience is when:

• the purchasing process is simple. Ideally easier than what was expected.
• it puts a smile on the customers face. The bigger the better
• it gets customers talking about their experience amongst their network. They become your advocate because they can find no fault in their experience with your company. Shows how rare good service is these days.

The tricky part is delivering great service when internal resources have already been stretched to their limits due to price slashing. If customers want great service, they should understand that it often comes at a cost to the service provider."

– Liz Hughes , Director at Blue Bamboo

Customer experience is what keeps people coming back

"Most companies offer some level of customer service. Few deliver an unmatched customer experience.

Customer service often includes a wait-for-the-customer-to-come-to-you approach—aka the bare minimum required to get by.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is what keeps people coming back.

Customer experience is the entire process a customer goes through when using your product. It starts the moment they type your web address and hit enter, and from there, the process never really ends.

The customer experience includes the product they buy and use every day, the support you provide when something goes wrong, and determines if and when they will do business with you in the future. In sum, customer experience is everything.

When we started EVAN360, we were focused on the experience our customers would have with our platform. The platform itself was secondary.

In fact, the entire reason we created EVAN360 was because of the poor customer experience provided by our competition. We saw how they failed in the area of customer support, so that’s where we zeroed in.

‍ Anyone can create, market, and sell a product. Providing an excellent, customer-centric experience is a whole different ballgame.

‍ No matter how innovative a product, if a company can’t deliver quality support and consider customers first, customers will look to a company that can. Those are the companies that will last."

– Todd Boutte , President of Technology & Operations at EVAN360

Customer experience is about creating a relationship instead of a transaction

"The traditional definition is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your products and services. But there's so much more to it than that.

Emotions and Perceptions play a significant role in how a customer feels about an organization's products and services(...). It's not about their interaction with a salesperson or customer service agent. It's about the brand promise, packaging, communications, delivery, invoicing, etc.

What distinguishes the great CX companies from all the rest is their ability to anticipate needs and intentionally design experiences based on those needs and expectations.

‍ CX is about not only each step in a customer's journey with your organization. It's also about whether or not you've created a relationship instead of a transaction.

‍ From a company's perspective, it's how CX can provide a balanced scorecard of performance - so, it isn't just an NPS score. It's how all these interactions align with the company's objectives and, yes, profit! There, I said it. That's why businesses exist – to make a profit – and CX must support that objective."

– Bob Azman , Chairman of the Board, CXPA and Founder & CXO, Innovative CX Solutions, LLC.

Customer experience is about listening to customers and suggesting solutions

"Customer experience is how much genuine care the company shows to the consumers, regardless of whether they buy from them or not. It's about listening to the customer needs, then suggesting products or services that will solve their problem, even if those things are sold by competitors.

‍ When a business shares the customer's best interest, not being too concerned over making money, you can bet the brand will be loved by people .

One of the reasons I personally like Best Buy, for instance, is because of the true customer care I feel while inside their shops, including one time when they've actually suggested I purchase from a 3rd party rather than from their store."

– Hassan Alnassir , Founder & Owner at Size Graf

CX is the way a customer feels when they hear my brand's name

I define the customer experience as the way a customer feels when they hear my [brand's] name. The foundation of this is built with every interaction with my brand, from the way they were treated, all the way down to how my brand smells (literally).

I believe that Starbucks is a perfect example of this. They have created an experience where individuals feel they “need” their product when having a bad day !

Even as a SAAS/e-commerce company you can create this same experience, even having a smell (send direct mail thanking them and scent the package) by being authentic, proactive, supportive, collaborative, understanding, and consistent."

– Dwayne Vera , Founder at Sales Legend Academy

Customer experience is guiding the customer to say "Wow, that was SIMPLE and USEFUL"

I define customer experience as the most efficient and best way of guiding the user, customer, or visitor to say "Wow. That was simple and helpful."

I challenge all teams that I work with to focus on driving and eliciting that response from users, customers, and visitors of your product, service, business, or company.

As busy as everyone's lives are, people are looking for a quick, simple, helpful, and direct way to solve their problem or answer their question or perform their desired task or function.

– Ray McKenzie , Founder & Managing Director at Red Beach Advisors

CX means reducing friction and being empathetic of the customer's situation

CX means different things for different types of customers. In the B2B services world it means reducing friction and being more empathetic of the customer’s situation. This includes things like:

• Knowing when to quickly respond to inquiries.
• Being flexible with your schedule.
• Directly answering questions.
• Making silly logistics as easy as possible (like scheduling and holding telecons).
• Active listening.
• Straightforward buying options.
• Knowing when and how to push back when you disagree with their direction."

– David LaVine , Marketing Consultant & Founder at RocLogic Marketing

Customer experience is all about consistency

"Customer experience to me is all about consistency. For example, when I shop in stores offline, I expect the same experience when I shop online at the same stores, on all channels.

From their website to social media, everything should be matching – from the language used to branding. I find if a brand is consistent, and continuously delivers great service and experiences, I’m more likely to trust them, build a relationship and maybe even become an advocate and recommend them to my friends!

This is also the logic I use within my role as a Marketing Director at citrusHR, to ensure we delight customers at every stage of the customer journey."

– Dan Madden , Marketing Director at citrusH

Customer experience is the usability of your website and the brand impact left on users

"To me, customer experience is defined in two different ways: the usability of your website and the brand impact left on users.

When someone visits my site, I want to make sure it is structured in a way that converts them into a sale as easily possible. With eCommerce websites, ease of use is key to providing the most enjoyable customer experience.

Additionally, I want to make sure my brand has left a defining impact on the user so they feel as if we are something they can relate with rather than just a company. Creating an experience that develops a relationship is the best way to create not only an enjoyable experience but also a lifetime customer.

As you can see, while we can all think of customer experience differently, it all comes down to one thing – keeping your eyes open and listening to customers’ opinions and needs. It's the only way to think of doing business, if you want to remain relevant in the highly demanding online business field."

– Matt McKenna , Owner at DELT

There is an endless list of reasons to convince you why customer experience is so important, but these four represent the primary advantages that will come along with focusing on customer experience at your company.

#1. Negative experiences stay with us longer

Did you notice that people more often talk about negative than positive experiences? It’s actually a scientifically proven fact.

Our brains handle positive and negative information in different hemispheres. This means that we spend more time thinking about negative emotions.

We process negative information in more detail than we process positive information. What does it mean? If you mess up, your customers will talk about it… A LOT! Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth.

#2. It’s the best brand differentiator

It doesn’t take long for a new product to come out that the public adores.

Take, for instance, the peel-off charcoal masks that had ads going viral across social media for extreme close-ups that showed them cleaning out thousands of pores. The product began selling almost instantaneously and was reviewed by countless beauty gurus .

