What is a customer experience strategy?

TL;DR: A customer experience strategy is a documented plan for how your company operates across the entire customer journey, and, above all, in the gaps between teams where no one's job description reaches. Most companies lack one because every department can hit its targets even though the customer has a miserable time, and nothing in the org chart is built to notice.

Eleven days after my espresso machine arrived with a snapped steam wand, I had spoken to three people at the company and told the same story three times.

Each of them was good at their job. The first replied on chat within a minute. In an email, someone apologized before I'd finished explaining. Dana, who picked up the phone on day nine, stayed past the end of her shift searching a parts database that kept insisting my steam wand didn't exist.

None of them was rude, and none of them was slow. What none of them had was any idea that the other two conversations already existed.

The chat transcript never reached the email queue. Email opened a fresh case number. Phone support could see neither, so on day nine, I started from the beginning with a woman who deserved better than to hear it.

By then, I'd stopped caring about the wand. Everyone at that company did their job, and I still won't buy from them. I bought the part from a third-party site for $22 and fitted it myself in four minutes.

Here's what should bother you. If you had audited that company's customer service the following week, you'd have found three closed tickets, three agents who handled their conversation well, and no trace of a problem.

What a customer experience strategy actually covers

Nothing in that story is a service failure. Every conversation worked. The failure sat in the two places nobody owned: the handoff from chat to email, and the handoff from email to the phone.

Preventing that is what a customer experience strategy is for. A customer experience (CX) strategy is a documented plan for how your company behaves across the entire customer journey, from the first ad a person scrolls past to the renewal or cancellation, including the seams where one team's responsibility ends and another's hasn't started.

Two words carry the weight. Documented, because an intention living in one person's head can't be handed to a new hire or defended in a budget meeting. Entire, because the espresso company had a competent plan for chat, one for email, and one for the phone, and nothing whatsoever for a someone like me who used all three.

An effective customer experience strategy answers three questions the entire company can repeat back:

• What should customers feel at each stage, and what data shows whether customer satisfaction moved?

• Who owns the seams between teams, where most bad customer experiences happen?

• Which customer expectations are we meeting, and what does the entire process look like from outside?

Where customer service fits in the customer experience

Customer service is what happens when a customer needs help, which makes it one component of the customer experience and the component most likely to be measured. Hence the confusion between the two, and the expense of it, since it sends companies shopping for digital tools when what they have is an ownership problem. My espresso company managed good customer service and a broken customer experience simultaneously, which is only possible because they aren't the same thing.

How is CX different from UX?

User experience covers how a customer interacts with your product: the checkout flow, the app, the settings page nobody can find. Customer experience is the larger container, holding UX along with the pricing page, the invoice, the returns policy, the wording of a delay email, and how it feels to cancel. Excellent UX inside a poor experience gets you a beautiful app bolted to a company that can't locate your order.

Why nobody at the company noticed

That espresso machine company employed people who cared, and the problem still ran eleven days unflagged.

The reason is that every team could show a clean month. Support closed its tickets inside target. Logistics shipped on time, since the damage happened in transit. Product had built a machine that works beautifully, which I can confirm, because I'm drinking from it as I write.

Nothing in that building was measuring me. Everything measured departments. A journey crossing four teams arrives as four separate successes, and the customer experience appears in no report.

That customer experience blind spot has a price, and Qualtrics has tried to put a figure on it. Their latest global study of more than 20,000 consumers found 11% of experiences are bad, and 47% of those make the customer cut their spending. For online retail the figure is 58%. Scaled across economies, nearly $3 trillion of sales is at risk this year, $865 billion of it from customers who stop buying altogether.

Almost none of that arrives as a line item. It shows up as customers who quietly don't return, the hardest loss to build a business case against. Competitive advantage used to sit in product and price, and competitors copy both inside a quarter. Accountability for the whole of what a customer meets takes far longer to copy.

