Customer experience
Customer experience, or CX, brings together the perceptions formed throughout the whole relationship between a person or organisation and a company
What it means, how it is used and where it comes up, with its related concepts.
What it is and how it works
It covers discovery, purchase, use, support and continuity across different channels. It differs from UX in its focus on the overall commercial relationship, although the two overlap. Improving it requires coordinating promises, operations and evidence from real experiences.
Also known as
Consumer experience, CX
Frequently asked questions about Customer experience
Where do you start when there are problems at several points in the customer journey?
Choose a specific journey and understand what prevents customers from completing it successfully. Then prioritize the points where the harm to the customer is greatest or where dependencies between teams are concentrated. Trying to improve every touchpoint at once can scatter the effort. A focused intervention should keep sight of the full journey so the problem is not simply shifted to another channel.
Who is responsible for a customer experience that spans several departments?
Responsibility needs to be coordinated among those involved in the journey, with the authority to resolve conflicts and agree on priorities. Customer service may detect a problem that originates in sign-up, billing or delivery. Assigning it all of the improvement would leave out the causes. A service blueprint helps make those dependencies visible and link each problem to the people and processes that can act on it.
Is a satisfaction survey enough to evaluate customer experience?
It is not enough to understand why a problem occurs or how to fix it. Combine customer ratings with evidence from the journey: completed tasks, incidents, repeat contacts and accounts of specific situations. Signals may disagree, and that discrepancy deserves investigation. A favorable overall score can hide serious difficulties for a group of customers or at a specific point in the service.