Customers can and will judge your entire business from a single interaction.
One missed phone call or sharp e-mail reply from a team member who is distracted or pressed for time can quickly become the only story your customer remembers (and shares) about you externally. We don’t intend it that way, but in reality, perceptions are shaped by the smallest experiences, not the biggest projects.
This is where customer experience (CX) design comes in – not as a branding exercise, but as a business discipline. It asks a simple question: When people engage with us, what experience do they walk away with?
But here’s the kicker: It’s not about when things go well. It’s all about how the customer feels when things go wrong: when deadlines move, when decisions are unclear, when emotions are involved.
The feelings then engendered are what shape your brand.
What customer experience really means
Every company claims quality. Every brochure promises innovation. But the truth is that customers evaluate far more than the deliverable itself.
Customer experience is the tone of every conversation, the clarity of a proposal, the confidence a client has that, should something change, you will tell them early rather than late. In short, it’s not the product; it’s everything surrounding the product.
We might not all track user interface patterns or development frameworks, but each of us can instantly recognise a company that communicates well, responds quickly and makes problems feel solvable rather than heavy.
That sense of ease is not accidental. It is designed, led, reinforced and lived every day by every function.
Four levers for intentionally building strong experiences
1. Start by viewing experience as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage
When products look similar, pricing can be undercut, access to tech and AI is democratised, and everyone arguably has the same capability to deliver; the only differentiator your competitors can’t copy overnight is what it feels like to work with your company.
Customer service is a reactive exercise. Customer experience is intentional and proactively designed beforehand. And once you can get your leadership aligned in seeing it as a growth lever that helps convert simple moments into loyalty, into revenue, the real work can begin.
2. Define what a “good experience” actually looks like
Modern software as a service companies are experts at CX design, so we borrow a page from that book: start by mapping out a single customer interaction (existing customer placing an order, for example), start to finish, but do it from the customer’s perspective.
Forget for a moment all your existing processes and compliance requirements and try to design outside of those an ideal customer experience roadmap with the customer’s needs and emotions as the central focus. Perhaps they are stressed and in a hurry, so they might want to log onto your website, choose a product and quantity, enter their card details and place the order in four simple steps that take no longer than two minutes to complete.
Now, review that same interaction flow against your existing one. Is your current flow longer, more laborious, with extra steps? Well, if the aim is to provide a great experience, why not start by redesigning this one interaction to be more like the ideal customer experience you imagined?
It’s hard work, of course, but redesigning one interaction flow might just be that 1% improvement you’ve been looking for.
3. Multiply across engagements and functions
The good news is that this same process works if you apply it, granularly, to every possible customer interaction across your entire organisation.
If you can step-by-step script an ideal experience flow for everything, from a potential new customer phoning for a price list to a longstanding client placing a repeat order, you’re well on your way to building standout CX that no competitor can copy.
Common themes you’ll notice will likely be:
Getting teams to focus on the client’s emotional needs instead of their own operational requirements is one of the hardest steps when designing CX.
The process of hypothetically foregoing your normal process requirements is crucial because it forces you to re-examine standard operating procedures (SOPs) for efficiency.
It’s a valuable process, however, that at the root really serves to identify and stamp out inconsistencies in your ways of working.
4. CX lives inside company culture, not departmental functions
In the long run, customer experience comes to life in behaviour: how someone answers the phone, how an update is worded, how billing handles confusion, how quickly issues are acknowledged. When leaders model responsiveness and teams internalise that every interaction is brand-building, creating great customer experiences becomes muscle memory.
It’s therefore essential to work constantly and consistently at making the customer’s experience central to process design.
In a world where almost everything else can be copied, companies that succeed in using experience as a strategy gain a growth lever no one can take from them.
Your competitors can match your features. They can undercut your pricing. But they can't copy how you make people feel when things go wrong, and that's where loyalty is built.
Start small. Map one interaction. Redesign it with the customer's emotions at the centre. Then multiply it across your business. Because in the end, the companies that win aren't just selling solutions, they're designing experiences worth remembering.
Want to design experiences your competitors can't copy?
Kohde helps businesses build software that doesn't just work, it creates experiences customers remember for the right reasons.
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