Assuming the Customer Experience

I work with a lot of blue chip organisations and the one trend that has been increasingly noticeable over the last couple of years is how executive level strategies are driving increased profitability through customer experience improvements. They wax lyrical about how projects need to be customer-centric and how operationally and tactically they need to put the customer in the centre of everything.
This is great right? Well, it’s a step in the right direction. However, the problem I’m finding though is that while the like the big management schools are instructing the executives to improve their customer experience no-one has truly defined what that means or how to go about it.
At worst most of these organisations do nothing more than pay lip service to improving customer experience. Just because you mention the phrase ‘customer-centric’ in a power point deck to senior managers and include a slide on customer segmentation does not in any way mean that you are being customer centric.
So here’s my definition: “The customer experience is the process of interacting with systems* which stimulate emotions and shape perceptions to influence consumer behaviour.” (*systems can be people, processes and machines)
To be truly customer-centric and to be able to influence consumer behaviour you have to stop presuming to know what’s best for your customer and actually engage them before, during and after the process. That mandate should be applied at all levels of business from the people on the front line who are responsible for sales through to the people who plan the delivery projects that will affect the way yours customers interact with your business.