Customer experience becomes a competitive advantage when a company makes it part of how it earns, keeps and serves customers—not a standalone service or marketing initiative. That means connecting customer outcomes to business results, fixing friction across the full journey, and giving teams the authority and tools to keep improving.
Why customer experience can affect market performance
A poor experience can cost a company more than a single sale. In PwC’s 2025 survey of 5,511 U.S. consumers and 406 executives, fielded from May 21 to June 30, 52% of consumers said they had stopped using or buying from a brand because of a bad product or service experience; 29% said they had stopped because of poor online or in-person customer experience. These are survey responses, not proof that a particular experience caused a specific business outcome, but they show why reliability and ease matter to customer decisions. PwC’s 2025 customer experience survey
There is also a business-performance signal: McKinsey reports that U.S. companies rated as CX leaders achieved more than twice the revenue growth of CX laggards from 2016 to 2021. That comparison is a correlation, not evidence that CX alone caused the difference. It supports treating experience as a strategic capability to investigate and measure, rather than promising a guaranteed growth return from any single CX project. McKinsey’s analysis of experience-led growth
What a CX strategy should improve
Set a business outcome and a customer outcome together. “Raise satisfaction” is not a sufficient objective unless leaders can say what decision that score will inform and what customer or business result should change. For example, a company might aim to reduce avoidable churn while making renewal and cancellation easier to understand and complete. Define the current baseline, a time horizon, and the decisions the team will make if results improve—or do not.
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Choose measures that expose the relationship between the experience and the result, rather than relying on one headline score:
- Customer outcome: effort, satisfaction, trust, or successful resolution, depending on the journey being improved.
- Operational outcome: repeat contacts, time to resolution, avoidable handoffs, or cost to serve.
- Business outcome: retention, repeat purchase, revenue growth, or share of wallet.
These measures are complementary, not interchangeable. A faster interaction is not an improvement if the customer’s problem remains unresolved; a satisfaction change does not establish higher retention unless the company measures that relationship. Track results over a defined period and segment them carefully—for example, by customer type, journey, or channel—so an average does not conceal a group receiving a worse experience.
How to find the friction that matters
Map the whole journey around the customer’s intended task, including the operational handoffs behind each interaction. A customer may encounter one company across several channels and teams; fixing a single touchpoint will not solve a problem caused by a policy, system, or process elsewhere.
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Look for evidence of friction such as customers repeating information, waiting without an update, switching channels to get help, struggling to understand a charge, or contacting the company again because the first attempt did not resolve the issue. Prioritize problems using both customer impact and business relevance: how often the friction occurs, how severely it impedes the task, and which outcome the company is trying to improve.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchHigh-impact moments can be ordinary but consequential. McKinsey highlights order reliability, transparent billing, and proactive handling of repairs or replacements as examples. The point is to identify where the customer’s confidence or ability to complete a task is at stake, then redesign the process that produces that moment—not simply polish its interface.
How to turn journey insight into a better experience
Once a priority problem is clear, align the product or service, policies, technology, channels, and teams responsible for the journey. A promise such as “we will keep you informed” needs an operational owner, accurate status data, and a process for acting when a delivery, repair, or case falls behind. Otherwise, the promise adds a new point of disappointment.
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Redesign the handoffs as well as the individual steps. Teams need to know who owns a customer’s issue as it moves between channels or departments, what information must travel with it, and how the customer can tell what happens next. This often requires changes beyond the contact center: billing rules, fulfillment, product design, or the authority frontline employees have to resolve a problem.
Compare possible investments against the customer problem they are intended to solve. Proactive service, digital self-service, a loyalty program, and personalized journeys are different interventions; none is automatically the best choice. Consider customer effort and resolution quality, trust and control, likely effect on retention or repeat purchase, delivery cost, cross-channel feasibility, evidence quality, and organizational readiness.
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Personalization is useful when it helps a customer make a decision or complete a task. It can feel intrusive or pressuring when a company uses data without explaining why, assumes what a customer wants, or keeps presenting irrelevant prompts. Treat it as a value exchange: ask for information when it improves the experience, explain how it will be used, offer meaningful choices, and invite customers to share preferences when that is useful.
