The concept of Customer Experience (CX) has transcended traditional business boundaries, emerging as a dominant force in modern discourse, storytelling, and cross-disciplinary research.
At the Institute of Customer Experience Management (ICEM), we believe that understanding CX requires deconstructing its core attributes to reveal its true nature: a Human Experience (HX).
Far from being a mere transaction, CX is an organic, deeply personal relationship between the customer and the employee. It is a co-creative process unfolding across a journey of multiple touchpoints, driven by the unique perceptions and evolving values of the individuals involved.
This article explores how organizations can transition from routine service to the creation of meaningful, transformative peak moments that solidify brand loyalty.
CX Becomes HX: The Human Experience
The questions we asked ourselves were at first of an epistemological nature and slowly shifted into more operational ones. So what is an experience? Is it something only customers live? How do we create extraordinary, memorable experiences?
We formed our opinions by understanding the different answers to these questions given by academics and industry professionals. Here is what we learned.
In a service context, customer experience is a long-term relationship between two people: the customer and the employee representing a company. It is meant to be an organic, human interaction. It isn’t just business, it’s very personal.
As the image below illustrates, it’s not just about the customer. The employee plays a very important role in this encounter and the experience is co-created with the customer. We can see this interaction unfolding in multiple touchpoints. This process is often called the “customer journey” and it is incredibly useful to study it.
The customer, often accompanied by friends and family, or in the presence of other customers, is a unique individual with specific needs, perceptions, and values that can change over time.
They have their own associations and memories informed by their experience with certain brands, which they can compare with other competing services. This is why having information about those specific needs and values is crucial in creating successful CX.
Customers change with time. If we do not form close relationships with them through consistent communication, we can lose sight of how their preferences evolve.
It goes the same way for the employees behind the scenes, with the difference being that they need to be invested in providing that extraordinary, meaningful experience that everyone wants.
For that to happen, staff is usually trained to develop cognitive skills and emotional agility to be translated into a specific behavior with the customer. This behavior should align with the company's values and DNA, and should also correspond to the customer’s expectations and needs.
While the customer is learning about the company and its specific know-how, even the employee, through active listening and observation, can learn more about the customers’ needs and personalities. This is often referred to as customer intelligence.
Striving For Meaningful Experiences
At the end of the day, customer experience is a two-way street, involving shared moments and co-created encounters that happen at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
In the context of physical touchpoints, like a retail store, it should reflect the company’s DNA and values in every way: from the objects on display and how the staff behaves, down to the lighting and even the background music. These attributes can be called brand essentials and they need to be implemented consistently for them to have any effect.
Sometimes in this evolving relationship, a peak moment is reached by the customer and the employee. This moment can either be an isolated interaction or a more gradual process that unfolds over time and repeat business.
It’s moments like these that solidify brand loyalty by invoking positive emotions that money alone can’t necessarily buy.
That’s exactly why consistency is key. Peak moments are almost always the outcome of commitment to providing the best damn service possible. This can only happen through interpretation, learning, unlearning, relearning, and the willingness to see the world from different perspectives.
So, what kind of experience do you want to create for your customers, students, patients, guests or tourists? One answer we hear again and again is that leaders want them to experience something they will never forget: something they’ll want to talk about.
This means an experience which will be remembered as meaningful and transformative. While that might sound like a stretch to many, the general idea is to consistently strive towards that benchmark.
The operative word here is “remembered”, because a lot of us nowadays are bombarded with information. Consequently, our attention and memory tend to be very selective.
So, those are two crucial components of CX for which everyone is fighting. As the authors of the Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore say: “If you do not create a memory, then you have not offered a distinctive experience.”
Moreover, distinctive or peak experiences happen when your worries and problems seem to fade away as you disappear into your work or activity. Everyday frustrations are removed from your attention. This brings a great sense of relief as you operate fully in the present moment.
This is why as customers or employees in our daily experiences, we should “pay attention to our attention”, as organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, recently stated. He argues that our scarcest resource is not our time, it’s our attention! It’s because our best work or leisure activities flow from paying undivided attention to what’s in front of us and important.
