There are still questions about defining the term "Customer Experience" following my last post on the subject (What is Customer Experience?)
The first issue that I'd like to touch on is the difference between the customer experience which is an outcome and customer experience management which may sometimes be a business function. Following Bruce Temkin's post (Who's Leading Customer Experience Efforts?), there ensued a short discussion between Wim Rampen, Tim Sanchez and I.
Wim tweeted:
What do you think? Customer Experience: Business Function or Outcome? http://bit.ly/9gxsYS read the 1st comment
To which I couldn't help but reply:
RT @wimrampen: What do you think? Customer Experience: Business Function or Outcome? http://bit.ly/9gxsYS read the 1st comment < Outcome!
And Tim chimed in:
@ericjacques @wimrampen Business function! Business function! Business function! I will comment later.
Following this exchange, I went and commented on Bruce's blog.
I believe that Bruce's point was that many large corporations have implemented a Customer Experience Management function. Companies are starting to understand that if they want their customers' experiences to be positive and reproducible, they have to manage it. It is important that there be a centralized and coordinated effort to ensure that all business functions are actually delivering a positive outcome.
But this doesn't change the fact that the customer experience is an outcome; it can be positive or negative, coordinated or not, ignored or visible to corporate executives.
So, my take is this:
Customer Experience = Outcome
Customer Experience Management ="discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service."
So to add to the list of what customer experience isn't; customer experience is not a business function.
Link to original post