What Is Customer Experience (CX) and How Do You Manage It?

Customer Experience (CX) is a broad term describing how customers interact with and feel about your business. With that in mind, Customer experience management is the process of interpreting, measuring and improving CX.

Understanding customer experience is one thing, but knowing how to manage it is at the core of providing a better experience for your customers, no matter where they are on their journey.

From the moment a customer first discovers your brand to long after their purchase, the different touchpoints they encounter will add up to the sum of their ‘experience’.

Due to the multi-faceted nature of ‘experience’, there’s no convenient single metric for measuring experiences – though concepts such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score) make a good go of it.

Outside of metrics like NPS, understanding customer experience is instead about analysing a user’s entire journey across your business. At the very least, an experience consists of communication, quality, pricing, and branding.

Thinking about a real example, consider a coffee shop.

A customer’s experience is shaped by many different factors, from the shop’s ambiance to the customer service, the taste of the coffee and the price they pay.

But… how did the customer find the coffee shop? Google Maps? Instagram? Did they make any enquiries before they showed up?

75% of consumers expect a consistent experience across all channels - both offline and online.. A good experience in the shop may be soured if they encounter issues with the shop’s social media pages, or if the opening times are listed incorrectly in search.

For any business to improve customer experience, it must first understand customer experience, which means putting in place a true Voice of the Customer programme, which doesn’t just give customers a chance to give feedback, but which listens to, and acts on that feedback.

With both digital and traditional touchpoints to account for, businesses need to understand not only what CX is but also which touchpoints matter most to their users and how to measure and manage customer experience improvements.

Customer experience vs customer service vs customer experience management

These terms get mixed together all the time, but they are not the same thing:

• Customer experience (CX) is the overall impression customers form from every interaction they have with your business.
• Customer service is one part of that experience. It usually refers to the help customers receive when they need support, advice or a problem fixing.
• Customer experience management (CXM) is the work of improving the whole experience deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.

If your team only thinks about customer service, it tends to focus on the point at which something has already gone wrong. Good CX management starts earlier and looks wider. It asks:

• Was the website clear?
• Did the customer know what to expect?
• Was the handoff between teams smooth?
• Did we communicate well?
• Was the outcome worth the effort?

That is why managing customer experience is really about managing journeys, not isolated incidents. If you need help with that shift in mindset, our guide to customer journey mapping is a good next step.

What shapes customer experience?

Customers do not experience your business in departmental boxes. They experience one joined-up reality.

That reality is usually shaped by a combination of:

• how easy you are to deal with
• how well you communicate
• whether your product or service does what it promised
• how consistent the experience feels across channels
• how quickly problems are resolved
• whether customers feel understood, respected and remembered

This is why CX is rarely improved by one-off initiatives.

You can redesign a website, retrain a support team, or launch a new loyalty programme, but if the rest of the experience stays clunky, the customer still ends up with a poor impression of your brand.

Why managing customer experience is vital to growth

Businesses that put a VoC programme in place to manage CX are far more likely to succeed than competitors. You may already measure and manage specific parts of a user journey, such as customer complaints – but you need to take the full customer experience journey on board if you want to succeed.

According to McKinsey, businesses deemed leaders in CX enjoyed three times the financial performance of CX laggards. Improving CX can drive myriad benefits — establishing customer trust and loyalty, improving sales and reducing complaints or refunds. Another stat showed that 84% of businesses that invested in CX improvements reported increased revenue as a result.

To manage customer experience and prioritise improvements, you need to know what factors matter most to your customers. This is different for every brand – though a Hotjar report did find that across a wide sample pool, the biggest issues that affected CX were long wait times, too much automation, poor personalisation, unresolved issues and a lack of understanding of customer needs.

Whilst many of those issues are shared across all brands, a truly effective CX management process needs to account for the unique needs of your specific customers and your business as a whole…

Defining customer experience through user journeys

To improve customer experience, you need to understand how that full experience is informed by multiple touchpoints that make up a customer’s complete experience of your company.

Individual touchpoints aren’t enough – you need a full customer journey map. To create these, you must first identify your user’s needs and map how your business solves them. How efficiently can you meet their needs, and what issues may occur as a result?