In the same vein, applied to relationships and experiences with a company or institution, Grant states that our “deepest connections come from listening with rapt attention to the people who matter to us.” Therefore, if we look from a logical perspective, people (as employees) are working towards meaningful transformative experiences for people (as customers).
Design to Guide, Not to Control
The less obvious answer is how to create these peak experiences. People are unique and have different needs and expectations in different situations. That is why knowing your customers is a crucial element when designing an experience.
Depending on the targeted public, we want to lay out the appropriate conditions for elements to include:
- novelty,
- surprise & serendipity,
- playfulness,
- pleasure (activation of the 5 senses),
- understanding & learning (“aha!” moments),
- poise,
- freedom, and
- other positive emotions like enchantment and joy.
The appropriate selection for the right segment is crucial. Easier said than done! There is a lot of advice on how to create extraordinary peak experiences. In their book, “The Power of Moments”, the brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, propose a four element framework. We can build these defining moments starting from one or more of the following elements:
- Elevation: Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the routine. They make us feel engaged, joyful, surprised, motivated. To create them, we can boost the sensory appeal; raise the stakes; and/or break the script. Research suggests that organizations dramatically under-invest in building peaks, choosing instead to fix problems.
- Pride: Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We can use three strategies to deliver pride: (1) Recognize others. A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones: reframe a long journey so that it features multiple “finishing lines.”; and (3) Practice courage by “preloading” our responses in advance, so we’re ready when the right moment comes.
- Insight: Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations. To produce moments of insight for others, we can cause them to “trip over the truth” by revealing (1) a clear insight; (2) compressed in time; and (3) discovered by the audience. To produce moments of self-insight, we must stretch, placing ourselves in situations that involve the risk of failure.
- Connection: Moments of connection bond us together. Groups unite when they struggle together toward a meaningful goal; they often begin their work with a “synchronized moment”. In individual relationships, it’s responsiveness that deepens our ties. A responsive interaction can bring people together very quickly.
It is important to remember, transformation is a personal journey. It cannot be controlled and it’s an internal process we experience through our senses, emotions, thoughts, actions and, most importantly, through interpretation of facts and events.
This is why the meaning we give to an experience is unique and personal. Moreover, leaders and managers cannot control this process, but can guide and pave the way to it.
Pay Attention to People
Customer experience is not just about customers, it’s about employees too. It is a human interaction. Under certain circumstances some interactions become meaningful and transformative.
If you’re a leader or manager who wants to improve CX, then pay attention to people, because attention can lead to peak moments, and those moments lead to long-lasting, co-creative relationships which will pay out in terms of sales, loyalty and advocacy.
Really listening to people’s stories, their wants, needs and aspirations can give you important clues for designing unforgettable experiences. How? There are many ways to do it. But, transformation begins with you, the leader, and the others will follow your example. Here are a few key takeaways in our experience:
- Start creating an experience mindset throughout your company. All employees participate directly or indirectly in customer experience.
- Empower your employees to act and deliver a meaningful experience on the spot.
Surprise and serendipity are time-bound to specific moments and cannot wait for an approval from management. - Maintain the “Essential Experience” through consistency in all your touchpoints.
Strive for peak moments whenever possible through elevation, pride, insight and connection. - Learn more about your customer and employee values and preferences, and build your Intelligence database.
- Create a culture where failure is part of the innovation journey and where emotions are central to our well-being and transformation.
The best way to do all of the above is through tailor-made research studies directed to better get to know employees and customers, and by observing the actual interaction happening in different types of touchpoints between the two stakeholders. This is our expertise and what we propose at ICEM for our clients.
In the end, people are emotional beings, and decisions are made based on how we remember things and events in our lives, and how we felt in those particular moments. This represents one core dimension of CX.
As the great writer and poet, Maya Angelou, wrote: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The Path to Human Connection
Ultimately, crafting unforgettable experiences requires a shift from managing transactions to nurturing human interactions. Because people are emotional beings, their loyalty is rooted in how an interaction made them feel and how it is remembered.
By focusing on attention, our scarcest resource, leaders can design peak moments that foster long-lasting advocacy and trust. Success lies in empowering employees to act with agility, maintaining consistency across all touchpoints, and embracing a culture of continuous learning.
When we prioritize the human element, we transform routine services into meaningful, life-long connections.
