It's always been an intuitive foundation of business success: companies that deliver quality products and helpful customer service beat those that don't. Seems obvious, right? Yet the fact that it was even necessary for Lou Cardone to coin the term "Customer Experience" in the 1990s speaks to how easy it is for organizations to lose sight of this fundamental truth.
Since the development of customer experience (CX) as a discipline, companies that focus on shaping and measuring the customer experience have seen real business value. A glance at a few available statistics shows that CX-focused companies see:
The value of CX has never been better understood. The technology to deliver elite CX has never been more powerful. But globally, the quality of customer experience seems to be stagnating. Forrester's 2025 CX Index rankings finds that 21% of brands have declined, 6% improved, and 73% remained unchanged. CX hit an all-time low in North America, and saw an overall decline in the APAC region. What's going on?
It's true that outside influences, such as macroeconomic instability, can negatively impact CX perceptions, as customers place a higher demand on seeking value. However, there are indications that much of this decline in CX quality is self-inflicted. Customers have noticed an evident decline in customer obsession, and they're turned off by lackluster technology implementations, including AI.
As technology has advanced, with customer channels becoming more layered and complex, the need for intelligent CX management is greater than ever. Maintaining a high standard across complex customer experiences has become a significant and sometimes overwhelming challenge. That's why it's more important than ever to debunk some common misconceptions about CX that stand in the way of adopting a company-wide CX mentality.
You can see the sense in this one. Marketing is responsible for brand awareness and reputation, so they have traditionally owned the CX. The problem is that becoming aware of a brand is really only the first step in a lifelong customer journey.
CX should be a uniting strategy across product, operations, marketing, and customer service because all these elements affect how the customer perceives the brand. For example, a regional bank might have independent marketing touchpoints for each business unit. This leads to a very disconnected experience for customers with multiple accounts. Someone with personal, small business, personal loan, and investment accounts might have four totally different onboarding experiences. They may feel like they're dealing with four independent entities, because essentially, they are. That's a recipe for confusion and fatigue.
Bust this myth: Define customer journeys to share across business units. A typical customer may well move through various relationships over a lifetime, and a disappointing experience in any one of them will blowback on the whole company. You can always adjust by segment as necessary, without losing the common focus.
This is like saying that an airplane seat is the same thing as an airline. UX is just one way a customer experiences your brand. Yes, by all means, it should be done right. But the nicest seats in the world won't save an airline whose flights are chronically late and that always loses your luggage.
UX tends to focus on the product only, often siloed from marketing and customer service, even creating their own experience strategy artifacts, such as personas and customer journeys. This is typical in startups where the product is the brand, which relies heavily on virality, and whose strategic vision rarely extends beyond solving the original acute issue.
Bust this myth: How much more effective would it be if the product was designed from the ground up in the context of the greater CX strategy? Value should be communicated, and performance identified, along the whole customer lifecycle.
Some organizations believe that measuring customer sentiment alone, with surveys like NPS and CSAT, is what CX is all about. Number goes up, CX good; number goes down, CX bad. Of course, those sentiment metrics are one indicator of the quality of your CX, but only one. The insight without a strategy and methodology to act on it is meaningless.
A large sales-driven enterprise may think its solid NPS means its customers are happy. But is there true value and engagement in the relationship? Not to mention, sometimes a hit to your NPS can point to an opportunity. The customer service recovery paradox is a phenomenon where customers are more confident in a company that fixes a problem than a company that never had a problem to begin with. Your survey ratings are just one part of a complex CX ecosystem.
Bust this myth: Integrate sentiment metrics into your design strategy. Use customer research to develop hypotheses, compare against data, design, test, and iterate. You can measure all the things and still misdiagnose your situation, unless those metrics are connected to an overall CX strategy.
Hands up, everybody who heard "CX" and thought first of call centers and chatbots. You're not alone. But CX goes way beyond frontline interactions to include the entire value proposition for the customer. Is the product easy to use? Are the terms of service fair? Is billing clear and timely? Is off-boarding even well-designed for clarity and usability?
Think of high-volume retail service businesses: credit cards, insurance, telecoms. Sometimes you have to contact them to deal with a minor issue that turns into a major headache. Other times, you've been able to self-serve and resolve the issue in moments without hearing a note of hold music. What's the difference? The latter invested in better digital CX rather than more call-center training or a more robust chatbot.
Bust this myth: Customers want to self-serve as much as possible - and you should want them to! A holistic CX strategy includes reducing dependency on frontline comms with clear self-service tools. Or better yet, by building such a usable product that many customers never need help in the first place.
Once you've cleared up these misconceptions about CX, you're on the path to reaping the benefits of a quality customer experience. To develop a strong CX strategy and see it function at its best, here are three key elements to keep things on track.
The whole organization is a part of it
Understanding the customer and obsessing over how the company supports their needs must be part of how every member of the organization views their job function and the value they deliver. Without this alignment, gaps in the customer experience begin to form, and soon, paper cuts turn into large wounds that bleed customers. When teams are properly aligned, they become more efficient and productive as they work together for one common purpose.
There is a clear, unifying vision for the customer
In order for the organization to align behind a CX strategy, everyone in it must have a clear picture of who their customer is and how the product or service will meet their needs. There are many artifacts and methods that CX practitioners can institutionalize within organizations to make the CX vision clear and accessible. Get out there and spread the news.
Customer feedback drives improvement and innovation
Organizations must have clear roles and methodology for incorporating how customer feedback makes its way into product improvement and innovation. The methodology must include principles and practices rooted in the scientific method, where each improvement is seen as an experiment to test & learn from.
At WNDYR, our CX practice builds on our years of experience with wider digital transformation and work management. Our humans-first approach has helped organizations across sizes, structures, and industries put tech to work serving people. Contact our CX experts today to start putting the ideas in this piece into action for your team.