Stop thinking about customer experience.
Instead, focus on what your company is trying to accomplish this year, next year, and the year after. I don’t mean your overarching vision or corporate purpose. I mean the practical stuff that comprises the day-to-day objectives of every for-profit business: retaining existing customers, selling more stuff to those customers, and adding more customers. Profitably.
It’s the behavior of your customers (and would-be customers) that will determine your success. At the risk of gross simplification, your enduring goal is to influence the behavior of customers and targets to drive revenue to your firm. The value of your company, moreover, is determined by current and future revenue streams from your customers.
How To Influence Customers
The first question is how do you influence the behavior of current customers to continue to be customers? Since for most firms, more than 90% of their 2027 revenues are sitting in the pockets of their 2026 customers, retention is a do-or-die mandate. The obvious answer it seems is to delight them: meet or exceed their expectations on those criteria that shape their behavior. Don’t give them reason to shop around because of underperformance or disappointment. The laws of inertia are on your side.
Now you want to sell more to those customers? While there are some circumstances in B2B where customers strive to diversify their suppliers to mitigate risks, most customers are more than happy to concentrate their spend (thus maximizing your share of their spend) with their trusted, preferred supplier. As for selling related products and services, the best path to such brand extensions is being a trusted partner in the core relationship.
Organic growth through new customer acquisition may be more expensive than retention and cross-selling, but it still is an important pathway to expansion. No one buys in a vacuum sealed off from the marketplace. Product specs and advertisements notwithstanding, buyers almost always want to hear from current/former customers as to their usage of a product or service and interactions with the supplier.
That’s It?
That’s it: the key to your company’s kingdom is to influence the behavior of customers and prospects to increase the likelihood (yes, everything is probabilistic) that they drive more revenues to your firm. Sure, there are any number of external forces that affect their behavior over which you have no influence: macroeconomic trends, acquisitions, seasonality and weather, tariffs and government policy, and so on. For the most part, however, those affect both you and your competitors about the same.
So what is it that engages customers to the point where they want to continue to be a customer, are willing to spend more with you and/or buy other products and services from you, and speak favorably about your firm to others? Leaving aside those immovable external forces, the behavior of your customers in 2026 will be most directly influenced by how you dealt with them in 2025, and their behavior in 2027 will largely be shaped by your interactions with them this year.
There is More
This does not need to be a trial-and-error guessing game. Is it the account manager/salesperson, customer support, or product/service quality that is key to the customer’s behavior? Or perhaps it’s being easy to work with, a sense of trust, or being a good partner? Or is it a price/value issues?
You can empirically determine what issues affect customer behavior and the relative impact of those issues on shaping that behavior. Armed with that knowledge, you can focus on improving those performance areas that have the greatest impact and opportunity for helping to influence future customer behavior.
Some might simply call this smart business. Others might call this customer experience management.