“Customer experience” a.k.a CX — what does it mean? Simply: a catch-all expression for how your customers perceive all aspects of your business from products to services to marketing from first touchpoint to last, owned, earned, paid media, what people say about your brand when you’re not around—everything. That’s customer experience.
Using Google search as a proxy, interest in customer experience has tripled globally over the last ten years.

The Age of the Internet has brought competitive differentiation to a head and with it a growing interest in CX. Using Google search as a proxy, interest in customer experience has tripled globally over the last ten years. What a product does for customers may be the objective truth, the effective reality is that products live or die on subjective five-star reviews and public opinion. Today more than ever, businesses find they are at the mercy of customers, themselves empowered by the Internet.
Customer experience matters, but how is growing interest in CX being turned into executable business decisions? What strategies are companies pursuing to improve customer experience? How are they tracking and managing the CX metrics? What tools are used? And what does the future of CX management hold?
How do we answer these kinds of questions? A challenging aspect of the broadness of CX is that it is touched by every job function, whether it’s design, product management, marketing, sales, customer support, or something else.
While volumes could be written about CX in each of these areas, outside of perhaps the product, itself, marketing has the most far-reaching, manageable impact on CX. Marketing is used to reach everyone who qualifies as a target customer, necessarily casting a wide net. Marketing may often be the first experience a potential customer has with your brand. For all these reasons, we determined to focus our initial discussion around customer experience here.
With marketing for CX in focus, we reached out to marketing leaders within the SaaS community and asked them how they are thinking about CX. The Marketer’s Guide to Customer Experience aggregates these leading perspectives into an easy-to-digest volume for the purpose of advancing the discussion of CX, in general, and specifically for marketing.