The results vary by type and context. In a Gartner survey of 1,464 B2B buyers and consumers across North America, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, fielded in November and December 2024, 53% of customers reported negative experiences with personalized marketing. Gartner said those customers were 3.2 times more likely to regret a purchase and 44% less likely to purchase again. The same survey found customers experiencing personalization were 1.8 times more likely to pay a premium, but also twice as likely to feel overwhelmed; active personalization was associated with a 2.3-times greater likelihood of confidently completing key decisions. These are survey findings about reported experiences and associations, not a claim that all personalization produces these effects. Gartner’s 2025 personalization findings
Customer willingness to share information does not remove the need to earn trust. In Deloitte’s 2024 U.S. survey, 51% of consumers said they were willing to share data for a more personalized experience, while only 60% were satisfied with current loyalty-program personalization. Respondents cited transparency about data use and the ability to opt out as the top two factors in willingness to disclose data. Deloitte also found that 80% considered earning and redeeming financial rewards the most important loyalty-program attribute: relevance can improve a program, but it does not replace tangible value. Deloitte’s 2024 report on consumer loyalty expectations and preferences
Where customers look for service is part of the journey
Design service for the places customers actually begin seeking help, not only the company’s website, app, or contact center. Gartner’s 2025 survey of 5,801 customers, conducted in January and February, found that 51% of customer service journeys began on third-party platforms; among Gen Z customers, the share was 74%. Gartner reported a 62% average success rate for customers finding what they needed on third-party platforms, compared with 22% of customers who started, stayed, and resolved issues entirely on first-party company channels. The figures describe survey respondents and do not show that companies should abandon their own service channels. Gartner’s 2025 findings on customer service journeys
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Companies can respond by making reliable, up-to-date help easier to find on external platforms while strengthening first-party self-service and the transitions between them. If a customer moves from a public help page to a company agent, the customer should not have to restart the task or repeat details the company already has. As Gartner’s Keith McIntosh put it, “Third-party platforms have become the new front door for customer service.”
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A successful fix is not the same as an enduring capability. In PwC’s 2025 survey, 70% of executives said customer expectations were evolving faster than their company could adapt, and 46% said their current loyalty program would be irrelevant in three years. These are executives’ views, not predictions that a given program will fail. In the same survey, 58% of consumers said they were only somewhat or not at all comfortable using AI tools to engage with brands; deploying automation without regard to customer preference can therefore create friction as well as efficiency. PwC’s 2025 customer experience survey
Build the conditions for teams to detect problems, make changes, and learn from the results:
- Leadership sponsorship: senior leaders set outcomes and resolve conflicts between functions when a journey spans multiple owners.
- Cross-functional ownership: product, operations, marketing, service, and technology share responsibility for the journey, rather than passing problems between departments.
- Frontline authority: employees have clear guardrails and enough discretion to resolve common issues instead of forcing customers through avoidable escalations.
- Usable data and technology: teams can see relevant journey and customer information, protect it appropriately, and use it to make decisions across channels.
- Governance and learning: owners review paired customer and business measures, test changes, and adjust policies or processes when the intended outcome does not follow.
PwC’s analysis of customer-centric transformation reports that the market winners it studied prioritized growth twice as much as underperformers and nearly twice as highly prioritized measuring strategic partnerships and networks. These are comparisons within PwC’s studied organizations, not a universal benchmark. The broader implication is that CX leadership involves building capabilities and partnerships that support both growth and execution—not just launching a new customer-facing tool. PwC’s market-winners analysis
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A practical sequence for CX-led advantage
- Choose paired outcomes. State the business result and the customer result, establish a baseline, and set a time horizon.
- Map the complete journey. Trace the customer’s task across touchpoints, channels, teams, and operational handoffs; identify where effort or failure blocks the outcome.
- Prioritize a consequential friction point. Select a problem based on customer impact and business relevance, not visibility alone.
- Redesign the system behind the experience. Change processes, policies, products, service, or channel transitions as needed, and assign accountable owners.
- Use customer data with purpose and choice. Explain why information is requested, make the benefit clear, and give customers meaningful control.
- Measure both sides of the result. Pair experience indicators with operational and financial measures, then investigate whether the changes move together rather than assuming causation.
- Make improvement ongoing. Give leaders and frontline teams the governance, skills, data, and authority to respond to what the measures reveal.
The evidence is encouraging but not a guarantee: the cited studies are surveys and comparative analyses, with findings shaped by their populations, regions, questions, and field periods. A company must establish whether a particular change works for its customers and business. The durable advantage comes from making that learning-and-improvement loop part of how the organization operates.
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