What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is a broad term that refers to how your customers feel about your company and its brand. It’s essentially a customer’s evolving opinion of your company, based on all of their interactions and impressions over time. This ongoing relationship is sometimes referred as the customer journey, and it includes the customer’s experiences in finding, evaluating, and buying, as well as interactions via social media, web browsing, and CRM interactions.

These days, customer experience spans multiple touchpoints and interaction types, from web to mobile, from social to voice, to face-to-face interactions in a physical setting. Customer experience is also rapidly expanding to include emerging technologies, such as cognitive chatbots and other interactions with your company that don’t involve a human employee. As a result, the need to deliver exceptional, personalized digital customer experiences continues to grow as subset of the overall customer journey. In fact, strong digital customer experiences are becoming table stakes to remain competitive in the modern era, including in businesses with significant brick-and-mortar footprints.

Customer experience is widely considered one of the most important competitive differentiators in the digital era. This is perhaps especially true in consumer businesses, but it is still applicable in business-to-business settings. A poor customer experience can ruin your bottom line, especially if your customers share negative experiences and amplify them on social media. A highly rated customer experience, meanwhile, is a pillar of some of the world’s most recognizable and powerful brands. Delivering consistently strong customer experiences not only helps bring in new customers, but keeps those customers coming back again and again.