The arithmetic underneath is dull and hard to argue with. Keeping a customer costs less than winning new customers, so customer churn inflates your acquisition budget long before it dents revenue, and every open seam in the customer lifecycle taxes customer lifetime value and loyalty. A company's ability to improve customer experience is mostly its ability to stop losing people it already paid for. Loyal customers recruit for you, telling potential customers what happened, which wins more customers without spending to find them. In a digital world your customer base compares you against the best experience they had all week.

So the useful question isn't whether your customer experience is good on average. It's where customers fall through. Faced with that, most companies reach for a framework.

Why customer experience frameworks won't find your gaps

They are largely one list, rearranged. Be consistent, be easy to deal with, follow through on what you promised, and put people in front of customers who want to be there. No two decks about customer experience management agree on the count, because the count was never the point.

What none of these models will tell you is who answers for the customer falling between two of the parts. They name the components of a good customer experience and go quiet on ownership of the seams, which is where customers' perceptions actually form, and the one thing my espresso company got wrong. Everyone promises a seamless experience in the copy. What customers actually register is whether anything good happened at the moment things went wrong. Steal what fits your business strategy, and pay closer attention to the two that earn more than checklist status.

The one pillar worth stealing

KPMG's six pillars include resolution, which holds that recovering well from a failure builds more customer loyalty than never failing at all. That's oddly encouraging for anyone running a real operation, and my espresso brand still managed to skip it.

The stage everyone leaves undesigned

The 5 E's are the only model here that forces you to plan what happens after the money changes hands. Entice and enter absorb the budget, while exit and extend get whatever survives, and that back half is where brand loyalty and customer advocacy get decided. Borrow it for customer journey mapping.

Finding the gaps in your customer journey

No framework will hand you a map of your own seams, so you have to go and look. Two jobs for your customer experience strategy, in this order.

Start from what customers already told you

A buyer persona built in a workshop is fan fiction. Build customer personas from customer feedback you already own: support transcripts, sales calls, cancellation reasons, online reviews, and a few focus groups if you can run them. Understanding customer needs begins with a deeper understanding of what your company's customers are trying to get done, and what makes them look bad in front of their boss when it goes wrong.

Then walk the whole customer experience and mark every seam

Customer journey mapping means listing every touchpoint in order with evidence from real interactions attached: ads, pricing page, signup, onboarding, first support contact, renewal, cancellation. Then mark each point where the customer crosses between teams, because that's where your version of my eleven days is waiting.

The pain points will be mundane. Mine was a parts database and two systems that couldn't see each other. Nobody designs that; it accumulates while everyone hits their numbers, which is also why maps go stale and want revisiting whenever you ship something that changes the buyer's journey.

Closing a customer experience gap means giving it an owner

A map shows you the seams and won't close them, because a seam belongs to nobody by default, and work belonging to nobody doesn't get done. Four things make the difference.

Name a person

Somebody has to own the whole journey, by name, with enough authority to stop a decision in a product review that would damage the customer experience. Saying the word "customer" often doesn't make a company customer centric. Having one person accountable for the seams between customer success, support, marketing and billing does. A good CX strategy is one a frontline agent can describe in a sentence and act on without permission. Without that owner, customer experience success stays a slide.

Tie the strategy to business objectives that already exist, translating each into a customer-side sentence, so "reduce churn 15%" becomes "a customer in month three should never wonder whether they picked the wrong tool." A customer-centric CX strategy that can't be traced to business goals the board watches gets defunded in the first hard quarter.

Give the next person the context

Here a customer relationship management system earns its cost: one record of all interactions, visible to whoever picks up next. Buying one won't do it alone. Gartner surveyed more than 200 service leaders and found that skill at evaluating vendors raised the odds of hitting a technology goal by 50%, while skill at organizational readiness raised them by 300%. Handoffs across multiple channels look like a technical detail and behave like the main event, because they're most of what customers mean by competent, and most of where customer loyalty is won.

