Is Customer Experience Just the Net Sum of Interactions?

Customer experience is generally defined as the sum of all interactions someone has with your brand and the resulting feelings they have about your brand. And a lot of people and companies spend a lot of time and effort creating customer journey maps and identifying the moments that matter. While this is a worthwhile endeavor, what’s usually missing from these maps are the answers to two key questions: What do we want the customer to feel as they move through this journey? How does the customer feel at each of the moments that matter?

And it is this feeling or emotion part that makes me believe customer experience is more than just a net sum of interactions. The definition of “interaction” lends greater weight to my argument.

Webster’s defines an “interaction” as:

• Mutual or reciprocal action or influence

• To act upon one another

From this definition, we see clearly that two or more parties are required for an interaction: for the sake of the present discussion, an interaction would involve a company or brand and a prospect or customer.

Harley Manning, former VP at Forrester Research, once defined customer experience as how customers perceive their interactions with your company, explaining that an interaction is when you and your customers have a two-way exchange.

So, what do we call it when it is only a one-way exchange or action? What do we call it when a prospect or customer browses your website but does not make a purchase? Or a customer clicks a link in your brand’s email, but does not go any further? According to the definitions above, those are not interactions. But there are a lot of people in marketing and digital experience teams at companies working very hard to get these actions to take place (click-through rate and time spent on website/app are very common marketing and ecommerce metrics). And these activities are certainly part of your customer experience and absolutely play a big role in customer perceptions of your brand as well as in moving customers through the purchase funnel.

If these one-way actions are not interactions, then what are they? Marketing teams typically classify them as engagements. A customer has engaged with your brand, but there was no interaction, because it was only unilateral. Thus, not all engagements are interactions.

I know on the surface this may seem like a mere semantic exercise, but bear with me. Are experiences limited to interactions or engagements? Do customers have to interact with your people, products, services, or digital properties for their engagement to fall under customer experience? Maybe. But it depends on where you draw the line between brand perceptions or feelings and customer experience.

Today, many companies make decisions or policies influenced or pressured by our divided political spectrum or the differing worldviews of younger vs. older generations. A company’s policies regarding diversity and inclusion, for example, or the politics, causes, and charities they choose to support have an impact on people’s feelings about the brand. There are prospects that will choose to never do business with your company based on these issues and other customers who become more loyal for the same reasons.

If the whole point of CX is to create lifetime customers, these other, non-interaction, non-engagement, activities that also impact loyalty have to be considered part of customer experience. And companies have to be attentive to all of the ways customers experience their brands, products, and services—not just direct, but indirect, through media and non-brand-owned social media and other forms of word-of-mouth communications.

What I am really arguing is that brand perception and customer experience are not only inextricably linked; they have a self-perpetuating, circular relationship with each other. The CMO and head of brand define what the brand stands for and its values. Marketing—emails, digital, advertising, collateral, etc.—sets the expectations for prospects and customers. The customer experience delivered by the rest of the organization must match the values and expectations. To the extent that there is alignment, there is positive reinforcement and a path to loyalty; when they are not aligned, there is incongruence that leads to customer misunderstanding or frustration, which often leads to churn.

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A previous version of my thoughts on interactions and customer experience was published here.