CX explained - definitions to start with!

In this blog we explain the basic terms and definitions used in the customer experience (CX) discipline. We hope this helps you understand customer experience and what it is all about. But also how different terms are used and relate to each other.

CX Term	Explanation
Customer experience (CX)	the customer's perception of your company. Formed by interactions with your organisation and by the portrayal by the media.
Customer experience management	the way you orchestrate your customers' experience consistently in all channels.
Aimed experience	the experience you want to give your customers, written down in customers promises and with accompanying behaviour from colleagues to live up to to create the aimed experience.
Customer compass	the aimed experience, written down in a few keywords (words that you want customers to use when describing the customer experience of your organisation). This customer compass helps colleagues to develop the aimed experience in the different channels and interactions with your customers.
Customer understanding	the way you listen to your customers and translate this into insights useful for colleagues to develop interactions with your customers based on their needs and wants and with the customer compass in mind.
Voice of the customer	the insights you gain from asking your customers. This can be done qualitative, quantitative, aided or unaided and solicited or unsolicited. Always be keen on who you are asking questions, why, at what moment and how. This combination makes or breaks the quality of the voice of the customers you are gathering.
Customer Analytics	how you transform customer data info insights useful for your colleagues when designing customer contact moments and interactions. Analysing customer data helps you predict behaviour and preferences.
Customer Journey	the set of interactions/contact moments your customer has with your company to get his/her job done. Customers are always getting in contact with you because they want or need something your company can help them with. Every customer journey contributes to the perception of the customer about your company.
Customer Journey Management	the way you gain insights, analyse and make improvements, changes or totally renew the customer journey and the contact moments of that journey. When managing your customer journey you determine the priorities (where to enhance) and how to do this for a particular journey.
Customer Life Cycle	it is a visualisation of the customer journey on the highest possible level. That means it contains a maximum of seven phases (meeting your company, becoming a customer, being a customer, leaving your company, and a couple that are more specific for your organisation). And it contains the steps that customers take during these phases.
Customer Life Cycle management	the way you manage all customer journeys and prioritise over journeys where to develop and enhance, based on customer insights and the customer compass.
NPS (Net Promotor Score)	a KPI for a lot of organisations to measure the perception of customers towards their company. It is asked by customers by the question: ‘On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?’. If you rate a nine or ten you are a promoter, and seven or eight a neutral and six or lower a detractor. Detracting the percentage of dectractor from the percentage of promoters gives you the NPS KPI for your company. See the illustration below.
Customer	a human that pays to use or own your service or product to fulfil a need or want in their life (also called: job-to-be-done). Customers comes in different forms: guest, traveller, citizen, participant, donor, anyway someone you want to have a trusted relationship with.
Customer needs & wants	the driving reason that humans have to take actions, and in your case want to buy or use your product or service. We can also define this as a job-to-be-done (JTBD)
Loyalty	the commitment to continue keep buying and using your products and services. A loyal customer can be recognized by the fact they less consider pricing as an issue. They might even act like an advocate to you.
CX bootcamp	the perfect alternative for more expensive consultancy on the topic of customer experience (management). Every bootcamp will train and guide to build your aimed customer experience and make you a customer experience expert.
CX expert	someone that followed all CX bootcamps and is actively building cx management in their organisation. And for whom it's above all logical to think and act outside-in!
CXPA framework	the framework that contain the six elements that are part of cx management and need to be organized in your company
Contactmoment/Touchpoint	interaction between customers and organisations in all off- and online channels. Mostly used in customer journey maps.
CX metrics	Customer Experience Metrics measure the success rate of the customer experience your company provides. When we talk about metrics, it is mostly quantitative data that is captured in KPI’s which contribute to the overall strategic KPI’s and goals of the company. The NPS and CES are well known CX metrics.
Governance	the way CX is organized in your organisation and has a stake in all playing fields (operation, tactical and strategical). Parts of this governance is CX roadmap, budget, cx expertise, position in the company, meetingstructure, etc.
CX competence	the way cx knowlegde is governed, build and kept alive in your organisation. This starts with doing all CX bootcamps ;-)
CES	Customer Effort Score indicates the amount of effort it takes to interact with a company.

Do you miss a CX term? Let us know in the comments below and we will add this term to this blog!