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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

Download our report to learn about the trends reshaping CX!

 
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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

Download our report to learn about the trends reshaping CX!

5 Simple Tips to Improve Customer Experience in an All-Talk World

We live in a world that is all talk. With social media platforms everywhere and growing, more and more people are chatting 24/7. When it comes to business, customers don’t want to be talked at; rather, they want to connect with their favorite brands knowing their voices are heard.

Many businesses are missing the opportunity for building and fostering strong relationships with their customers by not showing up to the conversation. Successful companies, on the other hand, find ways to show up—not only in stores, but online and through social media interactions. By engaging with your customers, acknowledging their concerns and complaints, and striving to put them first, you can foster long-term relationships with them.

Your customers have their own stories, and, if you are willing to listen, they will tell you what it is. While you build and cultivate the customer experience, remember that experiences aren’t born but are made. Each moment a customer engages with your products, services, and people is a moment that could sway them to be a lifelong customer or turn them away.

How would you rate your customer experience? As you evaluate your customer experience, here are 5 things to help you improve it.

Be proactive

Successful companies are always looking for ways the can provide their customers—current, past, and future—with the best service possible. By understanding your customers, being proactive, and anticipating their needs (and wants) businesses have the opportunity of gaining a loyal customer for life.

You’ve probably heard people say, “Get out of your comfort zone.” Businesses can have trouble doing this, especially if everything seems to be going well. However, are you continually looking for new ways to improve the customer experience, or are you comfortable in a company structure that isn’t willing to try something new? There are a lot of companies out there taking smart risks and reaping the rewards.

Show empathy

More companies are realizing that empathy is key to providing their customers with better service. Empathy is the act of putting yourself in someone else’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstances. By simply taking time to be more empathic to your customers, you can better understand their needs and provide them with better service.InMoment believes that no one person owns the customer. Instead, everyone—customer and company alike—owns the experience, and by equally sharing in the experience, everyone carries equal weight. To better serve their customers, brands must understand why their customers have chosen to interact with their company. To do that is to show empathy.

If you want to learn more about showing empathy to connect and build better relationships with your customers, take a moment to check out and download our empathy map exercise.

Empower employees

Many companies overlook the power of their employees and miss out on untapped potential. In many cases your employees are the face of the company. Think about it. They are interacting with customers on a day-to-day basis, answering their questions, dealing with their complaints, and building (or not building) strong relationships with customers.Take time to train and ensure your employees develop the skills they need to be successful. Brands with a strong company culture that encourages employees to engage and share appropriate company Tweets and posts can have a positive influence on strengthening the company’s brand.

Also, encourage your employees to offer feedback and suggestions, and listen to their concerns. Businesses that listen to their employees, along with their customers, have more insights on where they can improve and strengthen the brand image.

Collect customer feedback

How do your company, products, and services rate with customers? If you aren’t taking the time to gather feedback from customers, you are missing out on actionable insights for improving the customer experience and implementing new strategies for meeting and exceeding their expectations.By collecting customer metrics and stories, you get a better idea of where you stand with your customers. In addition, the data gathered can help you develop more targeted interactions with your customer base and allow you have a more personalized experience with them.

Creating more personalized interactions and connecting with your customers is important. So, how are you winning the moment with your customers?

Exceed expectations

Stand out from the crowd by providing your customers with the best service, content, and overall experience possible. You are not only competing with your competitors, but with yourself. Where can you improve and how can you exceed your customers expectations? Look at what your competitors are doing and what they are talking about. Can you take another angle that they may not have mentioned and talk about it? There are always ideas out there that can be expanded on.With social media and other digital marketing platforms, create the best campaigns or blog posts that will not only inform but engage your online audience. Be authentic and add value to their lives in the content you create and share. In a world where there is a lot of chatter and information being thrown at people, you need to capture their attention with interesting and well-thought-out campaigns.

The more you understand your customers and their needs, the better products, content, and overall service you can provide them. InMoment wants to help you “own the moment.” That’s why we have developed products and services to not only improve the customer experience, but to truly empower each person in your organization.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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Top Benefits of B2B CX Programs

In a B2B landscape where 9 out of 10 managers rate “fostering long-term relationships” as one of their top three priorities for their CX initiatives, it’s no wonder the best benefits support the long view. Our recent study conducted with CustomerThink, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience” highlights the forward-looking benefits brands are seeing the most.

Take a look at the top hits to see what’s really resulting from B2B customer experience efforts:

Improved Customer Satisfaction

The top benefit attributed to CX initiatives was fairly predictable, but it’s still encouraging with 73% of the pool stating they have seen this benefit. For your program, this one should be a staple. If you’re not improving customer satisfaction with your CX program, there’s a good chance your program is broken—unless your customer satisfaction is already maxed out (not likely, but possible).

Improved Employee Engagement

This second-rated benefit is a bit more surprising and equally encouraging. We’ve written before about this oft-overlooked flip side of Voice of Customer (VoC) and CX efforts. If you’re looking for ways to get the most from your CX initiative, we recommend joining 64% of fellow B2B brands in finding ways to put customers’ positive comments into employees’ hands.

