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The Gist
- Experience design was intentional from the start. Early CX pioneers showed that customer experiences can be deliberately designed, not left to chance.
- Measurement improved faster than execution. While CX became highly measurable over time, consistently shaping better experiences remains difficult in practice.
- CX operates too far downstream. Much of the discipline still focuses on identifying and fixing problems after they occur rather than preventing them.
- The next frontier is upstream thinking. Future CX gains will come from how leaders perceive situations, make decisions and design the systems customers ultimately experience.
Customer experience as a practice has evolved significantly over the past two decades, driven in part by advances in the power and sophistication of CX technologies.
Organizations measure it, track it and link it to growth, loyalty and long-term value. Yet the experiences customers encounter often remain inconsistent, unsatisfying and lacking in emotional connection, shaped more by operational constraints than by deliberate design.
Three decades ago, the challenge was different. Modern customer experience, as we know it today, first had to be defined.
Table of Contents
- Evolution of Customer Experience, 1990s Style
- The Moment CX Stopped Being Accidental
- From Design to Measurement
- Where Experience Actually Comes From
- Repositioning CX Upstream
- The Next Evolution of CX
Evolution of Customer Experience, 1990s Style
In the mid-1990s, two distinct lines of work began to articulate what it would become.
In the United States, Lewis Carbone and Stephan Haeckel published "Engineering Customer Experiences," introducing the idea that experiences could be deliberately shaped through the design of what they described as "clues." At around the same time in the UK, working within BT's Human Factors and marketing teams, a small group of us were developing a strategic, multidisciplinary approach to service and product development that we later described as "Designing the Customer Experience," published in the article "Delivering Competitive Edge," written by Mike Atyeo and myself.
These efforts emerged from different contexts, but they addressed a similar problem. Organizations were designing products and services, but the focus remained on market segmentation rather than on designing whole experiences.
At BT, this became clear in practice. Teams would launch new services and only then ask whether customers could use them effectively. Our work focused on moving that thinking upstream, understanding customer interactions early enough to shape how services were designed, rather than evaluating them after the fact.
Carbone and Haeckel approached the same challenge from a different angle, focusing on how experiences are constructed through a combination of functional, environmental and human elements.
Together, these two lines of thinking established a simple but important idea:
Experiences are not incidental. They are designed.
The Moment CX Stopped Being Accidental
Our "Designing the Customer Experience" method was strategic in several important ways:
- It shifted practice from usability to the experience as a whole, meaning every interaction a person has with a product, service and brand.
- It connected design to the product lifecycle, integrating experience design and marketing into a single process.
- It framed design in commercial terms, highlighting the impact of experience on the return on investment of innovation and product marketing.
- And it was inherently multidisciplinary, emphasizing sensemaking within leadership teams by integrating fields such as semiotics and anthropology with more traditional research methods.
One of our strengths was the number of psychologists working within the Human Factors department, developing tools that combined qualitative and quantitative research. Through focused ethnographic studies, for example, accompanying people home after purchasing a product, we were able to observe not only how products were used, but how they were experienced within the context of everyday life.
For this reason, it was particularly interesting for me to recently meet Lou Carbone and compare our complementary paths.
In our conversation, we reflected on how organizations have invested heavily in customer experience, and yet trust, customer loyalty and emotional connection continue to erode. What struck us was how familiar the pattern still felt. Despite three decades of progress, many of the same challenges remain.
Lou's approach is grounded in cognition, memory and behavioral science. Experience does not create value at the moment of interaction, but later, in memory. What people remember shapes what they believe happened, how they feel about it and what they choose next. Emotion shapes memory, and memory shapes behavior.
These insights are well established. Yet they were never fully absorbed into how organizations are designed and led.
Related Article: The Loyalty Equation: Trust + Context + Community
From Design to Measurement
As customer experience evolved from user interaction design in the 1980s to experience design in the 1990s, organizations began to recognize that experience extends beyond individual interactions to the broader systems through which products and services are delivered.
Methods such as customer journey mapping and voice of customer programs made those experiences more visible. Measurement systems followed, allowing organizations to track customer perceptions with increasing precision.
This was an important step in the evolution of the field. Customer experience moved from the margins of organizations into mainstream business thinking. Yet a persistent challenge remains. Even today, customer experience is rarely embedded in the decisions that shape how organizations operate.
This creates a familiar pattern:
Customer feedback highlights recurring issues. Journey maps reveal friction. Dashboards track satisfaction scores.
Organizations invest in improvement initiatives, and yet many of the same problems return. Experiences improve in one area, only for inconsistencies to emerge elsewhere.
The issue is not a lack of data, tools or intent. Most CX programs are highly effective at identifying problems. They show where customers are dissatisfied, highlight gaps between expectation and delivery and provide increasingly detailed insight into behavior.
But they operate largely after the fact. Organizations become very good at explaining why problems occur. They are far less effective at designing systems in which those problems are less likely to arise in the first place.
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This reflects where most CX efforts are positioned. They sit downstream.
Where Experience Actually Comes From
Customers do not experience strategies or organizational structures directly. They experience systems.
