What is customer experience (CX)?
Get an overview of customer touchpoints — plus, how product managers can influence CX
Last updated: November 2025
Customer experience (CX) is what shapes how people feel about your company and product. It encompasses every interaction customers have with marketing, support, product features, and more. Learn what it takes to create an experience that your customers truly value. |
Customer experience refers to every touchpoint that buyers have with your company or product and their overall perception of these interactions. CX spans the entire customer journey, from discovery to post-purchase.
Here is a simple example. Pick a local restaurant and read through the reviews. What stands out? You will certainly see customers commenting on the food (i.e., the product). But much more affects their experience beyond the menu. Wait time, staff helpfulness, atmosphere, and pricing — all contribute to the customer experience.
CX is a critical part of what makes any product successful. And product managers are in a unique position to influence your team to help create an exceptional customer experience.
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Let's explore this idea. Jump ahead to the sections in this guide:
Why is customer experience important?
Customer experience shapes every step of the customer journey — from the first time people hear about your product to when they (hopefully) leave a positive review after years of use. By building a strong CX, you can directly influence meaningful business results.
A continued investment in customer experience can:
Differentiate your product from competitors by delivering quality service, support, and functionality
Build strong customer relationships through thoughtful and memorable interactions
Reduce churn by addressing pain points across the customer journey
Encourage loyalty — turning satisfied customers into repeat buyers and advocates
Drive revenue growth by retaining more customers and attracting new ones
Strengthen brand perception when customers feel valued
It boils down to this — when you look at the big picture of what you offer and focus on improving the entire experience, customers are more likely to feel appreciated, understood, and respected. In turn, these positive interactions are more likely to turn customers into vocal advocates.
Related:
What makes a great customer experience?
If you want customers to care about your product, you need to care about how they feel. It is not enough to provide a good product at a competitive price when so many other factors impact how you gain and retain customers. You also need to think about how your product is discovered, delivered, and supported.
A great customer experience is seamless and reliable across all touchpoints (including marketing, sales, technology, and beyond). When teams work together to remove friction and delight customers at every step, you can turn ordinary interactions into lovable ones.
On the Aha! team, we use the term Complete Product Experience (CPE) to describe the ideal customer experience from a product builder's perspective. The elements of CPE offer a good overview of the touchpoints that make up the customer experience:
Marketing is how potential customers learn about your product and determine if it could help solve their problem. Common marketing methods include digital ads, online reviews, social platforms, and company-published content.
Sales interactions help customers decide whether or not to make a purchase. As they evaluate your offering, customers might read reviews, speak to a member of your sales team, or sign up for a trial.
Technology refers to the core set of features or services that customers will pay for and use. (For non-tech companies, "technology" could refer to another type of product.)
Supporting systems make it possible for your company to deliver your product or service (e.g., billing, logistics, analytics, and more). Customers will rarely see these internal systems, but they still impact your CX.
Third-party integrations enable customers to seamlessly incorporate new products into their existing workflows and toolset.
Support is everything that helps customers achieve something meaningful with your product. This could mean answering customer questions, providing training and self-help resources, and understanding what customers want most out of your product.
Policies govern how you do business and how team members should act. For example, you could have a flexible, no-questions-asked return policy or more strict guidelines with fewer exceptions. Policies like these can impact CX positively or negatively.
It is important to note that strong performance in one area is not enough — you must deliver a consistent customer experience across touchpoints. For example, your marketing messages should reflect the features you actually offer. Otherwise, the experience falls apart. Transparent communication and frequent collaboration are key to keeping everyone aligned.
Who manages the customer experience?
Everyone in the organization is responsible for helping to make customers happy. But some functions are more closely involved in customer experience than others.
In many organizations, customer experience management is a cross-team effort involving marketing, sales, support, engineering, and especially product management. These core groups have the best understanding of customer needs and are deeply invested in the product's success.
However, some larger organizations hire dedicated customer experience roles. Some also create CX teams that focus on building customer-centric experiences at scale. This is most helpful for companies with vast product portfolios where the customer journey may become disjointed across many teams and touchpoints.
Here is a quick overview of some roles that focus on customer experience:
Chief customer officer (CCO) | Drives a customer-centric focus across all groups in the organization. CCOs typically set strategy around improving customer retention, satisfaction, and advocacy. |
Customer experience manager | This role is responsible for CX initiatives like customer journey mapping, feedback programs, and process improvements designed to improve customer happiness and loyalty. |
Customer Success Manager (CSM) | Partners with customers post-purchase to ensure adoption and long-term engagement. CSMs play a key role in shaping ongoing CX and helping customers get the most value out of your product. |
Voice of Customer (VoC) manager | Collects and analyzes customer feedback to guide product, marketing, and service improvements. VoC managers help to boost CX efforts by helping the team make more informed decisions. |
How to improve customer experience: Templates and examples
In a digital-first world, customers expect solutions that are personalized and immediate. A working product is the baseline — what customers really crave is an enjoyable experience.
To improve your customer experience, a good place to start is mapping the entire customer journey. This can help you spot opportunities to reduce inefficiencies or confusion. You can try our customer journey map template — free to use when you sign up for Aha! Whiteboards. (As a bonus: If you are an Aha! Roadmaps customer, you can easily convert content on the journey map into actionable work items on your product roadmap.)
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From there, try running discovery interviews with your customers. Ask about their experience directly — when do they feel frustrated or indifferent, and what truly delights them? You can observe how they use certain product features or even sit in on sales calls to get an idea of what could be improved (and how).
But improving customer experience is not just about incremental improvements. You also have to think about how to place the customer at the center of everything you do. In many cases, this requires fundamentally transforming the way you do business.
For example, at Aha! we took a non-traditional approach to sales and customer support because we wanted to serve our customers in a totally different way. In fact, we do not have a sales team at all. Instead, customers work with our Customer Success team to demo, purchase, and get support for our software.
Our Customer Success team is uniquely equipped to help our customers — we intentionally hire former product and project managers for these roles. That way, our customers know that we deeply understand their problems and what is valuable to them.
This type of shift can be challenging. You often need support from the top and a companywide commitment. But product managers are in a strong position to encourage the rest of the team to think strategically about the customer experience. When your improvements make an impact, others will take notice.
FAQs about customer experience (CX)
CX stands for customer experience. It is how people perceive your company based on every interaction they have with it — from marketing and sales to product use and support. It is the sum of all impressions that shape customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
Customer service is the support customers receive, including guidance, troubleshooting, and administrative help when using your product. Customer experience is broader — encompassing all interactions customers have with your product or business, which includes customer service.
Brand is how people feel about your company and product: the reputation, perception, and emotional connection you create over time. Customer experience (CX) is what drives those feelings. It includes every interaction a person has with your company, from using your product to receiving support. In short, CX shapes your brand.
Customer experience management (CXM) focuses on optimizing every interaction a customer has with a business to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Product management centers on defining and delivering products that meet market needs and business goals. CXM and product management are complementary: Strong products support a great customer experience, and insights from CXM can inform product decisions to deliver more customer value.
With so many different touchpoints, it can be tricky to measure customer experience accurately. Many organizations use multiple methods and customer experience metrics, like:
Net promoter score
Customer satisfaction score
Customer churn and retention
Survey responses
Submissions and votes for product ideas
There is no simple answer to this question. Customer types vary widely between industries, product categories, demographics, and more — as do their perceptions of what makes good or bad customer experience. Conducting customer research and crafting personas will help you understand what your target buyers want out of their interactions with a brand or product.