Improved Customer Retention

This is quite possibly the clearest, traditional ROI-type benefit that CX initiatives are called upon to deliver. It’s also a byproduct of the benefits mentioned above. Naturally, improved customer satisfaction and employee engagement should lead to improved customer retention, which is where the loyalty and advocacy gains come in. It’s a shame to see even a 12% gap between this benefit and “improved customer satisfaction,” since the two go hand in hand.

Achieved Competitive Differentiation

A hard thing to track scientifically, this big-picture benefit is a very tangible element at play. More than just creating a good experience for your customers, to achieve competitive differentiation, it’s crucial to create the right experience. Creating a unique experience is key to a seamless brand experience, and it looks like 61% of B2B brands are on that path.

Other benefits are out there, some discussed in our report, some still waiting to be discovered and taken mainstream by intrepid practitioners. One thing is clear, though: Those who apply their VoC actively and purposefully will reap business benefits. Even the lowest-ranking benefit in our report was claimed by 35% of businesses and is of great worth: reducing operational costs.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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5 Critical B2B Drivers that Ensure CX Success

Customer experience (CX) programs take more than good fortune to succeed. In fact, luck usually doesn’t factor in at all. In CustomerThink’s recent report, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience,” researchers found that certain CX practices give B2B organizations a significant competitive advantage.

We’ve curated the top five practices based on the differentiation between CX leaders and laggards.* Read on for a description of how these practices have allowed brands to set themselves apart from the competition.

5 Critical Drivers of CX Success

Leaders

Laggards

Gap
1. Company leaders set a positive example 4.14 2.86 1.28
2. Identify high-impact “moments of truth” 4.05 2.97 1.08
3. Include people and systems in CX design 4.17 3.14 1.03
4. Share feedback with frontline employees 4.26 3.27 0.99
5. Empower employees with tools and information 4.04 3.11 0.93

* Rating Scale: 1 = Not at all effective, 3 = Somewhat effective, and 5 = Highly effective

Lead by Example

Unsurprisingly, good leadership is the number one critical driver of customer experience success. Customer experience starts at the top of your organization and trickles down to the location level. Every member of your organization must be committed to providing each customer with a positive and memorable experience.

Identify the “Moments of Truth”

By creating unique identifiers—or “moments of truth”—for each customer, your brand can produce a seamless and consistently great experience across every customer touchpoint. These identifiers enable brands from every industry to sidestep the pains of manually tying together customer interactions with disparate databases.

Design with the Customer in Mind

The wants, needs, and expectations of the customer should influence every decision your brand makes. Smart brands factor the customer into every company equation. Intelligent organizations align company culture with company goals.

Share Customer Feedback

With so much riding on every customer interaction, your brand can’t afford to leave its frontline employees hanging out to dry. Collaboration and data sharing across all departments and levels of management are a necessity for taking effective action on customer insights and creating a consistent experience across every customer touchpoint.

Give Employees the Tools They Need

Data silos are the enemy of CX success. Without actionable customer information, your employees won’t be able to create the effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) program your brand desires. One way brands are focusing less on data collection and analysis and devoting more time and resources to brand strategy is through the adoption of an automated VoC program. In addition to saving your brand valuable time, a VoC program also enables you to act on customer insights in real time and better meet customer expectations.

Set your brand apart from the competition by making these five CX initiatives the cornerstones of your organization’s VoC program.

* CustomerThink asked respondents to rate their organization’s effectiveness with each CX practice. These initiatives were determined through prior research, industry expert interviews, and sponsor input. “Leaders” are defined as those with measurable benefits or a competitive advantage. “Laggards” are defined as everyone else.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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Retail Benchmark: What Customers Are Telling You

Benchmark studies are interesting animals. The primary take-away most brands look for are the ranking to find out where they sit on the competitive battlefield, and especially how they’re faring in the blood feuds against their chief nemeses.

InMoment recently completed its 2015 Retail Benchmark Study, which contained a high-level view of the competitive landscape (those brands that are winning and those that are losing in the customer experience space). We also discovered a few additional findings that take us deeper into the minds and hearts of the buying public in this continually evolving Age of the Customer.

First, a little bit about our methodology: InMoment maintains a healthy panel of North American consumers. For this study, we received feedback from more than 20,000 of them about how they felt about the top 100 retail brands. We weighted the sample to reflect the most current census distributions. We also measured the data against our proprietary InMoment Index of Customer Experience (InCX), a new metric that combines Overall Satisfaction, Likely to Revisit and Likely to Recommend rankings. For this study, we asked consumers about their in-store experiences only.

Following are the top five insights uncovered by our study:

#1: Putting Their Money Where Their Mouths Are

This is the inaugural benchmark study for our new InCX Index, and it synched up nicely with our original hypothesis: Brands that scored in the top box for Overall Satisfaction and Likely to Recommend also scored the highest percentage—72—in Likely to Revisit. On the other hand, the brands that ranked in the bottom tier in OSAT and Likely to Recommend registered just 10 percent on the Likely to Revisit question. To sum it up: If customers are happy enough to recommend you to their friends, you can bet they’ll be back.

