What is customer experience: CX Mini Masterclass – E14

The inaugural episode of Julia’s CX Mini Masterclass series tackles a question that goes straight to the heart of CX: What is customer experience? This topic can feel vague and the concept is often misconstrued, so CX expert and show host Julia Ahlfeldt cuts through the jargon to provide clarity. What’s in a name? As it turns out, quite a lot. The term “customer experience” is the basis for an important area of business strategy and an emerging field of work. As such, creating clarity around the definition is quite important. So what is that definition? Customer experience is all the ways that a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, user interface, communication, service and much, much more. While this example isn’t even exhaustive, it’s easy to see that customer experience is incredibly multifaceted. It also adds context to why many in the field of CX have been pushing for customer experience to be recognized as the responsibility of everyone in the business. Still in doubt? Think about your last experience buying groceries, going to a movie or dining out. Reflect on the different components of the experience and where responsibility for these might sit in an organization. Learn more about CX If you’d like to hear more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or the longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Transcript Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript. Click to expand full transcript Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and the host of this program. Thank you so much for tuning in. This episode is the first in my customer experience mini masterclass series. These episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key CX concepts. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional just looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge and skills as a customer experience professional. A summary write-up of the show is available in the show notes for this episode, posted to my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. So, if you happen to be driving, chopping onions for dinner right now, or getting your workout on the treadmill, and there’s something that you want to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. I’ve already done that for you. So, I’ve been really excited to launch this series. I get lots of feedback from others working in the field about the lack of a clear curriculum for people who are interested in learning more about CX. As customer experience becomes a more prominent business focus, those of us who are established in the field need to amp up how we contribute to the evolution of the profession and prepare the next generation of customer-centric change champions. The CX mini masterclass series is part of my contribution to the professional development of global CX practitioners. If you’re interested in following this series, be sure to subscribe to the show so that you can get notified when new episodes are published. For the next few months, I’ll be posting my longer-format interview episodes during the first week of the month, followed by mini masterclass episodes each week after that. To kick things off, I’m starting with a classic concept that goes straight to the heart of CX: defining what is customer experience. The term customer experience is probably the most used term in my vocabulary. If the autocorrect function on my phone is any indication, I probably use these two words together far too often. And as a friend and colleague recently pointed out, not everyone thinks about customer experience in the same way as I do or is as familiar with this terminology that’s so important for my profession. So I’ve started adding a quick definition of customer experience whenever I do a workshop, have a speaking engagement, or give a guest lecture. I think it really helps contextualize the field of work and just make it more tangible for those who aren’t as familiar. I hope that this definition provides you with the same. So, what is customer experience? Customer experience is all the ways in which a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like products, communication, in-store environment, an app interface, advertisements that somebody might see or hear, assistance provided by a representative of the brand through a contact center or in a store. And that list isn’t even exhaustive; it’s just the tip of the iceberg. But I wanted to give you a sense of how broad and inclusive customer experience can be. So, a person’s specific customer experience would then be the cumulative effect of their actions and interactions as they go about fulfilling some need in their consumer life. So, for example, my customer experience shopping for groceries would involve my interactions with the physical store environment, the products on the shelf, the pricing information that I absorb around me as I work my way through the store, any dealings I might have with staff members along the way. Again, that list definitely isn’t comprehensive, but you get the point. Each of these elements is like a piece of a puzzle that has a unique contribution to my overall grocery store shopping experience. These experiences leave an impression on the consumer, and over time, the aggregate effect of these experiences shapes the consumer’s impressions of the brand. Shopping at a grocery store is quite an obvious and direct experience, but sometimes they can be subtler. Say, for example, I’m driving to work and I hear an advertisement on the radio for some items on special at my local grocery store, and this sparks an idea about what I might cook for dinner tonight. And then this is immediately followed by a news bulletin about how the same store was caught selling expired milk that makes me second guess my shopping plans. So while I wasn’t actively engaging with the brand and I wasn’t even grocery shopping, I still had a customer experience that impacted both something that I was going to do as a consumer and my relationship with the grocery store brand in question. When we think about experiences in this way, it’s easy to understand how multifaceted they are and how there’s almost never a case when a single team or department is responsible for delivering customer experience. Customer experience isn’t the responsibility of the support team alone; it’s the responsibility of the entire business. When we start weaving these experiences together to create a customer journey, that’s when we start to see how experiences are interlinked and how they impact loyalty. But that’s another topic for another mini masterclass, one that’s going to be headed your way soon. So there you have it, that’s my first CX mini masterclass episode. My commitment to you as my listener is to keep these episodes short and digestible so that you can easily pick and choose between the topics that you’d like to learn about without having to feel like you need to commit to some lengthy lesson. Please join me for next week’s mini masterclass as we explore the difference between customer experience and customer service. We’ll tackle this age-old question and hopefully give you some ammo for the next time someone asks you if you work in customer service. In the meantime, you can check out my website julia-ahlfeldt.com to explore previous episodes of Decoding the Customer, subscribe to my newsletter, or find my contact details to get in touch. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll be back next week. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email.