Customer experience: connecting business and customer value

The attention for customer experience (also known as CX) has grown exponentially over recent years – and it keeps doing so with customer experience now being recognized as an essential focus to create business and customer value. Yet, at the same time, customer experience has become a “thing,” a term many people use for various reasons. A guide to customer experience and customer experience management.

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

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

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

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

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