Customer Experience or Customer Satisfaction?
I hear this question posed frequently: “What’s the difference between customer satisfaction and customer experience? Isn’t customer experience just a fancy name for customer satisfaction?”Ask any five industry professionals for their definitions of customer experience and customer loyalty, and likely you’ll get at least ten different definitions. Why the confusion?
The answer is both simple and not simple. The simple answer is customer satisfaction is a component of the customer experience. Specifically, customer satisfaction is one of the desired outcomes of an excellent customer experience.
Most people have heard the business legend of a retail giant’s board meeting. The CMO of 
this mythical company stands up and presents the company’s wonderful customer satisfaction results, trending upward every single period. The beautifully rendered black line of satisfaction results arcs elegantly toward the top right corner of the graph. To applause and congratulations from the board, the CMO sits down. Next, the CFO presents business results. The net of this rather disturbing presentation is that sales and earnings are trending downward, the red line arcing precipitously toward the lower right corner. The Chairman of this mythical Board laces his fingers together and asks for the CMO’s and CFO’s charts to be placed side-by-side. Then this paragon of industry asks: “How can this be?”
If this were an Aesop’s fable, some innocuous animal — perhaps a cow or a dog — would answer that satisfying customers is important, but it doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you again. And the moral of the story would be something along the lines of ” Chasing Customer Satisfaction for its own sake is like chasing your tail. Somewhat gratifying at first, but painful in the end .”
What does this have to do with Customer Experience? Everything. Understanding the drivers of business results and of customer loyalty helps you craft your to-do list for designing a more ideal Customer Experience. One that actually delivers on the things that drive customers to be both satisfied AND want to buy from you again.
And, what happened to the mythical company? They focused on customer experience and customer loyalty instead of simply customer satisfaction. Happy customers, happy employees, happy shareholders.
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