Of course, it didn’t take long for plenty of competitors to come along and begin selling a similar face mask. In fact, some even did it better, because they went beyond product and they worked on branding – and that’s where the lesson about customer experience comes into play.

‍ There are two main parts of a customer’s experience: the product and the people. ‍

The original peel-off face mask had an appealing product, but there was no branding to it and that made it easy for competitors to move in and do things better.

A product and its features are easy to imitate, at least compared to customer service and branding.

When you create a consistently great customer experience, it becomes part of your branding and marketing strategy , making it a brand differentiator that is extremely hard to imitate. In other words, you should start competing on the basis of service –not just product .

#3. Customers always share great experiences

When customers get what they expect, they tend to stay silent. But, when a company goes above and beyond in delivering a great experience for them, they are quick to become brand advocates and tell everyone about it. Exceeding customers’ expectations means more word of mouth marketing, which is the most effective marketing tactic of them all.

People are quick to take the advice of their friends and loved ones. To put it simply, people trust what they hear from people they know. So much so that it is estimated to drive $6 trillion in consumer spending annually while accounting for 13% of sales.

This only further puts customer experience importance on the pedestal, right?

#4. People always have options

These days, everyone has options–even in very small niches. You have competitors who can someone solve your customer’s pain points, or at least offer a bandaid solution to them. And, while you might believe that you have the best product out there (as you should), customers can choose any company they want–and they’re going to pick the one that offers the best experience.

Customers are always going to shop around and, if they can find a product like yours, why should they pick you over a competitor?

Rather than competing on price or trying to talk up your product’s features, focus on the overall customer experience. Think about it: product quality may be at the center of that experience, but what else can you bring to the table?

#5. It will help you reduce churn

It’s no secret that customer experience impacts churn . So, if your business suffers from a high churn rate (above 7% annually), your client experience is definitely something you should look at.

And you probably know that acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than keeping your existing one.

#6. Good customer experience boosts revenue

There is no doubt that customer experience directly impacts your bottom line. There are three ways that good customer experience helps to improve your revenue:

‍ By helping you get customers: When great customer experience becomes part of your brand, customers are much more likely to choose you over any competitor.

‍ By helping you keep customers: Customers are less likely to switch if you are providing them with an experience that they feel is unmatched. Always strive to offer the best service and you’ll see increased retention along with repeat sales.

‍ By enabling you to charge more: If you are offering a worthwhile customer experience that beats competitors, you might be able to charge more, even if the product itself is comparable. People put a high value on experience. Ask, what’s it worth to your customer?

According to Convince and Convert , “A moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”

We all want to offer as good customer experience as possible - otherwise, we’re leaking money. But it requires a thoughtful and holistic approach.

First, you should have a list of all touchpoints your customer meets. It usually includes ads, website, your presence on other websites (guest posts, listings on marketplaces, etc.), interactions with a support or sales team, and all post-purchase activities (emails, calls, surveys , etc.).

Its complexity depends on how complex your sales process is - for example, it can also include personal meetings, negotiations, etc.

Second, the basic rule for creating a good CX is to be consistent on all steps. If you want to create an image of a professional company delivering the highest quality of services to corporations, do everything to reinforce this image.

This includes choosing graphics for your ads, website design, etc. Even the language used by the customer service team matters.

Third, you should constantly monitor customer experience on all steps. One-time research is not enough - trends regarding CX change, you can overlook changes that happen on the way (a simple example: new people joining the support team can affect the quality of support), new touchpoints appear. Monitoring the whole process will help you avoid unexpected problems.

How feedback helps improve customer experience

When you know all the steps of a customer journey, it’s time to investigate customer experience on them. Look for the biggest problems first. While it might be difficult to assess the experience of the negotiation process, other steps are easier to research.

Think of your website, support calls, purchase path - you can collect feedback with little effort and see whether they are any problems.

It’s tempting to collect feedback only from customers and ask them about their experience - it’s easy to contact them via phone or send an email survey and you don’t even need any specialistic survey tools to do it on a small scale. But it’s not the most effective way of researching customer experience.

Why? Because if they had some problems with CX, apparently they were not big enough to discourage them from becoming customers so. As a result, their feedback might be not critical enough and won’t show all existing problems.

This is why it’s important to collect feedback also from people who started interacting with your company but didn’t become customers.

‍ Hint : You can use email surveys with marketing automation or customer communication tools you're already using to tie responses to email addresses to responses. For example, Survicate integrates with tools like Intercom , Drip , HubSpot or ActiveCampaign and more , so you can recognize respondents with their email addresses.

It allows you to reach out to customers who reply in a certain way or to segment them for future communication or analytics.

Think about website visitors. Some of them become customers but the vast majority do not. Why is that so? You can only guess until you ask them. Maybe it’s simply not what they were looking for or they don’t have time to complete the purchase?

But maybe no one answers their question on live chat or an inquiry form doesn’t work and they leave frustrated? You can’t afford to make such mistakes - they can ruin customer experience.

This is why collecting feedback on a website is so important - you’ll quickly find problems. Sometimes a quick fix can improve customer experience. The best way to collect feedback on a website is website surveys and live chat (don’t forget to take advantage of built-in chat ratings to see how visitors assess your support).

Free Website Feedback Survey Template

Also, remember about collecting website feedback with a survey from people who don’t want to contact you and prefer to share their opinions on social media. Listening to them will show you the biggest problems with your customer experience and the biggest positives.

Why? Because not many people write on Twitter or Facebook that their experience was OK or slightly negative. They say that is was either awful or great. Use social listening to collect opinions on social media and jump into conversations.

Customer experience journey mapping is a great way to visualize your customer’s experience in detail. It includes every single possible touchpoint from when your customer initially becomes aware of your brand, to their decision-making process, to their purchase. It continues to include repeat purchases and brand advocacy.

Customer journey mapping allows you to put the customer front and center in your business’ thinking. The best part? It can be done by anybody and has benefits for a variety of people within an organization.

For example, a customer experience map will help designers understand where users are coming from and what they are hoping to achieve. It will help copywriters gain clarity about the questions users have and the feelings they experience.

Managers will better understand how customers move through the sales funnel and show how improved customer service can make a difference to the company’s digital experience.

By mapping your customer experience, you’ll gain a greater understanding of who your customer is, what their needs are at each step of your interaction with them, and how your company can improve their experience to ensure it’s always pleasant. This process will also help you identify potential problems before they escalate and turn into big problems.

Another benefit of customer journey mapping is that you’ll be able to better understand the entire process your customer faces. This can help you identify if there are any areas where you can improve efficiencies and if there is room for automating various activities along the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping will expose changes in customer behavior as technology evolves.

This will help make sure your organization isn’t planning or making changes based on out-of-date assumptions about customer behavior.

Tips for approaching customer experience journey mapping

#1. agree on the goal/purpose.