#2: Following the Crowd

Brands within the same segments tend to have similar strengths and weaknesses. For example, most Big Box stores excel at having products on hand, but not so great at staff availability. Shoe retailers score high on the quality of their products and services but can’t seem to stay well stocked.

#3: Friendliness Doesn’t Matter, Except When It Does

Friendliness is almost universally accepted as a critical metric for all consumer brands. However, our study found that high marks in Staff Friendliness did not tend to impact customer’s overall satisfaction, their willingness to recommend, or their likelihood to return. On the other hand, retailers that scored low on this metric got pummeled. Why? Because the customer experience bar has risen. Consumers view Friendliness as a hygiene factor. You won’t get extra points for doing it well, but your brand will suffer if you can’t get this very basic element right.

#4: Venus vs. Mars

When it comes to retail, gender—apparently—does matter. For example, men have much stronger opinions about store atmosphere than women, voicing both approval and disapproval much more frequently and strongly than women. When it comes to Big Box stores, women care a lot about products being in stock, while men care most about store layout. As much as we would like data to support our assumptions that there are no differences in the attitudes of male and female consumers, we find common themes within genders—males and females do seem to be from different planets when it comes to what makes them want to refer and revisit.

#5: Value Ain’t What It Used to Be

When we used to ask customers about value, the most common understanding of that word had to do with perceived fairness in what they received for what they paid. Over the years, “value” has come to mean much more than a simple exchange of goods or services and money. Our Retail Benchmark study found that brands with the highest ratings in variety and selection also performed better overall. On the other end of the spectrum, not having staff available erodes value perception.

Wrapping It Up

While brands tease out individual elements of the Customer Experience into discrete parts with names like Staff Interaction, Product in Stock, and Store Atmosphere, consumers do not. Each element—as well as every interaction customers have with retail brands (from the direct market messages we send to the visual impact of a store to the greetings they receive to the ease of paying—is a piece of the experience mosaic.

Depending on which segment you’re in, and which customer demographic you want to please, these pieces may be weighted differently. The key is in understanding your customers, what they expect, what they love, and what you give them that no other brand can. Simply scoring high on the individual parts of the Customer Experience helps, but unless brands are willing to understand that their relationships with consumers are much larger than the sum of their parts, they will remain in the middle of the pack.

The great brands of today and into the future will understand how they’re doing against their direct competitors, but they’ll spend most of their time understanding how and why their customers feel the way they do.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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How to Get Rich Product Feedback when You Can No Longer Talk to Every Customer

As a startup founder, you were probably on a first name basis with many of your early users. Some became cheerleaders and champions, others churned. And, in those early weeks and months, everyone’s detailed, anecdotal feedback was critical. Those first 5, 10, or 50 customers helped you hone your product into something that hundreds or even thousands of customers now rely on.

As a startup founder, you were probably on a first name basis with many of your early users.  Some became cheerleaders and champions, others churned. And, in those early weeks and months, everyone’s detailed, anecdotal feedback was critical. Those first 5, 10, or 50 customers helped you hone your product into something that hundreds or even thousands of customers now rely on.

As more and more users come on board, you can no longer develop personal relationships with each and every one. Plus, your attention is pulled to hiring, infrastructure and funding.  Now, more than ever though, you need to know what customers think of your product and stay connected.  You need a solution that scales.

What do you do when you can’t talk to every customer any more?

Homebase, a startup that offers free employee scheduling and timekeeping software, has thousands of customers, uses Net Promoter Score to continue its personal response to customer feedback and to shape the product roadmap as the company grows.
Read More…

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

Top 5 Issues Preventing Effective B2B CX Delivery

As a “one-two punch” to win competitive battles, the vast majority of B2B companies are pursuing excellence in their solution offerings and the experiences they provide. That second punch of improving the customer experience is a key competitive strategy, but as shown in a recent study with B2B leaders, there is a lot of room for CX programs to more clearly deliver valuable business benefits.

In the same study, 65% of companies with CX initiatives in place said their company “delivers excellent customer experiences,” and 62% reported that their CX program had improved business performance. However, when asked to rate the overall status of their CX initiative, just 24% of respondents reported clear success as either (1) measurable benefits or (2) gaining a competitive edge.

When asked what’s holding the other 76% back, this is what respondents said:

Lack of time, too busy with current departmental jobs » 50%

Half of the business leaders in this study reported that employees simply lacked the time to devote to CX activities because they were busy with their current jobs. This was reflected in numerous interviews, where CX leaders said that unless CX becomes a part of employee jobs, or personnel is hired for this distinct purpose, it’s very difficult to move forward.

Can’t measure ROI due to data/analytics challenges » 40%

The customer experience is notoriously challenging to sum up in simple figures, but areas where it directly ties to the bottom line have been identified. Numerous case studies outline the key pieces of CX-based ROI: Optimizing single transaction amounts in ways that strengthen future revenue streams and increase operational efficiencies. This blog article gives one starting point for building a business case and starting to define value.