Let your customer service teams decide

Train for empathy and problem-solving, then hand over the authority to use both. An agent forced to escalate a $40 part is an expensive way to irritate people. Dana wanted to help me and her tools wouldn't let her. The employee experience side isn't soft either: Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis, across thousands of business units, ties employee engagement to higher customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. People who feel trusted decide faster, and satisfaction is what that looks like in the customer experience.

Let a machine take the repetition

Most people would rather find an answer themselves than talk to anyone, so treat self service as part of the customer experience rather than a way of deflecting work. Self service that works is a positive experience in its own right. Past that, repetitive questions are where artificial intelligence stopped being a pitch and became plumbing, and where it earns its place in customer interactions. Order status, password resets and policy questions are high volume, low judgment, and answerable from data you hold.

This is the part of a CX strategy Text was built for. Text's AI Agent connects to your order, account and help center data, answers routine questions in seconds at any hour, and passes the rest to a person with the full conversation attached, so the customer never repeats themselves. Run that in my story, and Dana opens the chat on day nine, already knowing about days one through eight. One positive experience at the moment I was angriest would have possibly bought multiple orders from me in the following years.

Metrics that see the whole customer journey

If your reporting can't tell a successful ticket from a successful customer, you'll keep producing months like mine and filing them as fine.

Five numbers, read one customer at a time

Track a customer satisfaction score for individual customer interactions and Net Promoter Score for how customers feel about the overall experience. Add Customer Effort Score, the one that would have caught me, since it measures how hard the customer had to work. Retention, churn and customer engagement tie it to money, and customer lifetime value prices a rescued relationship. Five key performance indicators is plenty.

Read them at the customer level rather than the customer base average. Customers' perceptions form around their worst moment, so an exceptional customer experience for the median tells you nothing about the person drafting a one-star review. Averages hide the customer who never got a positive experience at all.

Close the customer experience loop or skip it

Analyzing customer data only counts when something moves afterward. Route each piece of feedback to whoever can fix the cause, then tell the customers who complained what changed, which costs nothing and is the step everyone skips.

The wand

The machine works now, and it makes very good espresso.

I've never bought anything from that brand again, and it isn't about the eleven days or the $22 or the snapped wand, which was the courier's fault anyway. It's that three capable people were made to look incompetent by the company paying them, and one of them stayed late for a stranger who then repeated himself to somebody else the following week.

A successful customer experience strategy is how you stop doing that to people on both sides of the conversation. The journey maps, the personas, the customer experience management platform and the six pillars are all instrumentation. What they instrument is one promise: that somebody here is following the customer through every customer touchpoint, and will fix whatever breaks along the way.

Frequently asked questions

What is a customer experience strategy?

A customer experience strategy is a documented plan for how a company behaves at every stage of the customer journey, including the handoffs between teams that no single department owns. It sets out what customers should feel at each stage, who is accountable for the gaps between functions, and which customer data proves whether any of it is working.

What are the four main pillars of customer experience strategy?

People, process, technology and measurement. People and technology get bought first because they can be. Process decides whether a customer moving between two teams is looked after or dropped, and measurement is the only thing that tells you which of the two just happened.

What are the 5 C's of customer experience?

Consistency, convenience, communication, care and closure. They work best as an audit: run your last twenty support conversations against the five words and the failures usually cluster under one of them. What they won't tell you is who is responsible for fixing that column, which is the limit of every CX framework.

How is CX different from UX?

User experience covers how someone uses your product, including the checkout flow, the mobile app and the settings screen. Customer experience is the wider container, holding UX along with pricing, invoicing, returns policy, support and cancellation. A company can run excellent UX and a poor customer experience simultaneously.

Who should own a customer experience strategy?

One named person, with enough authority to stop a decision that would damage the customer experience, and with support, marketing, billing and customer success reporting their friction to them. Ownership spread across every department behaves the same as no ownership, because the gaps between teams belong to nobody by default.

What is a customer experience example?

A shopper contacts a retailer about a damaged item, gets a fast and courteous reply on chat, then repeats the story on email and again on the phone, because none of the three systems share a record. Each conversation was handled well and the customer experience was still poor, since nobody carried the thread between them.