Before diving in, identify with your team why it is that you are doing this. Have you gotten poor customer feedback via social media, feedback surveys, or customer service complaints? Have you noticed points in your customer journey where users inexplicably drop off?

Free Customer Satisfaction Deep Research Survey Template

#2. Figure out who your customer is (ideal buyer persona)

The next step is to develop buyer personas. Keep in mind that creating just one persona won’t cut it. Customer behavior can vary from person to person, and at different buying stages.

It’s worth noting distinctions between customers who have been doing market research for a while and are ready to purchase, versus someone who has only just started to think about solving their need through your product or service.

To make sure your personas are as accurate as possible, dig into your customer data. Be specific with your personas and create customer journey maps for each of them. If you fail to do so, your journey map will likely be too generic and will cause you to miss out on important insights and questions.

Free Buyer Persona Survey Template

#3. Define the behavioral stages

Once you’ve developed your personas, you now need to define your customer’s behavioral stages. These may differ depending on your business; however, your personas should give you a good idea of the process your customers go through from start to finish.Typically, the average customer’s behavioral stages are discovery, research, decision, purchase.

#4. List all your touchpoints

A “touchpoint” is every time a customer engages with your company. This includes before, during, and after they purchase your product, and also includes moments that happen both on and offline, in person, through marketing, and over the phone.

Note each potential touchpoint that can occur between your organization and your customers. Though this may seem daunting at first, make this task a little simpler by putting yourself in your customer’s position and walk through their journey step-by-step.

You can ask yourself questions to get the ball rolling and to ensure you don’t miss anything: "Where do I go when…"

• I have a problem that your product/company offers solutions for?
• I discover the product or service that solves my problem?
• I make my purchase decision?
• I encounter this organization again after the purchasing?

Go through this list again and ask, “how do I get there?” at each stage.

You can also go about this task more directly by asking customers about their experience with your brand in the form of a survey. Common touchpoints might include product description pages, pricing pages, contact forms, etc.

#5. Identify customer pain points

Now it’s time to combine your data and look at the big picture. Note any potential pain points or roadblocks along the customer journey, as well as areas where you’re doing things right.

To do this, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are customers achieving their goals on my website?
• Where are the main areas where customers experience friction and frustration?
• Where are people abandoning purchases (and why)?

Once these pain points and roadblocks are identified, note them on your customer journey map.

#6. Remove any roadblocks

Now that you know what the roadblocks are, how can you address them to improve your customer experience?

Ask yourself what needs to be fixed or built. Is there anything that needs to be completely scrapped and restarted?

It’s important to recognize that at the end of the day, you’re not optimizing your customer journey just for the sake of it. Rather, your goal is to push your customers down the sales funnel and make it easier (and therefore more likely) to convert.

If you own a brand new business, the concept of creating an effective customer experience strategy can seem daunting. However, by breaking it up into small, manageable steps you can create an organized plan that isn’t so overwhelming.

So where do you start?

You must first figure out who your customers are, so you’ll know how to serve them best. Once you’ve established who exactly your audience base is, you’ll have a better understanding of how to market to them.

A good way to figure out more information about your customer base is to conduct a survey. For example, if your company makes money through online sales, you could include a survey after every purchase. The survey, which should be kept very brief, could ask basic questions such as what age bracket the customer is in, where they’re located in the world, and how they found out about your company.

Free Post-Purchase Survey Template

This will also be your chance to ask them how satisfied they were with your purchase, helping you to determine which areas you’re doing well in and what needs to be improved.

By doing this, you’ll have some basic information regarding your customer base and will know how to market to them more effectively. If you want to offer your customers an incentive to complete the survey, offer them a discount to be used towards their next purchase!

You’ll also want to take the time to determine who exactly your competitors are and learn from them.

Free Brand Awareness Survey Template

What seems to be working well for them? How have they managed to gain success thus far?

You’re not finding out this information to copy them, but to learn how to be better than they are. You want to set your brand apart and be able to convince potential customers that they should choose you rather than other options out there.

Create a customer experience vision

Now that you know a little bit more about who you’re marketing towards, you can create a more accurate customer experience strategy for your customers. Picture what a perfect customer experience should like for your clients. Ideally, they would be able to find exactly the product they are looking for, any of their questions about the product would be answered quickly, and the interaction concludes with them being satisfied with their purchase.

Customer interaction: the early stage

If you’re a new startup company, chances are your website is not yet the best it can be. Because this is likely where your customer’s experience will begin, you want to make sure they are not spending hours searching for the product they’re looking for.

If this is the case, they’ll likely give up and leave without making a purchase. Layout your website in such a way that your customer only has to make a few clicks to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Utilize search filters so that your customer can narrow down products to find what they’re looking for faster.

Customer interaction: the middle stage

It is within this middle stage of a customer interaction that you’ll want to be available to answer any questions they might have about your products.

Be sure to answer any inquiries as fast as possible, as this will show that you not only care about your customer’s experience but are passionate about your brand. Of course, realistically, you’ll not be able to answer every single inquiry in real-time, especially as your business begins to grow.

This is where a ‘Help’ page on your website will come in handy. This page could include a list of frequently asked questions about your products or a drop-down menu that offers them step-by-step assistance, guiding them through the process of making a purchase.

Customer interaction: the final stage

If you’ve followed the earlier steps, your client should be enjoying a positive customer experience thus far and will hopefully decide to make a purchase. Many business owners may make the mistake of thinking that this is when the work is finally done.

After all, they’ve successfully met their goal of achieving a purchase. However, this is actually the most pivotal stage of your customer’s interaction.

If your customer made a purchase online, they’re now likely waiting for it to be delivered. Be sure to give them accurate information regarding when they can expect their purchase to arrive.

After the timeframe of delivery has passed, be sure to send them a follow-up email thanking them for their purchase and checking in to make sure they’re satisfied. This shows that you aren’t just focused on making money, but genuinely care about your customers.

This will ultimately help ensure that they’ll return for a second purchase later on and maybe even leave you a positive review.

The customer experience metrics below should give you an overview of how your company’s efforts in improving CX are doing:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge general consumer opinion on your brand. All you must do is conduct a very brief NPS survey , which asks simple questions to be answered on a 0-10 scale.

Free NPS Survey Template

There are three types of respondents:

• Promoters , who answer from 9-10
• Passives , who answer from 7-8
• Detractors , who answer from 0-6

Once the data is collected, you can use the below formula to find your NPS:

‍ NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

‍ The next step comes in interpreting the results. The base goal is to be above 0 (net positive: more promotion than detraction) but each organization will have its own benchmark. Read our in-depth NPS guide for more details.

And make sure to check out the NPS benchmark report to see how your score stacks up against industry averages. Does your customer loyalty give you a competitive edge, or does your competition leave you in the dust?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is derived from the common customer satisfaction surveys . It asks users to rate their experience from 1 (least satisfied) to 5 (most satisfied).

