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While customer experience can make or break a brand, some may benefit from clarification on the true definition of this term. In fact, customer experience is often confused with customer service or user experience.
Customer Experience (CX) is the overall perception a customer forms based on every interaction with your brand—from marketing and sales to support and product use. For B2B teams, delivering consistent, frictionless, and value-driven experiences across all touchpoints is critical to building trust, loyalty, and long-term growth.
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If buyers have a positive experience with your company, they’ll become repeat customers and generate steady referrals for your business. The opposite is true too, of course. Providing a poor customer experience earns you a reputation that could sink your business in a hurry.
So, how do we define the customer experience, and what strategies should we employ to encourage a positive customer experience? We explore this and more below, so keep reading.
Customer experience (CX) is your customers’ perception of your brand through all aspects of the buyer’s journey. That means it’s a continual improvement process in any channel where you interact with prospects and buyers.
Every touchpoint, from a customer support call to a video ad on social media, adds to your customer’s perception of your brand.
Customer experiences can significantly impact your business’s success. That’s why focusing on creating positive interactions throughout the customer lifecycle has become such a vital component of any good marketing strategy.
It takes one bad or good interaction with your business to make or break the relationship you’ve built with your customer. This interaction could be anything from a response to a customer’s comment on social media to a newsletter sent to the customer or a customer service call.
Creating and implementing a customer experience plan can make all the difference. Ensuring each point of contact with your brand offers the best possible experience will go a long way to encouraging a positive overall CX.
Customer experience management (CXM) is all about capturing, evaluating, and using customer data to enhance your customers’ experience. The goal is to identify touchpoints resulting in bad customer experiences and transform them into good ones.
A customer experience manager considers the customer’s experience at all points throughout the customer journey. They use multiple channels to draw in data related to how customers interact with the business and their perception of the brand.
Part of the CXM process involves applying this data to generate specific customer journey maps to illustrate and understand the customer life cycle.
Customer experience managers repeat the data assessment and touchpoint improvement process regularly to maintain the best possible experience for customers over the long term.
Every time your customer interacts with your brand, they develop an impression of your business. And as we now know, this impression is known as the customer experience.
Customer service is one possible point of interaction that can lead to a positive or negative perception of your brand. However, it’s only one of many elements that contribute to the overall customer experience.
User experience” is another term often used interchangeably with customer experience, but the two are vastly different.
Customer experience relates to a customer’s overall impression of your business based on the sum of all their interactions with your brand. On the other hand, user experience refers more specifically to the experience of using your product or service.
While the user experience plays its part in shaping the overarching CX, it’s only one small piece of the pie.
At its most basic level, a positive CX is one in which you have anticipated and met the customer’s needs. But it’s often more complex than that, as customers demand more, including a seamless experience, convenience, and a reward for their continued patronage.
Brands with a compelling customer experience strategy in place understand who their customers are and what they want. With this knowledge, they’re able to:
Examples of a bad CX include:
Encountering any of these or similar bad customer experiences could prompt your customer to switch to a competitor’s brand.
There are numerous possible methods available to measure CX. Some are more straightforward than others, but there’s no denying that having robust CRM software at your disposal is half the battle won.
Here are some of the most common approaches for measuring customer experience for your business:
The first step to implementing an effective CX strategy is having the right tools to get the job done. As data extraction and evaluation are at the core of any CX strategy, a good CRM system is one of the most crucial tools you’ll need.
Nutshell provides an industry-leading CRM solution that’s packed with all the features you need but is so easy to use that getting started is a breeze.
With features like customizable analytics and reporting, you can track lead acquisition and lost deals and monitor your customer’s journey through the sales funnel and beyond.
Its powerful automation tools make creating personalized messaging and refining your audience segmentation far easier, resulting in an enhanced customer experience.
Nutshell also equips you with advanced contact management abilities, comprehensive sales management features, communication and collaboration tools, plenty of app integrations, and a host of marketing features that include A/B testing for email marketing.
When you choose Nutshell, you’ll have a powerful CXM partner by your side, helping you implement the following tactics for a well-rounded CX strategy:
Learn more about Nutshell’s reporting and analytics features.
We asked eight professionals to share what customer experience means to them and their best examples of what CX looks like in the real world.
Here’s what the experts have to say.
Customer experience is an umbrella that covers all consumer interactions with your company. This includes how they feel about the products you offer and any interactions they have with your brand, as well as with representatives of your company. Customer experience thinks about the full journey of a customer’s lifecycle and how to optimize each touchpoint to reduce friction and maximize revenue per customer.