CX goals and strategy not defined » 38%

Ultimately, CX program practitioners must define success clearly and uniquely for their own organizations. Simply put, if you don’t define what success looks like and/or can’t measure whether you’ve achieved it, you’re not likely to view your CX program as a winner.

Lack of people with the right skills » 37%

In this blog article’s alter ego, “5 Critical B2B Drivers that Ensure CX Success,” we stop short of showing the 6th critical driver as measured by gap, which is a shame, since it’s actually the #1 overall score for leaders . We’ll share it with you here: Scoring a 4.33 out of 5 on average was the CX practice of “Train employees to deliver great experiences.” If you want people with the right skills, you’ll need to train them.

Lack of cooperation across the organization (silos) » 37%

This suggests that CX leadership must dedicate their energies to uniting the organization to think about the impact of the end-to-end customer experience. 47% of B2B leaders said that a chief customer/experience officer would be beneficial. Other CustomerThink research has found much the same thing: A chief customer officer would facilitate cross-department coordination and get support from the CEO and the Board.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Net Promoter Score Implementation: DIY or Outsource?

The beauty of Net Promoter Score is its simplicity. At the core, it is one key numeric ranking question supported by an open ended “why” question. (See my post on the ABCs of NPS to learn the basics.) It’s a question that can be asked in many channels: over the phone, in an email, in your website or mobile app, in person. A variety of tools exist to help you execute NPS for your business with various degrees of complexity and cost. These range from setting up your own email survey to using an automated service to hiring a consulting firm to implement NPS programs for your company. Here’s a snapshot of what these different options have to offer:

The beauty of Net Promoter Score is its simplicity.  At the core, it is one key numeric ranking question supported by an open ended “why” question.  (See my post on the ABCs of NPS to learn the basics.) It’s a question that can be asked in many channels:  over the phone, in an email, in your website or mobile app, in person.  A variety of tools exist to help you execute NPS for your business with various degrees of complexity and cost.   These range from setting up your own email survey to using an automated service to hiring a consulting firm to implement NPS programs for your company.  Here’s a snapshot of what these different options have to offer:

Read More…

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

A/B Testing to Optimize Customer Happiness using Net Promoter Score at Magoosh

This week we are featuring a guest author, Peter Poer, Head of Business Development & Content at test-prep platform Magoosh. We love the creative, agile way the Magoosh team used NPS as the A/B test metric to improve their product (and student happiness.) 

Magoosh is all about making sure our students are well educated and happy.  But we’re also a data-driven business that uses metrics to make decisions — vague notions of happiness are nice, but we want numbers!

So this is the story of how we improved student happiness by A/B testing changes to our product with the goal not of optimizing clicks or conversions or revenues, but of maximizing student happiness.   To start, though, I’ll introduce the metric at hand: Net Promoter Score.

NPS: Our Reliable Referral Indicator

Net Promoter Score is a metric that tells you, on the whole, how willing your customers are to promote your product.  Customers are asked on a scale of 1-10 how likely they would be to recommend your product; 9s and 10s are considered “promoters”, 7s and 8s are neutral, and anything below 6 is a “detractor.”  Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters and dividing by the total number of respondents.  As a result, NPS is a percentage somewhere in the range of -100% (all detractors) to 100% (all promoters).  Not to brag, but our NPS is high. Really high.

At Magoosh, NPS is one of the most important metrics we track — it helps us determine not only whether students like our customer service and user interface, but also how well our products prepare students for their exams.  And most importantly it has been a reliable leading indicator of growth in word-of-mouth referrals — our largest marketing channel.  When NPS is high, students talk about Magoosh and more people buy it!

Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 4.13.43 PM

Historically, we’ve asked students the NPS question after they’ve taken their exams (and, importantly, seen their final scores).  We do this because our products prepare students for tests, and, really, the proof is in the pudding.  You can’t fully decide if you’re willing to recommend Magoosh for GRE prep until you’ve taken the real GRE.  The downside is that it can take a while for us to see NPS change in response to product changes.  Since we’re waiting until after students are done studying to survey them, it can take months between when a student sees a new feature and when she rates our product.

Our NPS Issue: Mismatched Expectations

Because NPS is such an important metric to our company, we take changes very seriously.  Earlier this year we saw NPS for our GMAT product dip fairly significantly.  Looking into why, we discovered that several passive and detractor students were complaining that they were getting lower scores on their real GMAT than they did on their Magoosh practice tests.

Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 2.31.45 PM

Our algorithm was telling students to expect one score, but, for some, their official reports were coming back lower — obviously a frustrating experience.  These students were still improving their scores significantly, but once you’ve got a 750 in your mind, a 700 seems disappointing!  We determined that we needed to fix our score prediction algorithm to be more accurate, but we were left with a major concern: would an improved algorithm that displayed a lower predicted score be demoralizing for students?  Which was worse for customer satisfaction — a lower predicted score while studying, or a disappointing final score after the exam?

The Challenge: Could we optimize quickly for NPS?

