CX Strategy Explained: How Customer Experience Drives Long-Term Business Growth

Whether you’ve realized it or not, we’ve lived through the ‘customer experience’ revolution for the last decade ( Google the “importance of CX” for proof).

If you or your team has ever found yourself going, “What is CX really?” or, more importantly, “What does CX actually help us do?” this post may help.

Why Customer Experience Became the Only Competitive Differentiator

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, brands realized that the internet made e-commerce possible.

They also came to find that it fundamentally changed people’s purchasing behaviors and, by extension, their expectations.

The increased prevalence of digital experiences also produced massive amounts of data, which opened the door for brands to really know their consumers — their activities, purchasing behaviors, interests, expectations, etc.​​​​​​​

With all that data, companies had to quickly formulate a way to collect and use it to better engage consumers.

These methods soon became much more effective than traditional advertising (e.g., content, customized experiences, better-designed products, etc.), and brands that didn’t change with the times quickly fell behind.

The headline from a 2016 INC article pretty much sums it up: Customer Experience is Your ONLY Differentiator. You’re About to Be Rewarded or Punished.

Case Study: Your Favorite Airline

Think of any consumer brand you love — specifically, your favorite airline.

Why is it your favorite? What does it do uniquely that you love? What little things (free baggage, boarding without a seat assignment, free Wi-Fi, etc.) ultimately make you choose one airline over another?

Now, zoom out a layer. All these airlines are doing the same thing: Transporting people around the world. In many cases, they’re all actually using the same damn planes too.

So what is so special about Southwest vs. American Airlines vs. Frontier vs. United?

Southwest became fixated and obsessed with their customers. And they know their customers intimately. They’ve crafted strategies around who their target customer is and understand how to keep them happy, and what unique value to bring to that customer base that will create brand affinity, loyalty, and long-term advocacy (read as spend more for longer).

In a world where there is so much consumer choice, they’re finding that micro experiences ladder up to a brand experience that attracts, delights, and retains those customers even when they aren’t the cheapest provider.

The Business Cost of Ignoring CX Strategy

To oversimplify my point, I present this:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin

Sears is a great example of a company that couldn’t figure out how to stay relevant with the changing needs of customers, for all of the reasons mentioned above.

It’s as if they buried their head in the sand and assumed the internet was a fad that would pass and their model would outlast the changing landscape of our world.

As you may have heard, they were wrong.

How Organizations Can Overcome CX Inertia and Start Transforming

Large, well-established organizations are prone to inertia and entropy.

These forces become as much a threat to your existence as the emergence of new competitors. But both things are terribly hard to overcome, and if your business is obsessed with justifying every investment, it can be hard to tackle the larger organizational transformation needed. 

Jamshid Vayghan, a technology and innovation leader at IBM, wrote an article for Forbes that explains how this short-term thinking can lead to an existential crisis: 

“When every business in an industry digitizes its processes and operations, the question for leaders becomes how to differentiate their organization from competitors. One possible answer could be to embed cognitive and AI capabilities — including machine learning and natural language understanding — into their processes and operations. A decision on this investment might be difficult to justify solely based on ROI because the immediate impact on business outcome is not known. But inaction or delay in action might enable another company to position itself as the industry leader — an obviously unacceptable result.”

If done well, CX is the catalyst that can help identify and push through these needed adaptations.

Creating A Vision & Discipline Around Customer Experience

In 2018, I really started to get a bee in my bonnet about what we were doing to differentiate ourselves as a business at Coyote. We’d had over a decade of tremendous growth and were in a prime position to start focusing on how we, as a 3PL, could and should be the easiest provider to work with. 

We really needed to start listening to customers (and that included acknowledging that carriers are our customers too). Both shippers’ and carriers’ unique journeys are equally important to our success — we have to focus on each audience with the same level of curiosity. 

So we started small, implementing voice-of-the-customer (VOC) programs on our technology platforms, and continued to build out from there to our legacy, enterprise customers who don’t engage digitally.

Measuring CX Maturity: The Gartner Five-Level Model

Gartner publishes a CX management maturity model on a scale of one (ad hoc) to five (embedded). We can use this methodology to gauge where we’re at today and where we’re going next.

