Understanding customer experience
Your brand is only as powerful as its public perception
Customer experience is key to long-term success
Do you really know what customers think of you?
A brand is only as powerful as its public perception. This means that when brands stand out within an industry or marketplace, it’s because perception positively aligns with the reality of being a customer.
Organizations that enjoy long-term success understand that their brand is, in fact, a promise. They also understand that the only way to keep that pledge is by delivering a consistent customer experience (CX) that aligns with customer needs and expectations.
The customer experience is how an organization makes its customers feel throughout the lifetime of a brand relationship. And it’s in experience, or more accurately, the emotion generated by the experience, where brand differentiation lives.
Once rationality has run its course, emotion takes over and it’s in this transfer from sense to sensation where a customer’s decision — between two competing products or services, or between staying loyal or leaving one brand for another — is ultimately made.
The evolution of CX has extended brand perception to every aspect of business
Before the internet established itself as an everyday norm of modern life, customer experience resided at the end of the traditional sales funnel. CX was predominantly about how an organization resolved an issue or continued to provide support following a purchase, subscription or contract. As such, for a number of business sectors, delivering this resolution was often the only direct interaction between brand and customer.
Digitalization has removed the middleman, empowering brands to engage directly with their potential customers before they become customers, to take control of their communication and distribution channels and to build better, potentially stronger relationships.
However, disintermediation has also made customer experience all-encompassing. CX now relates to any and every aspect of a business and its operations — from awareness to action — and has the potential to trigger an emotional response in a customer or influence how that person perceives the organization’s brand.
Most consumers (94%) acknowledge the power a positive customer experience has in influencing their purchasing decisions.1 In fact, the cost of a bad experience is detrimental — a recent survey found that, across 25 countries, $3.7 trillion of 2024 global sales are at risk due to poor CX.2
1 Foundever, “Driving customer loyalty: Perception, effort and action.”
2 Qualtrics, “$3.7 trillion of 2024 global sales are at risk due to bad customer experiences,” qualtrics.com.