Are Customer Experience and Customer Centricity the Same?

Some people argue that terminology is not all that important. As long as you’re doing your work right, you might as well call things whatever you like. And while I am all for freedom of choice, getting some universal terminology correctly will save all the parties involved some time and tons of misunderstanding.

So, if you ever wondered why some people speak about customer centricity while others use the term customer experience, let me put on my academic hat and try to bring some clarity into this.

At first glance, customer centricity and customer experience seem like the same thing. It’s all about making your customer feel satisfied when they are using your services. So, the name is pretty much a case of tomato, to-mah-to, right? To quote one famous pirate, “well, yes, but actually no.”

Going deeper into semantics, customer centricity is a mindset. If as a company, you take your customers seriously and want them to be happy when doing business with you, you show customer centricity. And to make it happen, you strive for positive customer experience.

Correspondingly, customer experience management is a set of activities and measures you implement to improve the customer journey and accumulation of experiences your customer has with your company. To provide positive customer experience, you must first set your mind on customer centricity.

To put it simply, customer centricity is your company’s strategy in advancing excellence while customer experience management is the tactics you apply to bring your strategy to life. If your company’s fundamental mind strives for customer centricity, building a positive customer experience will be an easier step.

As you can see in the overview above, the logic on the employee side is the same. If you stumble across the useless flag next to the employee NPS and have questions about it, ping me and we can have a cup of coffee on the topic. I will not touch it here for brevity.

Have I missed anything, do you have comments or additions?