Normally when we have questions about what works best for conversion or marketing, we run a quick A/B test to determine what works best.  But NPS was different — we’d never A/B tested for NPS optimization before, and our NPS collection survey only went to students after their exams.  It would be months before students who saw the changed algorithm took their exams and we got back NPS data.  Making a significant change without knowing how it would affect our word of mouth marketing was a big risk.

Our Solution:  Bring NPS inside our product

We determined that in order to A/B test the algorithm change, we needed a method for collecting NPS data while students were still studying — not just waiting til the end of their exam.  We began using a third-party tool called InMoment, which allows us to ask the NPS question in our product and analyze the data in real-time.  We then deployed the changed algorithm to half of our GMAT students, and we could then match the “Likely-to-refer” rating to students in the treatment and control groups.  Suddenly NPS had a new use case for us — as a powerful, agile product tool.

Wootric NPS Survey in Magoosh Dashboard


It turned out that the improved algorithm did not affect student satisfaction while studying with Magoosh — NPS from both student groups was identical.  Knowing this allowed us to roll the change out to all students more quickly.  We were also able to track the students in the A/B test over time, and have seen that post-exam NPS for students in the treatment group is a full nine points higher than for the control.

Takeaways from A/B Testing for NPS

1)  Include current customers in your optimizable funnel

Our goal is always to provide our students with the best possible test prep experience.  But since we’re not able to read minds, it’s not always easy to know if what we’re doing is actually providing a great experience.  It’s easy to think of customer acquisition as a funnel, and to wrap our brains around how to A/B test to optimize that funnel.  But what doesn’t come easily (at least for most startups — and definitely not for Magoosh, at first) is to think of current customers as part of an optimizable funnel too.

2)  Optimize your products for referrals

If your business is built on recommendations and word-of-mouth, then you really can’t afford not to optimize your products for referrals.  This process has helped us make sure that what we’re doing is making a meaningful difference for students, and has provided us with a useful and repeatable framework for testing future features and products.

3)  Focus on agility

Shift your thinking on NPS from a one-time transactional model to an ongoing and contextual model.  In-product NPS tools available today like Wootric can help you do this easily, as well as keep track of your A/B test groups.  You can speed up decision making and keep your pulse on customer happiness.

Fee in-app NPS with Wootric

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

More Than a Metric: The Net Promoter Score Cycle

Imagine a lion tamer in the center of a circus ring, whip in one hand, a wooden chair in the other. The lion stares at the man, unsure of its next move. The crowd waits anxiously for the lion to strike — but nothing happens. The angry lion has been tamed, without brute force or coercion.

Imagine a lion tamer in the center of a circus ring, whip in one hand, a wooden chair in the other. The lion stares at the man, unsure of its next move. The crowd waits anxiously for the lion to strike — but nothing happens. The angry lion has been tamed, without brute force or coercion.

The secret, as writer James Clear details on his blog, to taming a lion isn’t submission. Rather, it’s confusion.

When a lion tamer holds a chair in front of the lion’s face, the lion tries to focus on all four legs of the chair at the same time. With its focus divided, the lion becomes confused and is unsure about what to do next. When faced with so many options, the lion chooses to freeze and wait instead of attacking the man holding the chair.

This is precisely the reason that Net Promoter Score is such an effective tool. In other words, the goal isn’t to “tame” your customers but rather to set them free. Read More…

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

Five Steps to Uncovering the Real Customer Experience Journey

When I was growing up, a 50-cent, bottomless cup of coffee was the norm. People would have laughed at the thought of a five-dollar cup of joe, and yet how many of us drive out of our way to find a Starbucks to start our day? In the case of Starbucks, it is not even about the quality of their coffee. You can go to the grocery store and purchase the same coffee there, yet people flock to Starbucks stores because they provide an experience and not just a cup of coffee.

Today, the coffee shop is an iconic gathering place. From the moment you walk in, the aroma of the coffee surrounds you. The environment in the store is calm, relaxing and inviting. The store invites you to stay and relax for long periods, and many people stay to study, work, check their e-mail, update their social media account, surf the web, or share some time with friends. The servers are not called servers; they are “baristas,” adding to the sense that you are doing more than just grabbing an ordinary cup of coffee. Each cup is prepared individually and the customer’s name is written on the cup to personalize the experience.

In other words, the product is not the focal point; rather, the focal point is the experience that the company delivers.

Successfully delivering a good customer experience requires a comprehensive orchestration of a great many things. One of the most essential to the backbone of your CX program is a thorough understanding of the customer and his or her experience with your brand, people, product and service — a process popularly known as customer journey mapping.

