Customer experience
the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship
Customer experience (CX) refers to the cognitive, emotional, sensory, and behavioral responses of a customer during all stages of interaction with a product or service, including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.
Different dimensions of customer experience include senses, emotions, feelings, perceptions, cognitive evaluations, involvement, memories, as well as spiritual components, and behavioral intentions. The pre-consumption anticipation experience can be described as the amount of pleasure or displeasure received from savoring future events, while the remembered experience is related to a recollection of memories about previous events and experiences of a product or service.
Definitions
According to Forrester Research, the foundational elements of a remarkable customer experience consist of six key disciplines, beginning with strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance and culture. A company's ability to deliver an experience that sets it apart in the eyes of its customers will increase the amount of consumer spending with the company and inspire loyalty to its brand. According to Jessica Sebor, "Loyalty is now driven primarily by a company's interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs".
Barbara E. Kahn, Wharton's Professor of Marketing, has established an evolutional approach to customer experience as the third of four stages of any company in terms of its customer centricity maturity. These progressive phases are:
Product orientation: Companies manufacture goods and offer them in the best way possible.
Market orientation: Some consideration of customer needs and segmentation arises, developing different marketing mix bundles for each one.
Customer experience: Adding to the other two factors some recognition of the importance of providing an emotionally positive experience to customers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Customer experience” as the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q984142. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Customer experience”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Customer experience primary sources, Customer experience archive and Customer research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Customer experience”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Customer experience” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.