Free CSAT Survey Template

A CSAT can show you how satisfied customers are with a specific process or piece of the overall customer experience. It differs from NPS, which gauges overall brand satisfaction and loyalty.

Using these two metrics together can provide a more complete picture of your customers’ opinions.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The third survey is the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey . This metric measures how easy or difficult a certain process is for customers. Data collection often takes the form of an to agree/disagree question regarding the statement “it was easy for me to handle my issue.”

Free CES Survey Template

Agree and Strongly Agree answers would be given a high numeric value, while Disagree and Strongly Disagree would be given a low (or zero) value. Using this system, a low CES implies that customers find it difficult to complete the process in question. This means there is room to improve.

Make sure to include the CES in your CX analysis. It has become very popular for a reason: the Harvard Business Review found that the CES had the most predictive power in terms of increased spending and repurchasing!

Upsell & Cross-Sell Rate

Upselling and cross-selling are effective techniques to increase the average order size of your e-commerce business. This sub-field of customer experience analytics revolves around customer behavior, while the previous one was about user opinions.

There is a common misbelief that these terms are interchangeable. To recall: Upselling in e-commerce occurs when a similar but more expensive product is recommended, on the basis that it will provide the customer with better value. Cross-selling involves recommending smaller purchases that complement the main purchase, for example, recommending accessories for a new camera.

Tracking conversion rates for these strategies can be complex and ambiguous. In fact, 50% of businesses don’t know the conversion rate of their cross-selling and upselling efforts.

‍ It can take up a lot of dedicated resources to track this metric in detail (conversion by page, conversion by product recommended, etc.) and you may not even have a large enough sample size to compile meaningful information.

However, your company should at least track the overall conversion rate of all cross-selling and upselling efforts. Tracking and improving this conversion rate can help your company get ahead of the curve.

The final metric to track is the churn rate . The broad definition of churn rate is this: the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service in a given time period. Say your company has 100,000 subscribers and loses 5,000 in a month; the monthly churn rate would be 5%.

Churn rate should be monitored over time and minimized in the following way:

• Stop selling to the wrong customers – create your buyer persona.
• Find out what the churn reason is.
• Try to spot any red flags.
• Offer great customer support!
• Create an exceptional customer onboarding process.
• Ask for feedback regularly and react to it.

We’re going to talk you through the process of customer experience research. We’ve chatted with Kate Jordan, our Product Marketing Specialist who spent the past 6 months doing customer research all to ensure we create an experience that our customers will never forget!

What is customer experience research?

I bet that most of you will think NPS. However, the net promoter score is just a drop in the ocean – it’s the least you can do to check whether your customers are satisfied with the service you provide. It’s easy to do which makes it a good starting point.

While the majority of people know how to measure NPS, they don’t know what to do with the results. And checking your NPS just for the sake of it, just because everyone else does it is a waste of time.

Customer experience research goes way beyond NPS. It’s an ongoing process, not a one-off project.

It can be divided into two major areas: customer satisfaction and customer engagement.

Customer experience research best practices

Start collecting qualitative data by interviewing your customers.

Try to focus on the experiences of specific users. You can segment them into two groups: ‍

New customers - to discover how they found you, what made them choose you over the competition, what problems they want to tackle with your product, or what job they believe they can get done with it and what their first impression is. ‍

Long term customers - to learn what the main product value is, what could be improved, what’s done well. They are an amazing source of knowledge because they know the product well, and they clearly like it since they haven’t churned.

Go through the conversations your customer-facing teams had with your customers. The information you find there might be very different from what you’ll learn in the interviews or they can support the conclusions from your 1:1 interviews.

Reading customer conversations in Intercom, for example, will let you in on some first-hand product insights. Customers will report any problems or issues they have with the product at the point of experiencing them. This will provide you with very honest information.

You can find out what their obstacles are, what lowers the quality of CX, to identify all areas which require improvement.

Start collecting quantitative data with CX surveys

Running a CX survey is a great way to identify any CX gaps you might have. This is something different from the golden trio – CSAT, NPS, and CES. Where can you run such surveys?

‍ On your website to ask your prospects what stopped them from signing up for the product. It’s one of the most important questions you can ask your visitors, much more valuable than an NPS. Getting insights from “what stopped you from signing up” survey will help you optimize your website for better conversions.

After sign up, ask your customers what their goal for using the product is. If X% mentions a reason you’ve never heard of, it might be worth sharing this feedback with your product team. This could help with future product roadmap development.

In your knowledge base , to check if your content is helpful. Target your survey at the readers, asking if the article they read was useful. If the user doesn’t get anything out of it, it might lead to frustration. In the fast-paced business world, customers choose self-service over (sometimes) time-consuming contact with a support/sales team.

‍ After your customer churns . Not knowing why your customers leave you is a real problem and a massive growth inhibitor. As soon as your customer churns send them a survey to ask why. Identifying the factors that stop your users from using the product will help you improve customer experience and reduce churn – if you use the findings that are. Be aware of how many customers you lose due to unfulfilled expectations (e.g., poor customer service) vs the reasons you have no influence on.

Measure at least one of the CX metrics regularly

You should measure at least one of your CX metrics continuously to check if it’s going up, down or if it’s static. For example, NPS might come in handy after getting feedback from the surveys mentioned above and incorporating it. You’ll be able to verify if the improvements had a positive impact on the customer/user experience.

Track product behavioral data

Customer experience research also includes tracking data inside your product to check how it’s used and how it performs. This means that you not only research how customers think you treat them but also how they actually engage with your service.

It’s worth establishing milestones, which will make judging success easier. For example, at Survicate one of the milestones is getting a specific number of survey answers.

We monitor what actions an average user needs to take to reach this goal and how long it takes. We then try to figure out how to optimize the process to make it easier for our customers to collect the answers.

There are a lot of tools like Mixpanel , Pendo , Amplitude which provide invaluable product insights. For example, how your customers use certain features. Are there any features that no one uses and you can dispose of to enhance product usability?

Use web tracking apps for session recordings and heatmaps

Your website is part of the customer experience. It’s the first impression your customers and prospects get – and we all know that first impressions count. You can use web tracking tools such as Hotjar to monitor what your visitors do on your website.  Do your CTA’s get enough clicks? Is there any section that can be moved for better visibility? You can find it all out by using web-tracking tools.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, while we can all think of customer experience differently, it all comes down to one thing – keeping your eyes open and listening to customers’ opinions and needs. It's the only way to think of doing business, if you want to remain relevant in the highly demanding online business field.

Positive customer experience is crucial to ensure that your company grows and prospers for years to come. By having a greater understanding of who your customer base is, you’ll be better able to serve them. Finally, remember that your work isn’t done after making a purchase, but extends into the post-purchase stage when you’ll ensure your customer is satisfied with the product and their decision to work with you.