Starbucks knows its customers well. It has a well-mapped journey of what the experience will be like from the moment the customer walks into the store. By selling more than just a product, the company is able to charge 5-10 times what a competitor could and still attract more customers. Starbucks clearly understands that focusing on the customer experience is not just a corporate tagline for shareholders. It is a business strategy.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the journey a customer has with your brand, products, services and people. It is important to note that journey mapping is not an appropriate replacement for quantitative efforts, but rather a good starting point or supplement to quantitative programs. It includes multiple touchpoints from the customer’s point of view, such as:

  • Key moments and evaluation points in the process
  • Positive and negative components of the experience
  • Attitudes and emotions that may come into play

Step One: Build the Company View of the Journey

Mapping the customer’s journey starts with identifying and building out the steps of the journey from the company’s point of view, from beginning to end. Start by identifying the key moments a customer has with the company. Getting agreement on the discrete steps a customer takes can be difficult, as each functional area and stakeholder will bring a unique perspective to the table. It is critical for the organization to work off a common vision of the journey, so measurements, improvements, and enhancements must be created using a shared framework.

Building out the steps

Once the steps of the journey are identified, build out the experience of each step, including the following elements:

  • Customer’s desired outcomes
  • Time or duration
  • Attitudes and thoughts
  • Emotional responses
  • Emotional needs
  • Customer pain points
  • Areas of weakness
  • Areas of strength
  • Importance of the step
  • Satisfaction with the step

Though some might argue that this process is overkill for organizational stakeholders to go through, the elements of this process enable a more educated approach to the secondary probing and qualitative research phase. Additionally, the process of including all stakeholders embeds customer journey mapping within the cultural framework of the organization. As stakeholders help build the journey, hear different perspectives from their peers, and eventually see the customer’s perspective of the journey, they are more likely to understand and accept the final product. Finally, it is very insight-provoking at the end of the process to highlight the differences in what the customer sees as critical moments and evaluation points in the journey compared to company stakeholders.

Customer-Centric Blueprint

A by-product of customer journey mapping is a customer-centric blueprint, which highlights customer experiences that lead to a decision or behavior that impacts financial outcomes for the organization. A customer-centric blueprinting process involves:

  • Determining what critical elements are impacting each step in the journey
  • Identifying all people and departments who are even remotely connected to this element
  • Identifying the policies, processes, procedures and tools that impact this element
  • Listing all internal metrics associated with this element of the step, which can serve as early indicators of a good or bad experience by the customer before they even take a survey

Step Two: Build the Customer View of the Journey

Once the internal stakeholders have created their view of the customer journey, it is time to have the end customer validate this framework. A series of qualitative research sessions are usually helpful for this purpose. In these sessions, customers walk through their version of what the journey looks like, using all the same criteria used by internal stakeholders.

During or prior to the interview, customers may also be asked to:

  • Create a collage, drawings or photos that illustrate how they feel about the experience they have when dealing with the brand, category, product, service or people. (See an illustration below of one perspective on air travel.) The use of imagery adds a richer perspective to the experience, which can elicit deeper insights than verbal cues alone.
  • Share metaphors that describe what their emotional needs are at each step. These can come from a standard list, or they can share their own. This part of the process creates a clear delivery goal for the company at each step of the journey.

Step Three: Review the Current State

The next phase of the journey-mapping process often takes the form of a workshop, during which the customer journey is reviewed, while keeping the following objectives in mind:

  • Create a common understanding of the customer journey
  • Identify areas within the experience with the greatest opportunity to improve/address
  • Identify elements that should be included in the VoC program
  • Review the design criteria for improvements and development of new experiences
  • Prioritize the steps in the journey that should be addressed

This step is critical for embedding the journey into the organization. It involves immersing participants in the qualitative research in a way that helps them step into the shoes of their customer. In order to do this, the room where this final workshop is conducted is turned into a customer gallery, which may contain detailed summaries of each step in the journey, customer quotes from the qualitative research, any photos or imagery created or solicited during the research, and any relevant previous research that contributes to the organization’s understanding of the customer journey.

Once this information is absorbed, it is time to prioritize the areas the company considers more important to focus on for improvement. Among the improvement opportunities is the chance to evaluate the current VoC measures against what customers identified as their key moments of the experience. This process can either validate the current measures or identify gaps that need to be filled with VoC tools.

Step Four: Create Customer Experience Design Criteria

You now have detailed journey maps, photos, interview transcripts, previous research, customer quotes, etc. How do you make sense of this and avoid everyone running in a different direction to improve the customer experience?

Creating common customer experience design criteria helps prevent organizations from becoming overwhelmed. Customer experience design criteria are the three or four top criteria that serve as the essence of what customers need in any experience they have with your organization. These criteria are derived from analyzing the attitudes, thoughts, emotions, and needs of customers at each step in the journey, and then identifying a few common themes that represent the essence of what the customer needs. For example, the design criteria for a business technology supplier may look like the following:

  • Proactively identify solutions that add success to the business owner
  • Be impressively responsive
  • Remove the technology burden from the business owner
  • Make every interaction professional

Each of these represents what the business owners conveyed throughout the journey. By creating common design criteria, everyone in the organization can now use these as criteria that should be met in any customer-impacting service, tool or interaction. Additionally, marketing and customer-facing communications should also reinforce the same criteria so that there is better alignment with every customer touchpoint.