They encounter digital interfaces, service processes, support interactions and physical environments. These systems shape how customers perceive an organization.
Those systems are created through decisions. Decisions about priorities, investments, trade-offs and ways of working determine how products are built, how services are delivered and how employees interact with customers. And those decisions, in turn, are shaped by how organizations interpret the situations they face.
Opportunities, risks and problems do not present themselves as neutral facts. They are understood through particular perspectives that influence what is noticed, what is prioritized and what actions appear possible.
Organizations often assume that challenges arise from gaps in data, capability or execution. As a result, considerable effort is directed toward improving measurement, refining processes and accelerating response. These efforts are often necessary, but they do not fully explain the patterns that persist.
Many of these difficulties arise earlier, before action is taken and before systems become visible.
The Interpretive Gap Shapes What Gets Built
They can be understood as expressions of an interpretive gap: the difference between what is available to be known and how a situation is understood.
For example, one organization may interpret declining customer satisfaction as a service issue, investing in training and support improvements. Another may recognize it as a product or pricing issue and redesign the underlying offer. The data may be similar, but the interpretation, and therefore the system that follows, is entirely different.
This gap is not visible in reports or dashboards, yet it quietly shapes what is noticed, what is considered relevant and what is seen as possible before any decision is made.
Where the interpretive gap is narrow, perception is more complete, and decisions tend to stabilize into more coherent systems. Where it is wide, systems fragment, even when they are well designed structurally.
When organizations focus primarily on improving experience at the surface level, they tend to address symptoms rather than causes. They refine journeys, optimize touchpoints and respond to feedback, while the underlying patterns that generate those experiences remain unchanged.
As a result, improvement efforts become cyclical. Problems are identified, addressed and then reappear in new forms.
Repositioning CX Upstream
To overcome these limitations, leaders need to recognize a central insight that has shaped our work over many years:
The problems organizations face are not the starting point of action. They are the output of perception.
Working upstream means developing the capability to understand how situations are interpreted in the first place and how meaning shapes the decisions that follow. This allows organizations to act earlier and with greater precision, shaping outcomes while they are still forming rather than correcting them after they have stabilized.
Upstream Work Begins With How Leaders See
Seen from this perspective, repositioning customer experience is leadership work.
Leadership experience (LX) describes the conditions through which leaders perceive and interpret the situations they face. It shapes what is noticed, what is prioritized and what actions appear possible.
When these conditions are fragmented, decision-making fragments with them. When they are coherent, decisions stabilize and systems produce more consistent outcomes. Improving customer experience therefore depends, in part, on improving the conditions through which leadership itself operates.
Related Article: Rethinking How You Approach Your Customer Experience Strategy
How Customer Experience Has Shifted — and Where It’s Going
Editor's note: This table breaks down the evolution of customer experience from early design thinking to today’s measurement-heavy approach — and what needs to change next.
| Era of CX | Primary Focus | What Organizations Got Right | Where It Falls Short | What Comes Next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990s: Experience design emerges | Designing experiences intentionally | Recognized that experiences can be shaped through systems, not left to chance | Limited scale, tools and organizational adoption | Embed experience thinking into core business design |
| 2000s–2010s: Measurement takes over | Tracking satisfaction, journeys and feedback | Made customer experience visible and measurable across the organization | Focused on diagnosing problems after they occur | Connect insights directly to decision-making and system design |
| Today: Downstream optimization | Fixing touchpoints and improving journeys | Strong tools for identifying friction and customer pain points | Creates cycles of fixing symptoms rather than root causes | Shift upstream to influence how systems are created in the first place |
| Next phase: Upstream CX leadership | Designing conditions and decision environments | Aligns leadership thinking, systems and experience outcomes | Requires new capabilities in interpretation and sensemaking | Build coherent systems where better experiences emerge naturally |
| AI-driven future | Scaling experiences through automation | Extends reach and consistency of CX delivery | Amplifies fragmentation if underlying systems are flawed | Design conditions carefully to avoid scaling poor experiences |
The Next Evolution of CX
The next stage of customer experience may require a shift in focus.
As organizations increasingly rely on AI-driven interactions and automated systems, the importance of designing coherent conditions becomes more apparent. These technologies extend the reach of organizations, but they also amplify the consequences of how systems are designed. Where underlying conditions are fragmented, experiences become fragmented at scale.
Rather than concentrating primarily on managing experiences, organizations may need to focus upstream, on designing the conditions that shape the systems through which those experiences are produced.
This does not replace existing CX practices. Journey maps, feedback systems and measurement platforms remain valuable. But their impact depends on how well they are connected to the decisions and assumptions that shape organizational systems.
Customer experience is not something organizations simply manage. It is something that emerges from the conditions through which those systems are formed.
The next evolution of customer experience, therefore, will not come from better dashboards or more detailed journey maps. It will come from understanding how organizations perceive the situations they face, how decisions are shaped and how those decisions give rise to the systems customers ultimately encounter.
That shift, from managing experience to designing the conditions that shape it, will define the next chapter of customer experience.
The question this raises for leaders is not only how to improve experience, but how the conditions that produce it are being formed in the first place.
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