The best way to discover what your customers really think is by asking them directly. With Survicate, you get access to over 300 ready-to-use survey templates so you can start collecting customer insights in a matter of minutes. Simply sign up for Survicate's 10-day free trial and get access to all Business plan features today.

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• Customer experience vs customer service

What is a good customer experience?

Successful customer experience management.

• Key elements of your CX strategy

Measuring customer experience

How to improve customer experience.

• Digital customer experience

See how XM for Customer Frontlines works

Your ultimate guide to customer experience (cx).

26 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.

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 is an increasingly popular term in business, 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.

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The importance of customer experience

Most organizations recognise the importance of customer experience at its core: 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 Net Promoter Score (NPS) , without connecting it to financial performance or competitive advantage.

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

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
• Keep close to customers and changing behaviors
• Reduce costs and invest in the right things

How CX leaders outperform CX laggards:

• #1 – By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator – Walker
• 86% – of those who received a great customer experience were likely to repurchase from the same company; compared to just 13% of those who received a poor CX – Temkin Group
• 6x – Between 2010-2015, CX leaders grew 6x faster than CX laggards – Forrester

Customer experience versus customer service

It’s worth taking a moment to differentiate customer experience from the better-known idea of customer service, since it’s not unusual to see the two terms used interchangeably. This is understandable, since customer service and customer experience management have an important shared goal – making customers happy.

However, rather than simply being a new label for an old idea, customer experience is a much wider concept that includes customer service and much more besides.

Customer service is the quality of attention and care you provide for your customers, whether over email in a contact center , face to face on a shop floor or across a reception desk. It can be provided through customer touch points with staff, or via service-based tools such as website support pages and customer service chatbots.

As a department or job title, customer service is a customer-facing role that has the remit of answering queries and dealing with routine aftercare and any complaints that arise. It is a component part of customer experience, albeit a crucial one.

Customer experience encompasses customer service quality and also marketing, advertising, merchandising, product design, hiring decisions, logistics, brand purpose, in-store aesthetics, supply chain choices and just about every other part of your business operation that affects customer outcomes. It also extends beyond your sphere of control, drawing from third-party reviews and opinion, press and media coverage and even popular culture if your brand has a high enough profile.

Long story short – CX is vast in scope, and customer service is a relatively small part of it.

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.

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 CES , CSAT and 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 suggested 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

If customer experience is your customers’ perception of your organization, customer experience management (CXM) is your strategy for controlling those perceptions. It’s gone out of fashion as a term as practitioners have shifted to thinking about customer experience as something you don’t just “control” but track on a constant basis and make a central part of everything you do. It remains in use mainly because of Forrester’s use of the term in their Wave ranking of SaaS customer experience providers.

To understand how to manage customer experience, you need to first understand experience management – 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. While each of these elements are important, focus most of your attention on the six competencies and their 20 associated skills.

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 a reciprocal customer experience strategy

Once you’ve developed a business-wide framework to support your team and provide a customer experience that meets your customer 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.

Act with empathy to quickly improve experiences

Your audience is continuously providing you with customer information, as well as their 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 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, no matter their customer needs.

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.

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 great 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

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.

Customer journey mapping example

2. Cross-functional collaboration

Consistent delivery across the journey can be a challenge, often increased by a business’ siloed 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. CX programmes can deliver that real-time insight into what customers are experiencing and how those experiences impact their engagement with the brand.

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

It’s not just about soliciting feedback, however. Customers will tell their stories both positive and negative whether you are listening or not, meaning you need to capture every mention of your brand and turn it into usable data.

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

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 what your customers most value is the key to CX success. And acknowledging and resolving experience failures builds trust in the brand.

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:

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 advocacy. 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?).

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.

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.

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 is often unproductive. 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.

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 sexy side of digital CX, but understanding 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 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.

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 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.

Discover how you can provide a best-in-class customer experience with Qualtrics

Related resources

Ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 19 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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Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience

Devoted customers will pay 50% to 200% more to stay with your brand. Inspiring and maintaining such loyalty requires your organization to master the discipline of customer experience (CX), which necessitates a shift from the “quick fix” mentality to a continuous transformational effort.

Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience  empowers CX leaders to mature their organization and fuel predictable business growth. With a combination of bold vision, curated tools and frameworks, and hands-on guidance, you’ll deliver experiences intentionally created to drive loyalty across customers’ most meaningful touchpoints.

Deliver Experiences that Fuel Growth

Mature the cx function.

Strengthen and scale the CX discipline with a clear understanding of which capabilities to build and how to build them.

Maximize The ROI Of CX Improvements

Align CX investments to the experiences that improve loyalty and impact revenue.

Tie CX To Business Results

Prove the impact of CX initiatives and secure funding by continuously linking CX to key business outcomes.​

Watch this video to see how Forrester Decisions helps customer experience leaders deliver experiences that fuel growth.

Key priorities.

As a customer experience leader, you’re on a mission to strengthen your CX organization by ensuring it continuously delivers and demonstrates value. Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience is tailored to help you succeed at your most pressing priorities:

• Establish, fund, and scale the CX function.​
• Gather and analyze data for customer insights.
• Embed customer insights into the business.​
• Design experiences that drive loyalty.
• Enable CX with technology.
• Measure CX performance and prove ROI.

What’s Included In This Service

Forrester Decisions services are uniquely built to give you strategic insights for your role as a business leader in your organization and help you deliver on your functional role as a division or department leader. Here’s what’s inside:

Stay ahead of changing customer and market dynamics, plan for the future, and set your strategy with leading customer experience research. ​

• Customer obsession research
• Customer insights
• Trends and predictions
• Market forecasts
• Technology and service provider landscapes

Empower your team to conquer your priorities with proven strategic models and plug-and-play templates. ​

• KPIs and peer benchmarks​
• Assessments​
• Strategic models​
• Strategy templates​
• Forrester Wave™ evaluations for your function
• Certification courses

Accelerate progress and de-risk decisions with best practices tailored to you and your team​.

• Guidance sessions​
• Peer discussions
• Event attendance​
• Dedicated relationship management

Construct A Successful Customer Advisory Board

Hear how Forrester helped Discount Tire set up a customer advisory board that’s still successful five years on.

Service Model Spotlight

The Forrester Customer Experience Leader Success Cycle

To bring customer obsession to life, CX leaders must organize stakeholders enterprisewide to create a consistent, on-brand, and high-quality experience. CX leaders who succeed will drive customer loyalty, deliver business results, and justify greater investment in CX.

Support For Executives, Leaders, And Team Members

Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience offers multiple levels of service to ensure the right expertise and degree of support for you and your team. All service levels offer access to customer experience research, tools, data, and  certification courses .

Leverage support from a trusted partner and former executive who understands your challenges and supports your strategic agenda every step of the way.