Step Five: Ideate a Future State

The final phase in the customer journey mapping process is to leverage the new insights and design a better customer experience. One of the greatest challenges in any customer experience program is achieving true organizational commitment and buy-in. It is not that companies are against having a customer focus; quite the contrary. The challenge is getting the attention of stakeholders who are stretched so thin that it is difficult to get their attention. But the benefits of engaging stakeholders in customer journey mapping gives them a vested interest in the process and increases their common knowledge of the customer experience well beyond where it was.

The final step is to leverage this insight and engagement into the design of a better customer experience. This is done through ideation. Unlike brainstorming, ideation is structured so that it can take participants beyond their current framework of thinking and view solutions through different lenses using the customer experience design criteria previously identified. While ideation is intended to unleash creative thinking, the design criteria help ensure the thinking is focused on what the customer needs the new solutions to address.

While there are entire books written on ideation alone, here are a few of approaches with very brief descriptions:

TOP MIND IDEAS: People throw out top of mind ideas (these tend to be very incremental/not very innovative, but allow people to get the pent up demand ideas out of them).

PICK YOUR PROBLEM: Split up into groups — each group picks two to three high priority problems/opportunities identified in the journey mapping. Each group then develops as many ideas as they can around their selected items.

RELATED WORLDS: After breaking into smaller groups, each group picks an industry outside of the one where they operate. Each group then identifies the characteristics of the selected industry, focusing on how that industry generally solves its key problems (e.g., cell phone companies require contracts for additional service, they offer the phone for free or at a steep discount based on a two year contract, etc.). The intent is then to leverage the list of characteristics to ideate around how companies in the related industry would apply their thinking to solve the problems at hand in your business.

Get Fired/Get Hired High Risk — High Reward Ideas/Far Out Ideas.

GET FIRED: Moderator encourages participants to generate ideas that are so outrageous that in a normal meeting you would “get fired” for bringing them up.

GET HIRED: Moderator asks the group for ideas that scale the outrageous ideas back to something for which you would “get hired.” The intent is to give participants the license to bring up ideas that normally they may be too cautious or prudent to do.

Idea Tournament Session

The last step in the ideation process is to take the mountain of concepts and evaluate them in order to whittle them down to something more manageable. A structured process of voting is used based on top-of-mind reactions and tied to the design criteria. Different targets can be set, but generally allow people to vote for 10% of the ideas. Once this is complete, a process of evaluating the ideas on criteria such as customer need, revenue potential, feasibility, ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage and time to implement (or other gauges that are relevant to the organization) is completed. The output is a “portfolio” of ideas that includes some ideas with “breakthrough” potential (high risk — high return), and others that are more incremental in nature (low risk — low return).

Conclusion

The end result of conducting a thorough customer journey mapping process is a more comprehensive understanding of the experience your customer has with your organization, insights in the areas that need to be addressed, ideas on how to improve the experience, and a common understanding of the experience your customers have with your organization. Walking out of this process, you will also have the following outputs to continue to guide the organization’s journey to improve the customer experience:

  • Journey Map: Company view of the customer journey
  • Journey Map: Customer view of the journey (both a detailed version and a more aggregate version that can be shared more broadly across the organization)
  • A customer-centric blueprint
  • A common set of customer experience design criteria
  • A portfolio of new ideas to improve the customer experience (both short term tactical ideas and longer term break-through ideas)
  • Transcripts of interviews
  • Visuals created by customers
  • A list of measures to consider adding to new or existing VoC efforts

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Customer Journey Map redefined: Customer Journey Management

Let me make a suggestion right out of the gate. While many customer experience practitioners have readily adopted customer journey mapping as a best practice, too many of us look at it as a “once-and-done” activity. We mistakenly see the effort to understand and document the customer journey as almost a checklist step in a project plan with little if any utility value other than the production of a graphical “map” to hang on the office wall and to inform our design process only at the onset of new initiative.

Instead, may I offer the suggestion that we need to consider the customer journey as an evolving, living thing that will change over time as customers find new preferences and manners of interaction and experiences with us. As such, I’d like to offer up the idea that we look at the journey with fairly frequent revisits and, in doing so, work to manage the evolution of the journey. This will keep us from seeing the effort to understand it as a static step we often consider only at the beginning of a new customer experience improvement process.

We accept the notion that our customers are not sitting still and limiting their interactions with us to the same ways and for the same reasons they always have. They do not have a permanent “business as usual” approach to literally everything. Why then could it be sufficient to seek to understand the customer journey as only a single point-in-time exercise? Instead, why can’t we consider revisiting the process a few times a year as our markets and customers mature and evolve?

The purpose of follow-up journey assessments is to re-focus on gaps created by market conditions and changes in customer preference. These updates will bring value as we prioritize our own transformational efforts, focus on areas where we can implement customer-centric innovation and process improvements, and develop and launch new solution offerings. They will enable us to align our new developments with the refreshed journey map and moments of truth along it.

We can (in a progressive mindset) consider customers and their journeys with us as assets, no different from cash in the bank or infrastructure. Then why not do a new journey assessment and artifact map even quarterly, just as we produce financial statements several times a year? It’s just another way to look at this unique asset class; our customer relationships.

