Customer Experience, or CX, and Customer Journey are not creative exercises with colorful sticky notes, nor mere inspirational workshops. They are management disciplines with direct impact on results: retention, growth, commercial efficiency, and profitability. Customer experience is now one of the main competitive differentiators because products and prices are increasingly easy to replicate. What is not easily replicated is how a customer feels, decides, buys, uses, and recommends.
Customer Journey makes it possible to rigorously map the critical moments of that relationship, from discovery to post sale. But true journey management requires operational and financial metrics. A strong CX program measures NPS, Net Promoter Score, CES, Customer Effort Score, churn rate, response time, repurchase rate, customer acquisition cost, CAC, and customer lifetime value, CLV. Without this, there is no management. There is only opinion.
Let us look at well known examples that illustrate the contrast between success and failure. Amazon is often cited as a benchmark because it reduced friction across the entire journey: one click purchasing, fast delivery, simple returns. The impact is measurable: higher conversion, stronger loyalty, and sustained growth. In B2B, Salesforce built a customer centered experience through structured onboarding, continuous support, and user communities, reducing churn and increasing recurring revenue.
On the opposite side, examples of failure are equally clear. Telecommunications companies with fragmented processes, long wait times, and lack of first contact resolution generate churn and reputational damage. In B2B, industrial suppliers that fail in delivery or technical support lose multimillion dollar contracts not because of the product, but because operational experience destroys trust. The customer journey does not end at the sale. Often, it begins there.
In training and consulting, the essential goal is not to make it look impressive, but to ensure applicability. CX is a discipline of execution: improving response times, reducing effort, increasing retention, and turning customers into promoters. Results without context are distractions. Context without results is sterile theory.
At its core, we are giving new names to old practices. We all know someone who remembers the neighborhood grocer who knew customers by name, understood their preferences, kept informal running tabs, and anticipated needs. He built natural loyalty and attracted new customers through word of mouth, without major promotional investment. The real value was in attention to detail, service quality, and excellence in the relationship.
Today, the challenge is to transform that artisanal professionalism, close, human, and consistent, into a capability that can be replicated at scale across thousands or millions of interactions throughout the customer journey. This is where technology, particularly artificial intelligence, plays a decisive role. It enables personalization at the right moment, anticipation of needs, automation of processes without losing relevance, and consistency across touchpoints, from acquisition to retention.
But digital sophistication cannot distract us from the essentials. Each phase of the customer journey exists to protect and strengthen the relationship that sustains the business. In the end, this is what marketing should be about: continuously optimizing the relationship with customers, creating sustainable value for both sides across the entire experience, not only at the moment of sale.
Ultimately, without relevant content and without substance in the product, the service, and the execution, no creativity can overcome mediocrity. Customers understand this better than anyone. And without customers, there is no revenue. Without revenue, there is no business.
Pedro Celeste, Professor at CATÓLICA-LISBON