What is CX?
Customer and employee experience, explained.
What CX and EX are, why they pay off, and how the two connect.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is every interaction your customers have with you and how they feel about it. From looking at your website before they’ve made their first purchase, to interactions they have with your sales and service people, to the communication they receive from you when they cancel their subscription or service.
Why focus on customer experience?
Happy customers don’t complain and don’t leave you. They’re prepared to pay a little more for the service they’re getting and your employees love dealing with them. All of this translates into higher profits, less churn, lower costs, and better culture.
Research shows that companies that do well at customer experience management outperform the market in terms of stock market returns. Watermark Consulting’s 18-year study found CX leaders’ returns were 7.8 times those of CX laggards.
Source: Watermark Consulting, Customer Experience ROI Study (2026)
What is employee experience management?
Your customer experience is almost always delivered by employees, so they are a crucial element of your CX management strategy.
Great employee experience management analyses and optimises employee journeys using the same principles as customer experience management: taking the time to understand employee needs, pain points and expectations, then using that information to design and deliver a better experience.
If you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.
Tom Peters, The Pursuit of Wow!
Not sure where to start?
Take the free 4-minute CX maturity check, or book a conversation and we’ll work it out together.