Even if you’re thinking to yourselves that your customers’ journeys with your company don’t change that much, that often, I’d still bet that your priorities change.

Some touchpoints along the customer journey may be necessary to make the customer experience more functional or efficient, while not being drivers of customer delight in and of themselves. But in time, these touchpoints, sometimes referred to as “experience hygiene,” may become more important to customers and grow into moments of truth. Similarly, factors that are loyalty drivers at one point in time can lose their importance for customers as the world changes.

It all changes based on the natural heartbeat of our businesses, our customers, and the markets we serve. Losing sight of new priorities or moving targets for optimization may create, at best, avoidable inefficiencies and, at worst, significant market setbacks. If we don’t stay up to date, we allow our competition to seize customer relationships, market share, and profits that should have been ours.

I’d like to strongly urge you to consider the best practice of frequently refreshing to your customer journey mapping work. Perhaps we could also consider, as the title of this post suggests, renaming our process – from customer journey mapping to something with a sense of repetition and continual improvement, like customer journey management. Doing so sends the right message about the process being “alive,” and suggests the need for the continual reprioritizing and frequent critical visits that will benefit our programs.

Let’s refocus on our takeaways: changing our old process of thinking about the map as an artifact to considering the fact that the journey has a heartbeat and is alive with change. The more clearly we understand this, the better the experiences we will create for our customers. Those customers will reward us long into the future with their wallets and their loyalty.

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Customer Experience Disconnects: 5 Steps to Creating the Right Customer Experience

Customer Experience is maturing. I rarely hear the phrase “customer service” anymore, and most business leaders know what acronyms like CX and VoC mean—without even Googling them.

However, maturing is a verb that indicates a process; it doesn’t mean we’ve completely grown up. In fact, we’re probably somewhere in our teenage years, which, just like that stage of human development, can be awkward and painful.

Over the last year, I’ve seen an increasing number of news stories, blogs, and social posts recounting customer experience initiatives gone awry—from awkwardly executed campaigns to the imposition of “friendlier” lingo. Customers are rolling their eyes, posting comments of incredulity, and poking fun in live broadcasts.

Does the Shoe Fit Your Brand Experience?

While I won’t name names, this is happening to customer experience newbies and more seasoned brands alike. Why are these good intentions being questioned, begrudged, and even mocked?

Simple: Because in our rush to deliver great customer experiences, companies are designing experiences that simply don’t fit their brands. Normally, disconnects between expectation and execution present themselves in the form of a “bad” experience. But inappropriate experiences can come across as contrived, insincere, or just plain silly—and they can hurt a brand as much as those unpleasant ones.

When it comes to customer experience, it’s important that you don’t just try to be “the best,” but that you create and execute experiences that align with your customers’ best expectations. Following are a few important steps every company and CX professional should take to get, and stay, on the right path:

1. Know Who You Are

A brand isn’t just an image, a “look and feel,” or a catchy name. Your brand should capture the essence of who you are and the unique value you offer customers. Most importantly, your brand is a continual negotiation, a dance between your company and your customers. Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, said, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is; it is what consumers tell each other it is.” This doesn’t mean you can abdicate the responsibility of doing the hard work of distilling that unique value and communicating it out. But it does mean that you must know, without a doubt, whether your brand promise resonates with customers.

2. Know What Your Customers Expect

Customers expect different things from different brands. For some, it’s “fast and accurate.” For others, “friendly and helpful” is more appropriate. And for some, “luxury and exclusivity” are baseline expectations. Deviating from these core promises gets brands into trouble. For example, “friendly and helpful” can actually get in the way of “fast and accurate.” Stay focused on delivering what your customers value most.

3. Be Authentic

There is no single formula for CX success because each organization and its relationship with customers are different. Simply imposing another successful customer experience blueprint on your own organization won’t work. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the best, but, if you neglect the important step of adapting rules to the specific needs of your brand and your customers, you’re likely to stumble.

4. Be Deliberate

Great customer experience doesn’t just happen. Identify the “moments of truth” along your customers’ journey that are most critical to their experience, so you can draw them closer at each interaction. And pay special attention to the language you use. Even subtle-sounding misfires, like using the word “guest” instead of “customer” can indicate you don’t understand what customers value from their relationship with your brand. This is not simply a matter of being politically correct. Words matter, so choose wisely.

5. Listen

Listening to customers cannot be something that happens once a year, once a quarter, or even once a month. Set up listening posts at every important touchpoint, provide open forums for customers to share when and how they prefer, and be proactive by listening on social media and other online forums. It’s just as important that you have the right technology in place to make sense of the mountains of customer data—and the organizational commitment to act quickly.

In a blog post late last year, Gartner declared customer experience “the new competitive battleground.” As you embark upon the fight for market share, be wise in the strategies and tactics you deploy. While you should learn from the past, the only sure way to win and keep the hearts, minds and dollars of your customers is to take time to create an authentic environment: one made up of individual experiences that are true to the relationship you want with your customers. And then, push yourself elegantly beyond that goal.

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