Optimizing your brand's customer experience (CX) is one of the most impactful skills you can cultivate as a business leader. A successful customer engagement strategy can be a pathway to brand loyalty and strong customer lifetime value.
The concept of CX encompasses every interaction and point of contact between customers and companies, which makes it a broad topic. It's also mediated by technology, and therefore always evolving. While these facts make it challenging to grasp and master CX, you can apply fields of study such as behavioral science to become more conversant in related best practices.
By learning about the state of modern CX and its importance, through insights from the experts on the MIT Sloan Executive Education faculty, you can position your brand for lasting customer experience success.
What is customer experience?
CX is the blanket term for the points where a company and its customers meet. Today, with businesses and their audiences meeting on digital channels, this contact is more frequent and varied than ever before.
In the short term, the CX can consist of a series of "nudges," encouragements that encourage customer behavior to guide people from one interaction to the next along an ideal path that will be mutually beneficial. Over time, these touchpoints add up to form a relationship between customer and brand.
As MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Renée Richardson Gosline explains, corporate leaders should expand their thinking about digital CX to go beyond the points where brand and customer interact directly, such as during ordering and fulfillment processes and customer service calls. Everything a brand presents for consumption by customers, from its public statements to its social media interactions, is part of the CX.
Gosline's view of CX involves both points of parity (POPs) and points of differentiation (PODs). The former term describes a piece of the customer experience where brands converge, such as deploying a website around the turn of the millennium or offering touchless delivery during the height of COVID-19. The latter is all about unique value propositions where companies go beyond the POPs to display their unique value propositions.
Successful customer experience strategy in the age of AI
Since digital CX accounts for such a large amount of brand-customer touchpoints today, leaders need to think in terms of technology when optimizing how they present themselves to the public. Thinking about digital interactions is more relevant than ever as so many brands turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to power more elements of their customer-facing operations and shape the overall customer experience.
Gosline uses the concept of "good friction" to describe the way customer experience management can evolve in the AI age. This means pushing back against the idea that the optimal form for a customer journey is to have no slow points at all, with a smooth slide from one step to the next.
While Gosline is in favor of removing "bad friction" from customer interactions — meaning points where users end up trapped in experiences that use their data in unclear ways or are hard to exit — she encourages brands to add some "good friction." This may mean asking for consent to use data and being transparent about how automated elements of the experience work, ensuring that users feel they're in control and improving customer engagement.
Why is a positive customer experience so important for brands?
While creating a positive long-term connection between company and customer has always been important, there is a sense of urgency facing today's businesses to provide an exceptional customer experience. This is because online communications move so quickly, with such an extensive range.
Individuals can express themselves quickly online. As Gosline points out in her course, Breakthrough Customer Experience Strategy, both business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer communication is now faster than ever before. A bad customer support interaction or frustrating experience can influence a brand's reputation quickly, with complaints reaching a large audience. A negative customer interaction can have a bigger impact than a positive experience.
Brands that can innovate while also meeting customer needs and thus create shared value are poised to thrive in this fast-moving space. Organizations that can't create experiences that resonate in fast-paced digital spaces, on the other hand, will struggle to compete.
Legacy organizations and digital-native companies alike have to compete in this new landscape, where positive digital interactions are the price of admission and mishaps can have both immediate and long-lasting consequences. Large, long-tenured businesses may have to learn to move more quickly and communicate through their audiences' preferred channels. Younger competitors may need to focus on avoiding mistakes associated with moving too quickly or a lack of carefully developed messaging.
See how learning about CX strategy empowered an executive's journey.
Step by step: Creating a great customer experience
Creating a strong customer experience strategy in the digital age takes input from every level of an organization. It begins with executives' support and strategic intention and extends to the many employees across departments who will implement the practices in their day-to-day tasks.
While customer experience strategies will be unique to suit each company's needs, there are a few common waypoints that add up to a well-balanced approach:
- Understand the brand's audience: Understanding customer needs and what kinds of incentives and interactions they value is an essential early part of crafting an audience-pleasing CX strategy. Customer preference research can set up a company to cultivate loyal customers.
- Create a clear strategic intention for the digital CX: What does the brand hope to accomplish? This question can unlock the basics of CX strategy. Are customer retention and customer loyalty the most important goals? Is the company trying to rapidly expand its customer base or reach a new market? CX should promote business objectives.
- Innovate and design experimental CX elements: Once companies have mastered POPs, the parts of the experience that are standard for all brands, it's time for them to develop PODs. Thinking of new ways to reach and interact with their audiences can set brands apart.
- Use advanced tech tools (potentially including AI and ML): The integration of automation, AI, and ML to smooth the customer experience is where brands will encounter Gosline's theory of good vs. bad friction. These tech tools can make interactions smooth, but ideally not so smooth and human-free that customers feel like they and their data are lost in the system.
- Collect and analyze customer data: Data is an essential resource for companies' CX efforts because it enables them to determine the performance of their offerings and refine them. Rather than speculating about customer interaction patterns and preferences, brands can know for sure with customer experience analytics.
- Make frequent changes and refinements based on customer feedback: Collecting and analyzing customer data aren't valuable on their own. To make these practices matter, companies must act on what they learn and refine their CX performance to stay ahead of the market.
Crafting a better customer experience is a process that never ends. As technologies evolve and customer expectation trends shift, the entire customer journey map may have to change from year to year. The most agile and effective leaders will be ready to change along via a flexible digital customer experience strategy.
Watch Gosline's expert webinar on encouraging breakthrough CX for the digital era.
Deepening your knowledge to deliver a top-quality customer experience
As a business leader in the digital area, you have a strong incentive to learn as much as possible about optimizing the customer experience. Courses offered through MIT Sloan Executive Education allow you to build this knowledge, whether you take them individually or as part of the requirements for an Executive Certificate. Studying this essential topic from knowledgeable, industry-connected faculty, accompanied by ambitious fellow executives, is an ideal way to immerse yourself in the next generation of business strategy.
View all the details about Renée Richardson Gosline's Breakthrough Customer Experience (CX) Strategy course, which is a highly interactive experience, and enroll today.