By Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer, and author of The 10-Second Customer Journey
You hear the term “customer experience” all the time, but what exactly does it mean, and where did it come from? When I began writing The 10-Second Customer Journey
I decided to find out.
In its earliest conception, the term “customer experience” grew out of academic discussions of "experiential consumption," which described the set of sensory perceptions and feelings that surround the use of products and services. (1)
But the term “customer experience” and its arrival as a field of marketing study and focus are credited to Lewis Carbone, who wrote the 1994 Marketing and Management article with Stephan Haeckel entitled "Engineering Customer Experiences.” Carbone and Haeckel defined customer experience as "the 'take-away' impression formed by people's encounters with products, services and businesses — a perception produced when humans consolidate sensory information."
Carbone and Haeckel’s work launched an entirely new way of thinking about what people were buying when they became customers. In their groundbreaking article, as well as in subsequent publications, Carbone and Haeckel laid out the need for organizations to deliver and compete on ‘experiences’ by orchestrating a set of cues that consumers consciously or subconsciously pick up on during the buying process.
In other words, customers aren’t just buying a product. They’re buying an experience. Customer experience is the secret sauce that the most successful companies added to distinguish their offerings and create loyalty. Whether it was the cleanliness and uniformity of McDonald’s or the attention to detail at Walt Disney World, these customer experience elements created both distinctiveness and loyalty.
According to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in their groundbreaking 1999 book The Experience Economy, this differentiating layer of experience actually becomes the “product” with its own economic value.
Around the same time as Carbone and Haeckel’s original article, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers added a complementary dimension to the concept of customer experience with their book The One to One Future. They painted a vision of personalized marketing communication based on newly powerful databases and developing “interactive” (the old word for “digital”) technologies. Given the timing, Pepper and Roger’s book was both revolutionary and downright visionary. Underlying their vision of personalization was a new way of thinking about customers through data-driven segmentation, with an objective of identifying core ‘heavy users’ and nurturing direct relationships with them.
When Carbone, Haeckel and Lewis Berry wrote in 2002 about the need to understand the customer journey, the concept at the time still focused on in-person, live interactions. (2) But at that moment, everything was about to change. The internet and the advent of digital marketing and e-commerce dramatically altered the paradigm of experience. The arrival of the internet didn’t make the original concept of customer experience obsolete by any means, but it necessitated a broader definition to encompass an entirely new set of challenges.
Over the next two decades, the more academic view of customer experience transitioned into a formalized and distinct discipline called “CX.” CX pioneers like Jeanne Bliss, one of the original Chief Customer Officers, and Bruce Temkin, a former analyst at Forrester and former Head of Qualtrics XM Institute, began developing frameworks around enterprise CX capabilities, focusing on measuring customer perceptions and tying these to business outcomes.
In general, the terms “customer experience” and “CX” are often used interchangeably, but somehow in the transition from big idea of customer experience to discipline of CX, a lot more changed than just a bunch of letters. What I’ve found mostly is that, outside of CX professionals, I don’t think a lot of people understand the meaning or difference.
In The 10-Second Customer Journey, I defined Customer Experience as “the seamless integration of marketing, product, commerce, and service to acquire and retain customers.” In other words, it’s the orchestration of the organization’s growth engine to create and keep more customers. The discipline of CX supports Customer Experience with an array of expertise, frameworks, tools, and metrics that identify, predict, and eliminate friction for customers, unlocking growth.
If the difference between Customer Experience and CX seems confusing, the ‘X’-plosion of other types of experience, with UX (user experience), DX (digital experience), MX (multi- platform experience), EX (employee experience) and XM (experience management) make it even tougher to understand. Sometimes, it seems like people are adding the word “experience” as a re-branding exercise. For instance, I find that technology vendors often position Customer service tools as Customer Experience platforms.
Whatever the case, the concept of customer experience has come a long way since its conception 30 years ago, and it will continue to adapt as we learn to operationalize its key principles and tie them closely to growth strategies.
Read more about Customer Experience in The 10-Second Customer Journey
Brian Lofman (1991),"Elements of Experiential Consumption: an Exploratory Study" and
Hirschman and Holbrook's (1986) Thought-Emotion-Activity-Value (TEAV) Model.
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