Availability may vary by geographic region.

Procure deep expertise across your functional discipline through expert-led guidance sessions that help you apply unique research, tools, and data to your specific needs.

Develop a common language and toolset to strengthen your team’s expertise and skill sets with access to relevant certification courses and insights.

Meet A Few Of Our CX Analysts

Rich Saunders

Senior Analyst

Judy Weader

Principal Analyst

Maxie Schmidt

VP, Principal Analyst

Gina Bhawalkar

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Understanding Customer Experience

• Andre Schwager
• Chris Meyer

Anyone who has signed up for cell phone service, attempted to claim a rebate, or navigated a call center has probably suffered from a company’s apparent indifference to what should be its first concern: the customer experiences that culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment and defection.

Customer experience is the subjective response customers have to direct or indirect contact with a company. It encompasses every aspect of an offering: customer care, advertising, packaging, features, ease of use, reliability. Customer experience is shaped by customers’ expectations, which largely reflect previous experiences. Few CEOs would argue against the significance of customer experience or against measuring and analyzing it. But many don’t appreciate how those activities differ from CRM or just how illuminating the data can be. For instance, the majority of the companies in a recent survey believed they have been providing “superior” experiences to customers, but most customers disagreed.

The authors describe a customer experience management (CEM) process that involves three kinds of monitoring: past patterns (evaluating completed transactions), present patterns (tracking current relationships), and potential patterns (conducting inquiries in the hope of unveiling future opportunities). Data are collected at or about touch points through such methods as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and online forums. Companies need to involve every function in the effort, not just a single customer-facing group.

The authors go on to illustrate how a cross-functional CEM system is created. With such a system, companies can discover which customers are prospects for growth and which require immediate intervention.

Companies that systematically monitor customer experience can take important steps to improve it—and their bottom line.

Anyone who has signed up recently for cell phone service has faced a stern test in trying to figure out the cost of carry-forward minutes versus free calls within a network and how it compares with the cost of such services as push-to-talk, roaming, and messaging. Many, too, have fallen for a rebate offer only to discover that the form they must fill out rivals a home mortgage application in its detail. And then there are automated telephone systems, in which harried consumers navigate a mazelike menu in search of a real-life human being. So little confidence do consumers have in these electronic surrogates that a few weeks after the website www.gethuman.com showed how to reach a live person quickly at 10 major consumer sites, instructions for more than 400 additional companies had poured in.

• AS Andre Schwager is a former president of Seagate Enterprise Management Software and a founder of Satmetrix Systems, a customer experience software company based in Foster City, California. (Contact him at [email protected] .)
• CM Chris Meyer is the chairman of the Strategic Alignment Group, Inc., a member of the Band of Angels deal committee, and adviser/board member for several early-stage companies.

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What is customer experience? How to craft a CX that wins and retains clients

Customer experience (CX) examines the actions in a potential customer’s shopping journey. In this guide, we cover why it’s crucial for businesses to foster an excellent CX, how to measure it, ways to improve the customer experience and explore customer experience management. 

What is CX?

CX concerns every facet of a customer’s interactions and experiences with an organization during the client journey. This includes aspects, such as initial awareness of a product or service; touchpoints with team members; and the feelings, emotions, and perceptions a client has about a company. 

Why is customer experience important?

Consumer-facing businesses must strive to build an exceptional CX to drive sales, retain customers, and forge a positive reputation for their brand. Here are a few reasons why a top-notch CX is paramount: 

• Competition: Most organizations face fierce competition in their market. Having a strong CX makes you stand out from the crowd because customers can expect to be heard and taken care of. 
• Reputation: Customers leave reviews and talk about the experiences they have with brands. When someone Googles your company, you want them to read about positive impressions others have had with your brand so they feel comfortable trusting you to meet their needs. Plus, having a great reputation fosters word-of-mouth referrals that drive more customers to your business. 
• Customer loyalty and retention: When customers know they can expect an unparalleled experience, they are less likely to move to a competitor. This helps companies build clientele and grow revenue while reducing churn rates .

Insights from Pam Dodrill, Chief Customer Officer at Reputation

“Customer experience is the most important opportunity for business growth and brands must prioritize it to remain competitive. Consumers lead their buying experiences and no longer trust a sales pitch or a traditional brand message. They conduct research via reviews and social media, expecting a seamless experience. If they aren’t happy with their experience, they’re not afraid of telling the world. Delivering a strong customer experience is your best chance at gaining both repeat and new business.”

How to measure customer experience

Teams must measure their customer experience with various methods to ensure it is steadily improving and meeting customer’s needs and expectations. Here are some of the top ways to measure CX: 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a survey companies use to analyze customer loyalty using a scale of 1-10 that measures the likelihood a client will recommend the business to others. A higher NPS score indicates a better CX. 
• Customer churn rate: This measures the percentage of customers who stop using your products or services during a set period. Companies seeing an increasing churn rate should examine strategies for improving their CX. 
• Mapping customer journeys: Analyzing the touchpoints in the customer journey, or sales pipeline , allows teams to visualize particular pain points and work on methods to streamline parts of the buying process. For example, if leads get stuck for weeks in the negotiation phase of the purchasing process, it could be that sales representatives don’t answer questions about pricing during this period and hot leads become cool. 
• Customer satisfaction surveys (CSATs): CSAT surveys measure CX by asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale of 1-5. Often, they are administered after a purchase or after solving a customer service inquiry.

Many customer relationship management (CRM) systems offer integrations that track CSAT and NPS scores automatically, putting some CX and customer retention measurements on autopilot.

How to improve customer experience

Consider the following tips to foster an exceptional customer experience that helps brands stand out from competitors: 

• Leverage omnichannel support tools: Make it simple for clients to reach out however they prefer. Be accessible via email, live chat, chatbots, phone, and social media. Teams often use customer service tools that streamline communications in one platform to ensure customer inquiries don’t fall through the cracks. 
• Invest in employee training: Businesses must make a customer-focused culture part of their mission and train employees to put the customer first by solving client issues proactively and promptly, answering customer queries efficiently, and relying on data. 
• Be receptive to customer feedback: Companies that listen when customers express problems and aim to solve them are the ones that level up their business. Teams can analyze customer feedback with tools like social listening tools and surveys. 

Insights from Robert Blake, vice president of Digital Marketing at Arkansas Federal Credit Union

“Website chatbots can improve your customer experience whenever customers need help. The key is having relative content, help, and support pages to build the chatbot’s knowledge base. If your customers still want human interaction, a chatbot can easily pass them off to a representative.”

What is customer experience management (CXM)?

CXM involves the tools and strategies teams use to measure and improve the experiences customers have with their business. The main objective of a CXM strategy is to foster customer satisfaction and retention while building brand loyalty, leading to an overall increase in customer lifetime value (CLV) . 

