Customer Experience (CX) Definition

Customer experience (CX) is how businesses describe the feelings experienced by a customer or potential customer over the entire course of their relationship with the business. Note that CX begins the first time a customer becomes aware of a business—not just later in the working relationship.

For this reason, many businesses create a customer journey diagram to map out the steps a customer takes over the course of their CX. The steps in the customer journey are essentially the same as those in the buying cycle. In the context of online marketing, the customer journey diagram is meant to map the CX of potential customers online (which can then be extended to real-life interactions later).

Customer Experience (CX) Example

A business realizes that they’re losing online marketing prospects in the stage just before they make a purchase. In the buying cycle and their customer journey diagram, this is the “intent” stage—wherein a prospect solidifies their purchasing decision through emotion, budget, and logic.

To figure out why more prospects than they believe is reasonable are dropping off during the intent stage, the business decides to audit the types of CX present at that stage. After internal and external research (such as a survey), the business realizes that prospects at that stage feel that they just don’t have enough information about the product to feel comfortable making a purchase.

The business decides to improve CX by adding additional cornerstone content to their website, writing and distributing an ebook, and nurturing leads via an email drip campaign.

Why is Customer Experience (CX) Important in Strategic Marketing?

Customer Experience

As you can see in the example above, learning more about the CX of their prospects allowed the business to figure out how to solve the problem. In the process, they improved their overall level of CX provided, presumably throughout the entire buying cycle.

Closing Sales

Great CX will lead to increased and easier-to-close sales.