About Customer Experience and HCX

What is Customer Experience? 

Customer experience is defined as… how your customers perceive their interactions with your company

• Perception: it’s how your customers think and feel about what you do.
• Interactions: the experience encompasses all of the interactions with – and about! (hence also what customers hear from others) – your organization

CX experts, like Forrester & Temkin Group (now Qualtrics XM Institute), believe customers perceive these interactions along 3 dimensions: “success or effectiveness (meet needs)”, “effort” & “emotion”

Wow Now observations & analysis show that customers perceive these “interactions” along 5 dimensions. In addition to the 3 dimensions above there are two more:

4.“Meaningfulness and Values Consonance“: how much the experience is meaningful, fulfills desires, and respects customer’s values and brand values promise”

5.“Timing and Timeliness”:  how timely and fast is the experience (resolution) & in which moment (or life events) of the person living the experience it happens. During emotional life events or timing – i.e. like corona times – what happens to us has a bigger impact on our lives and we remember it more because it gets stored in our long-term memory.

Customers’ perception is then influenced by their mood and compared with three references:

1. Expectations
2. Previous experiences (with you or with competitors)
3. Alternatives available

Together, these five dimensions and three references determine the perceived value for money and alignment to a person’s own life values, and therefore the likelihood to repurchase and/or recommend a product/company to others, and they make what we have called the “Human Perception Spiderweb” with six perception dimensions and four context dimensions.

Great Customer Experiences don’t happen by chance. To deliver innovative experiences that create meaningful value for customers and also further the business objectives of the company, organizations need to master and orchestrate a set of practices and competencies across 6 different disciplines which – identified by Forrester analysts Bodine and Manning in Outside In, after analyzing best practices from CX leaders – have become the most used customer experience framework:

• CX Strategy. When strategising your customer experience function, you need to know what your organisation stands for and how this appeals to your customers.
• Customer understanding. To fully cater to your customer’s needs, you need to know who they are exactly and how you can serve them in a way they can appreciate.
• Experience design, improvement & innovation. Make a customer journey map, improve on the critical decision points and innovate on your processes.
• Metrics, measurement & ROI. How can you turn a qualitative value as ‘customer experience’ into a quantitative one? By measuring NPS, CSAT and CES and interpreting them accordingly.
• Organisational adoption and accountability. When you want to become a fully customer centered organisation, it is imperative that everybody is on board and responsible and accountable for their own customer experience KPIs.
• Culture. Changing the culture of an organisation is one of the hardest things to do, but it is possible to imprint a CX DNA on all employees and colleagues.

You can use this framework both as a blueprint to prepare for the CXPA exam to become a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and as a checklist to review the status of CX in your organization. An adequate and coherent CX Framework has a pivotal role in achieving the company’s financial and growth goals.

The CX Framework series elaborated on each of these disciplines. The foundations for these blog posts are written by Milou van Kerkhof following the June 2017 CX Masterclass given by Nienke Bloem and Rosaria Cirillo. Milou attended this as a newcomer in Customer Experience, hence the posts are written in simple language and are very easy to understand. These blog posts have been only slightly edited and reflect the highlights of the content of each module.

Below you find the posts in the series.

PS. Ultimately, everything that applies to CX also applies to EX (Employees Experience), and we believe that the future of CX is HCX. For this reason, since 2019, we have started talking about H-CX (Human-Centered & Happiness-Contributing Experience) and we have developed the Happiness Driven Growth Framework. We will soon be writing a new blog series about it. Stay tuned! In meantime, below you find a glimpse of the new framework that we use both in our HCX Masterclass and our HCX Compendium (both available in English and Italian).

Customer Experience Framework Blog Series