CXM vs. CRM: What’s the Difference?

CXM is heavily focused on what the company looks like in the view of the customer themselves, including their feelings, emotions, and behaviors. CRM involves how the customer appears in the company’s eyes and is often measured with a CRM system that tracks customer engagements and purchase history. 

CXM strategies utilize Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and tools that measure customer sentiments. Typically, CRM programs involve adopting software focused on outreach and sales that drive revenue. 

The takeaway  

Customer experience involves analyzing every interaction a customer has with an organization. That information is then used to create an unbeatable CXM strategy that meets customer’s needs, solves pain points, and fosters an environment where the customer is always put first. It’s crucial for companies to measure customer satisfaction and retention consistently, listen to customer feedback, and implement ongoing improvement strategies to delight customers, earn referrals, and drive revenue. 

EDITORIAL DISCLOSURE : The advice, opinions, or rankings contained in this article are solely those of the Fortune Recommends ™ editorial team. This content has not been reviewed or endorsed by any of our affiliate partners or other third parties.

Customer Experience Research

Wish you knew what your customers were thinking, wish granted., wish you knew….

…the best ways to retain your customers?

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…which parts of the experience cause frustration?

…where to focus your acquisition efforts?

…how new customers feel about their experience?

…which customers you’re most at risk for losing?

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We help clients focus their CX research efforts on what matters most… understanding their customer needs, expectations, and experiences.

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Wish you knew where to take your CX next?

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Staying relevant and responsive is key to not just growing but keeping your customers.

We get it though. CX can feel like an unsolvable puzzle if you don’t know where to go next (and the pieces keep mysteriously moving around).

Keep your finger on your customer experience pulse – always – with this simple step-by-step guide to help you prioritize and maximize your evolving CX research efforts.

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Customer experience (CX) research uses the latest research techniques to understand the experiences and information that customers generate, refining that data into actionable feedback that can help understand new behaviors and drive engagement across products, services, and experiences.

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Future-proof your business with research insights

Customer experience drives new value through understanding customer data—social, e-commerce, or other engagement-based experiences—through the lens of feedback and business growth.

High-level products and services require CX research-driven data as a constant input to create new features and experiences based on research-based customer insight rather than gut feeling alone.

Partners for dependable customer experience research

From customer experience research to user persona studies to customer interviews, we have experienced designers who understand the value of getting customer insights through research, proving hypotheses, and evaluating options, not designing based on feelings or assumptions. 

With our premier UX/UI industry talent working on CX research, we can provide research to justify important design decisions that contribute to creating customer experiences that convert.

An optimized approach

Fresh’s ability to understand the core business needs and develop surveys, market information, and engagement around core issues gives us a distinct advantage in building a customer research program that is adaptable to every need.

Research into customers’ social experiences begins with helping your business distill information into actionable market feedback and data that can be used to drive new value.

The pillars of Fresh CX research

Successful design requires understanding the customer experience and aligning the product to customer needs. There’s a variety of important elements to understand along the way to transform research data and feedback into value.

You’ll want to obtain feedback about your application, website, or experience early on through CX research to identify key improvements. Doing so upfront reduces cost, time, and frustration in the long run. We recommend performing user research, testing, and analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding.

Focus groups

Focus groups allow Fresh strategists to quickly identify commonalities in people’s experiences or attitudes about the research topic.

Ethnographic research

Our researchers observe the world and product use cases from the point of view of users.

Contextual inquiry

Through examining product use in context, we understand the end-users of the product, as well as how they’re using it.

Pain points identification

We explore how current solutions aren't meeting the user’s goals, or unpleasant and time-consuming product touchpoints that can be addressed.

Affinity diagramming

Our researchers use this visual tool to organize qualitative data and identify overarching themes.

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Explore our other creative services, which allow our team to solve challenges for your organization and others, regardless of size, industry vertical, or product category.

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Small Business Trends

Exploring loyalty: 60 customer experience statistics.

Understanding the intricate relationship between customer experience (CX) and brand loyalty is a must in today’s dynamic business landscape. As consumer behavior evolves, so does the concept of brand devotion. In this article, we go into 60 essential customer experience statistics, shedding light on the impact of positive experiences, customer loyalty, and emerging trends.

Defining Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) refers to the overall perception and interaction a customer has with a brand throughout their entire journey. It encompasses every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. CX extends beyond individual transactions; it’s about building lasting relationships and fostering trust.

The Role of Customer Experience in Today’s Business Landscape

In the hyper-competitive business world, CX has become a strategic differentiator. Here’s why it matters:

• Customer Retention : Exceptional CX leads to higher customer retention rates. Satisfied customers are more likely to stay loyal and recommend your brand.
• Brand Advocacy : Positive experiences turn customers into brand advocates. They share their positive encounters with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.
• Revenue Impact : Research shows that companies prioritizing CX outperform their competitors in terms of revenue growth.
• Competitive Edge : In a crowded market, superior CX sets you apart. Customers are willing to pay more for a seamless experience.

Top Customer Experience Statistics

From the undeniable influence of customer satisfaction—where 86% of buyers express a willingness to invest more for superior experiences—to the repercussions of negative encounters, with 82% of customers severing ties with a company after a disappointing interaction, each statistic paints a vivid picture of consumer expectations and preferences.

Through exploring themes such as omnichannel engagement, personalized interactions, and the transformative power of employee engagement, we aim to redefine the way we perceive and prioritize customer experiences in today’s ever-evolving marketplace. Join us as we navigate through these illuminating insights, poised to unlock unparalleled growth opportunities and foster enduring brand relationships.

The Impact of Positive Customer Experience

• 97% of consumers and 98% of contact center managers say customer service interactions impact whether consumers stay loyal to a brand.
• 61% of consumers will pay at least 5% more if they know they’ll get a good customer experience.
• 60% of consumers have switched brands due to a negative contact center experience.
• 70% of brands see a direct connection between customer service and performance.
• 87% of customers actively avoid buying from brands they don’t trust.
• 74% of CX leaders say improving content and knowledge delivery to customers and employees is important.
• 81% of customers say a positive customer service experience increases the chances of them making another purchase.
• 95% of consumers say customer service impacts their brand loyalty.
• 64% of leaders say customer service has a positive impact on their company’s growth.
• 60% of leaders say customer service improves customer retention.

Customer Loyalty and Experience Statistics

• 88% of buyers say experience matters as much as a company’s products or services.
• 12. 80% of consumers feel more emotionally connected to a brand when customer service solves their problem.
• 13. 54.7% of customers are loyal to 1 to 5 brands.
• 14. 86% of consumers would leave a brand after as few as two poor experiences.
• 15. 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor customer experience.
• 16. On average, companies that put in the work to improve customer experience see a 42% improvement in customer retention .
• 17. 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition.
• 18. 75% of consumers say they favor companies that offer rewards.
• 19. 56% of customers stay loyal to brands that “get them”.
• 20. 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.

