How can a business leader triple their number of sales and customers? Not through gimmicks. Not by throwing money at digital upgrades. But by rethinking the entire customer experience.
Whether you’re leading a financial institution, managing operations at a logistics firm, or driving change in a government agency, the experience your customers have with your brand is one of your most valuable strategic levers. And yet, it's often overlooked or misunderstood.
What customers remember most
Customer experience goes beyond speed or convenience. The emotional journey people go through when they interact with your organisation can often create lasting impact and is why experience matters more than ever.
We’ve all been customers. We know when we’ve had an experience that makes us smile, feel understood, or discover something we didn’t know we needed. We also remember the opposite, when the process felt clunky, impersonal or frustrating.
But how can businesses create the kind of experience that turns a one-time user into a long-term advocate?
Understand your customer’s perspective
One of the most impactful ways to improve customer experience is to shift your perspective. Many organisations design journeys based on internal logic, operational constraints or legacy processes. But that doesn't always match what the customer actually needs or feels.
A customer-centric lens often reveals a very different story from the one businesses believe they’re telling.
For example, you might think your onboarding process is seamless because it meets your internal KPIs. But customers might find it overwhelming or impersonal. You might believe you’re providing choice, when from the outside, it feels more like complexity.
Journey mapping, customer interviews and data analysis are all helpful tools, but the real shift happens when leaders spend time experiencing their services the way their customers do.
Perception vs Reality
It’s not uncommon for businesses to assume they’re delivering great service, only to find that customers feel otherwise.
A Customer Journey Health Check can uncover hidden pain points and moments of friction that reduce satisfaction. Metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and journey analytics can often help identify where the experience is falling short.
But metrics alone don’t create loyalty. It’s important to understand how customers actually feel during their interactions with your business because ultimately, emotions shape decisions and memories far more than efficiency ever will.
Make every interaction meaningful
One of the most exciting opportunities in customer experience is the idea of customer inspiration.
Inspiration happens when you move beyond meeting needs and begin to anticipate and unlock new possibilities. When you expose clients to options or ideas they hadn’t considered, but immediately recognise as valuable, you can dramatically increase their level of engagement.
Forget aggressively pushing products or services and think more about presenting ideas in ways that spark curiosity and add value.
This approach is relevant across all industries. A bank might introduce a tool that helps clients manage finances more proactively. A logistics provider might help a customer uncover a faster or more transparent way to deliver to their end users. A healthcare service might offer support resources before a patient even realises they need them.
Inspiration leads to stronger connections, more loyalty and greater word-of-mouth advocacy.
Put people at the centre of strategy
Customer experience transformation combines data with insight, strategy with empathy.
Studies across the UK, Germany and France show that when businesses align their customer journeys with emotional insight and creativity, they see measurable results where customers spend more, stay longer and recommend more often.
Service that is simply functional is easily forgotten. Experiences that feel meaningful are remembered, shared and repeated.
Are you ready to reframe your customer journey?
If your current approach to customer experience feels routine or transactional, it might be time to ask some bigger questions:
- Are we designing experiences with our customers, or just delivering services to them?
- Do we help people discover what’s possible, or only respond to what they ask for?
- Where in the journey might we be losing engagement, and how do we find out?
Our four-day short course, Transforming Customer Experiences, is designed to help leaders answer these questions and take meaningful action. Along Professor Heiner Evanschitzky, you’ll explore research-backed approaches, work through real-world examples and leave with practical tools to elevate every stage of your customer journey.