Level 1	Ad hoc	A designated CX leader spurs efforts to explore CX capability gaps, improve voice-of-the-customer programs, establish processes, and determine how CX can effectively resolve drivers of dissatisfaction.
Level 2	Establishing	The organization has proven how customer satisfaction delivers on business and financial goals. Most or all CX processes operate effectively to not just identify and resolve customer problems, but to uncover proactive solutions that satisfy customer needs.
Level 3	Performing	A common organization-wide understanding of customers exists, a standing CX leadership group drives cross-functional alignment and effectively coordinates CX efforts, and customer insights are widely disseminated.
Level 4	Optimizing	A common organization wide understanding of customers exists, a standing CX leadership group drives cross-functional alignment and effectively coordinates CX efforts, and customer insights are widely disseminated.
Level 5	Embedded	A customer-centric culture influences the day-to-day actions and decisions of employees at every level.

From this model, we built out our own internal report card to look across the key functions that Gartner identifies: Voice of the Customer, Customer Research, Metrics, Strategy, Technology, Personas & Journey, Customer-centric Culture, Roles & Governance, and Purpose.

I’m happy to report that in a year’s time, we were already at Level 2 and taking on activities in Level 3, which is one of the hardest hills to climb and where I see many organizations still today because of a lack of internal coordination or placement of CX.

I built a framework that looks at what customers experience, how employees and technology create & impact that experience, and the underlying productivity or efficiency of our assets in delivering the experience (human capital, data flow, systems, et al.)

With that context & measurement framework in place, you can more easily identify areas of improvement that will have the most business impact and prioritize those while clearly identifying KPIs or metrics that should see a lift from those improvement efforts.

Why CX Strategy Must Also Improve Employee Experience

Creating a vision & strategy has to outline why CX is important to the business. And that may work well for leadership, but how do you get the people to care about your initiatives or believe that CX really is important?

A good CX team, wherever it sits, should drive positive change that results in less customer churn, better margins, and more revenue…but should also inherently make your employees’ jobs more meaningful, opening the door for them to do the right thing by customers in every interaction & empowering them to identify areas of improvement that can help them help customers faster, easier, etc.

‘Employee Experience’ tends to live in HR, but I think their focus is more about office engagement, holiday parties, swag, and culture. The problem is that many organizations don’t look at employees in how they operate their day-to-day – what slows them down, what handoffs between teams are unnecessary, what work they are doing for customers that could be self-service, how fast/slow is the operating systems they work in, etc.

People in roles oriented around the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the customer are going to be the individuals who help bring to light whether the existing business strategy will continue to drive long-term financial results and garner more market share.

Frequently Asked Questions About CX Strategy

What is CX strategy?
CX strategy is the organizational discipline responsible for understanding, measuring, and improving the end-to-end experience customers have with your company. It goes beyond surveys and satisfaction scores — it involves customer research, journey mapping, cross-functional alignment, and tying experience improvements to business outcomes like retention and revenue growth.

How is CX strategy different from customer service or customer success?
Customer service and customer success are execution functions that handle specific interactions at specific moments. CX strategy looks across all those moments to understand patterns, identify root causes, and drive structural fixes. Customer service handles the support ticket; CX strategy asks why tickets keep coming in.

What is the Gartner CX maturity model?
Gartner defines CX maturity on a five-level scale from Ad Hoc (Level 1) to Embedded (Level 5). Most B2B companies operate between Levels 1 and 2. Reaching Level 3 — where a shared understanding of customers drives cross-functional CX work — is the inflection point where measurable business impact becomes defensible.

How long does it take to build a CX program from scratch?
Most organizations can reach Gartner Level 2 within 12–18 months with dedicated resources and executive sponsorship. The key is starting focused — one journey phase, one customer segment — and scaling from there rather than trying to do everything at once.

Does CX strategy matter for B2B companies?
Yes — arguably more so than B2C. B2B relationships are longer, more complex, and more expensive to lose. A single churned enterprise account can represent years of revenue. CX strategy gives B2B organizations the tools to understand where those relationships are at risk before renewal conversations become cancellation conversations.

---

If you want to talk through what this looks like for your company specifically, the first conversation is free. I’ll tell you honestly where you are in the build and what the most important first move is. Here’s an overview of how I work.