Key Trends in Customer Experience

• Generative AI in CX has endless potential uses, from generating dynamic marketing campaigns and personalized user guides to streamlining customer service and gaining deeper insights into customers and loyalty.
• The shift towards subscription services enables businesses to nurture ongoing relationships and drive up lifetime value.
• 23. Customers will willingly pay higher prices for good experiences.
• 24. CX quality fell for 19% of brands in 2022 , the lowest rate in 17 years.
• 25. In 2022, only 3% of U.S. companies were customer-obsessed, a decrease of 7% from 2021.

Strategies for Positive Customer Experiences

• Companies that actively engage in listening to their customers see a 25% increase in customer satisfaction. Moreover, ineffective listening can lead to misunderstandings, costing companies approximately $62.4 billion per year .
• Utilizing customer feedback is crucial, as 73% of consumers worldwide expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Additionally, businesses that personalize experiences based on customer feedback can see consumers spend an average of 38% more.
• Implementing effective feedback systems can lead to significant performance improvements. For instance, employees who receive regular feedback are more engaged, with 80% of such employees being fully engaged .
• Companies using APIs (Application Programming Interface) are 21% faster in solving customers’ problems, and their customers spend 35% less time waiting for responses.
• Three to four buyer personas account for over 90% of a company’s sales . Moreover, brands that use personalization, which includes understanding buyer personas, can reduce marketing and sales costs by 10-20%.

Loyal Customers and Customer Interactions: Statistics and Insights

• 96% of customers feel that customer service is crucial for brand loyalty.
• 32. 89% of customers express they would switch brands after an unpleasant experience, and CX handles over 60% of brand loyalty.
• 33. 77% of the customers who experience positive CX are likely to recommend the brand to a friend.
• 34. 72% of global customers feel loyalty toward at least one brand or company.
• 35. Price is the #1 factor keeping customers loyal to their favorite brands.

The Personalized Experience: Future Trends

• With the rapid advancements in technology, data, and analytics, marketers are on the cusp of being able to create much more personal and “human” experiences across various moments, channels, and buying stages. This humanizing customer experience has the potential to dramatically improve interactions.
• The concept of physical spaces is being reimagined to extend customer journeys well beyond a brand’s front door, with digital innovations enhancing the customer experience in both physical and virtual environments.
• 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, highlighting the importance of personalized customer experiences.
• Customers are likely to spend more with companies that provide excellent service, with statistics showing that a good customer experience can lead to customers spending up to 140% more than they would after a negative experience.
• Companies that are customer-centric and focus on delivering superior customer experiences are found to be 60% more profitable compared to those that do not prioritize the customer experience.

The Rise of Personalized Customer Experience

• Highly personalized customer experiences, when offered to millions of individual customers by using proprietary data, are difficult for competitors to imitate.
• 42. Today’s personalization leaders have found proven ways to drive 5 to 15 percent increases in revenue and 10 to 30 percent increases in marketing spend efficiency.
• 43. Personalization at scale often delivers a 1 to 2 percent lift in total sales for grocery companies and an even higher lift for other retailers.
• 44. 80% of consumers would be more likely to do business with a company that offered experiences tailored just for them.

Customer Satisfaction: A Key Indicator of The Customer Experience

• 66% of customers reported that they expect brands to understand their needs and wants.
• 52% of customers reported that brand satisfaction increases due to personalization.
• 63. 62% of consumers reported feeling they had lost control over their private information
• 89% of businesses compete primarily based on customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010.

Personalization and Satisfaction: A Look at Future Customer Experience Trends

• By 2024, the global revenue of customer experience personalization and optimization software is projected to surpass 9.5 billion U.S. dollars .
• 55. Many companies are already spending more than half of their budgets on personalization efforts today.
• 56. 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.
• 57. 76% of consumers get frustrated when companies don’t deliver personalized interactions.
• 58. Companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.
• 59. 49% of marketing professionals report that increased customer retention is one of the top benefits realized from a successful personalization strategy.
• 60. 43% of marketing professionals report that improved customer experience and increased engagement are significant results of effective personalization.

FAQs: Customer Experience Statistics

What are the 3 c’s of customer experience.

The 3 C’s of customer experience refer to Consistency, Convenience, and Communication. Consistency ensures that customers receive the same level of service across all touchpoints. Convenience involves making it easy for customers to interact with your brand. Communication emphasizes the importance of clear and effective communication throughout the customer journey.

What are the 4 E’s of customer experience?

The 4 E’s of customer experience are Engage, Empower, Emotion, and Effortless. Engage involves creating meaningful interactions with customers. Empower focuses on giving customers the tools and resources to solve their own problems. Emotion highlights the importance of creating emotional connections with customers. Effortless refers to streamlining processes to make the customer experience as smooth as possible.

What are some surprising customer experience statistics?

Some surprising customer experience statistics include:

• 82% of customers stop doing business with a company after a bad customer experience .
• 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

How does a positive customer experience impact loyalty?

A positive customer experience leads to higher customer loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand, make repeat purchases, and recommend the brand to others. Positive experiences create emotional connections with customers, fostering long-term relationships and brand advocacy.

What are common challenges businesses face in improving customer experience?

Common challenges businesses face in improving customer experience include:

• Lack of customer data and insights.
• Difficulty in creating effective customer journey maps.
• Inconsistencies in the customer journey across different channels.
• Adapting to the evolving expectations of mobile customer experience.
• Addressing issues highlighted in customer experience reports.

How have trends in customer experience changed over the years?

Trends in customer experience have shifted towards personalization, omnichannel engagement, and the integration of technology. Businesses are increasingly leveraging customer data to personalize interactions and anticipate customer needs. There’s also a greater emphasis on creating seamless experiences across multiple channels, including mobile platforms.

What are some success stories of businesses that have significantly improved customer experience?

Several businesses have successfully improved customer experience and achieved notable success. For example, companies like Amazon, Zappos, and Airbnb are renowned for their customer-centric approach and dedication to delivering exceptional experiences. These companies prioritize customer satisfaction and invest in innovative solutions to enhance the customer journey.

How do loyal customers respond to positive customer experiences?

Loyal customers respond positively to exceptional customer experiences by demonstrating higher levels of brand loyalty, making repeat purchases, and advocating for the brand. They are more likely to engage with the brand across various channels, provide positive reviews and recommendations, and contribute to the brand’s long-term success.

Are customer-centric companies more successful?

Yes, customer-centric companies tend to be more successful in today’s competitive market. By prioritizing customer needs and preferences, these companies create memorable experiences that drive customer loyalty, increase retention rates, and ultimately lead to higher profitability. Customer-centric organizations understand the value of building strong relationships with customers and continuously strive to exceed their expectations.

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