Using this information, you can start to define the measurements you may use to gauge experiences. Customer complaints, product returns, email unsubscribes – all of these metrics might indicate the overall experience you are offering.

NB: Don’t confuse review scores with customer experience measurements, read this post to find out why.

If you’re struggling to define your customer journey, the following questions are a great place to start:

• What needs bring a customer to your brand?
• How do they first encounter your business?
• How do they make an enquiry or purchase?
• What sort of issues might they experience?
• What level of customer support do they receive?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll better understand the journey a user takes with your brand. You can begin to test improvements at various stages of this journey and measure how they impact the overall customer experience.

How to manage customer experience in practice

The phrase “manage customer experience” sounds bigger and more complicated than it needs to be.

The strongest CX teams we work with are doing five things repeatedly:

1. Decide which journeys matter most

Don’t start by trying to improve everything.

Start with the journeys that matter most to customers and to the business: onboarding, support, renewal, complaint handling, repairs, claims, checkout, delivery, implementation, or whatever your equivalents are.

If you are not sure where to begin, look for:

• repeat complaints
• drop-off points
• moments with obvious operational friction
• journeys linked to retention, referrals or revenue

2. Listen at the right moments

You need feedback close enough to the real experience that customers can still remember what happened and your team can still do something about it.

That usually means real-time customer feedback or transaction-triggered feedback rather than occasional, vague pulse-checks on the whole relationship.

3. Combine scores with comments

Scores help you judge severity. Comments tell you what to fix.

That is why the best CX programmes rarely rely on one number alone. They use a small set of customer satisfaction metrics alongside free-text feedback to understand both how bad a problem is and what is causing it.

4. Assign ownership

Experiences do not improve because a dashboard exists.

They improve when somebody owns a journey, sees what is frustrating customers, and has the mandate to coordinate improvements across teams. Without ownership, CX work becomes a stream of observations without consequences.

5. Close the loop and prove impact

Good teams do not stop at “we gathered feedback”.

They act on what they hear, respond to unhappy customers where appropriate, share insight internally, and track whether changes improve outcomes. That is the difference between measuring experience and actually managing it.

Signs you are measuring CX, but not managing it

A lot of businesses think they are doing customer experience management when they are really just collecting fragments of customer opinion.

Warning signs include:

• you have dashboards, but no clear owners for customer journeys
• complaints are handled, but underlying causes keep repeating
• teams can see scores, but not the comments behind them
• customer feedback sits in one function and never reaches the people who can fix things
• you run surveys, but customers do not see evidence that anything changes

If any of those feel familiar, the issue is rarely lack of data. It is usually lack of process, ownership or follow-through.

A simple framework for improving customer experience

If you want a practical starting point, use this simple cycle:

1. Listen: collect feedback at meaningful points in the journey.
2. Understand: identify the biggest frustrations, patterns and causes.
3. Act: fix the operational issues that matter most.
4. Check: measure whether the experience actually improved.
5. Repeat: use what you learned to improve the next journey.

That is customer experience management in its most usable form.

It does not require a giant transformation programme on day one. It requires a disciplined habit of listening, learning and improving.

Measure and manage CX effectively with CustomerSure

As we’ve discussed, the quality of a customer’s experience is the result of multiple factors. Thanks to technology, however, there are methods to better focus and define experience at a customer level.

CustomerSure’s Voice of the Customer platform allows businesses to create and send engaging surveys that gather direct feedback from customers. Better yet, we use CSAT and NPS scoring to help you establish the most effective industry measurements to take the guesswork out of the equation.

Once you have these measurements in place, you can begin to manage and improve your customer experience process. Without them, many of the actions you might take will be based on guesswork.

If you want to build a stronger foundation before choosing tools, our guide to Voice of the Customer best practices explains what separates useful CX programmes from box-ticking exercises.

Remember: businesses implementing effective CX improvements drive far greater revenue than competitors. Take a demo of our software today and see how we can help you.

Darren Wake

Darren Wake leads Customer Success at CustomerSure, where he helps clients act on feedback in ways that improve retention, increase revenue, and reduce customer effort. With a background in marketing, research, and experience design, he’s worked with teams across sectors to align internal processes with what matters most to customers. Known for his practical, plain-speaking approach, Darren helps organisations keep things simple, focus on the essentials, and deliver measurable improvements.