An ideal customer experience might look something like this: they purchase your product or service to solve their pain point. Along the way, they contact your customer service team, get a question answered, and learn about another way that your product adds value to their life or business. Based on that value, they become a repeat customer and recommend you to their network.
Katherine Mays, former VP of Customer Experience at Nutshell
The customer experience is the accumulation of each interaction a customer has with your brand. That can include their experience in your store, on your website, and even scrolling through your social media channels.
I often find myself getting frustrated when I shop with small businesses with attentive social media managers but careless customer support. You must ensure consistent interactions across the board to retain your customer base!
Nikitha Lokareddy, Director of Client Services at Markitors
I spent nine years working as the consumer advocate for a local TV station. It was a great education into what works and what doesn’t work in the way of customer experience. I found that people would call us looking for help when they felt the company wasn’t listening. And it wasn’t enough to have someone listen and then pass off the problem. The customer needs to know that someone will both hear what they have to say and find someone to create a solution.
Rick DeBruhl, Communication Consultant
Bad customer experiences are inevitable. When a customer leaves a bad review of your business, they are really just looking for help. Companies have to be all ears, listen hard, and understand where they’re coming from.
That’s especially true if you’re the business owner. If a business owner can make the time to call frustrated customers directly, that outreach can go a long way in turning a negative experience into a positive one.
Brian Greenberg, former CEO/Founder at True Blue Life Insurance
Customer experience is simply how a customer or client interacts with your brand. Much like people generate first impressions when they meet someone for the first time, your customers do the same with your brand!
Since we conduct our business online, we make it a priority to provide our customers with the easiest checkout experience possible coupled with fast shipping, which will ensure their first experience with us is a great one. Once we get that first impression right, our customers will continue to purchase from us and recommend us to their colleagues.
Vanessa Molica, Founder of The Lash Professional
For many, customer service and customer experience are seemingly interchangeable. But customer service is a single touchpoint, while customer experience impacts feelings and emotions throughout the entire customer journey. Although both are important, finding ways to improve your customer experience as a whole should be the top priority of your business strategy.
Peter Babichenko, Sahara Case
My definition of customer experience is the feeling you get as a result of any interaction with a brand, good or bad. I believe the brands that successfully promote great customer experiences are those that strategically use multisensory marketing in their arsenal of experiential methods.
A great example is Disneyland and Disney World, which have dedicated departments that oversee multisensory marketing, from the use of “olfactory” smelling techniques to visual perspectives. Next time you visit a Disney theme park, pay attention to this and understand how it benefits the entire customer experience and, as a result, creates loyal fans worldwide.
Karissa Yson, Brand Strategist and Business Development
Customer experience is the entirety of the customer interaction, from enticing the customer (marketing) through post-purchase. It culminates in “What does the customer think about our company?”
The best experience I’ve had arose from the ashes of the worst. I rented a van for a long trip. During the trip, there was a comedy of errors (malfunctions, no fuel, bad attitudes). Upon return, the manager of the local branch apologized and worked with me to find a reasonable solution. His customer service ensured I stayed loyal to his company and ensured good “word of mouth” advertising.
Matthew Lee, Learning and Development Leader
Get the right CRM for the job at hand to ensure you have the data you need to create the positive experiences your customers desire. Sign up for Nutshell’s free 14-day trial now and discover one of the most powerful and user-friendly CRMs on the market.
You’ll typically see initial improvements within 2-3 months as you implement foundational changes like better response times and personalized communication. Significant, measurable results—like increased retention and higher satisfaction scores—usually appear within 5-6 months of consistent effort.
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend your brand. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) gauges satisfaction with specific interactions or purchases. CES (Customer Effort Score) tracks how easy customers find it to complete tasks. Use NPS for relationships, CSAT for transactions, and CES for process improvements.
Focus on zero-cost wins: deliver on time, respond quickly to inquiries, follow up after purchases, and make contact information easy to find. Use your CRM to personalize communication and automate follow-ups. Small businesses can compete by being more responsive and building genuine relationships—no big budget required.
Common mistakes include ignoring customer feedback, focusing only on metrics without understanding the “why,” neglecting employee experience, offering inconsistent experiences across channels, and failing to adapt to changing expectations. The biggest error? Measuring satisfaction without actually taking action to improve it.
Start by identifying key touchpoints where customers interact with your brand—from awareness to post-purchase. Gather data from your CRM, surveys, and customer feedback. Plot each stage, noting customer goals, pain points, and emotions. Use this map to identify friction points and prioritize improvements that enhance the overall experience.
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