The Marketer’s Guide to Customer Experience

Customer experience has evolved from a nice-to-have to the primary battleground where brands win or lose.  

In 2026, with AI reshaping expectations and competition fiercer than ever, marketers who master CX strategy will drive loyalty, reduce churn, and fuel sustainable growth.  

This guide delivers a step-by-step framework for measuring, benchmarking, and improving customer experience using social data, real-world examples, and proven tactics across the entire customer lifecycle. 

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience is the sum of all the moments and interactions a customer has with a brand across the entire journey. From the first ad they see, through purchase, to ongoing support and advocacy, it encompasses every touchpoint: your marketing messages, product quality, checkout flow, customer service interactions, and even how peers discuss your brand online. 

CX is fundamentally about perception formed over time. It's not a single transaction but a series of experiences that shape how customers think, feel, and act in relation to your brand. It’s the sum of people, workflows, and touchpoints working together to create consistent interactions that drive customer loyalty and positive business outcomes. 

CX vs customer service

Customer service is one component of the overall customer experience. Specifically, it's about the interactions when something goes wrong or customers need help. CX is broader, encompassing every interaction across the customer lifecycle, including marketing, product usage, and post-purchase engagement. 

CX vs UX

User experience (UX) focuses on how people interact with a specific product, app, or website – the usability, navigation, and design elements. Customer experience includes UX but extends to all brand touchpoints, including offline interactions, emotional connections, and the entire customer journey. 

CX vs customer success

Customer success is a proactive approach to helping customers achieve their goals with your product or service, typically used in B2B or subscription models. It's a subset of CX focused on the post-purchase phase, ensuring customers derive ongoing value and remain engaged. 

Why CX matters more to marketers in 2026

AI has raised expectations

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed what customers expect from brands. AI-powered support can deliver fast, personalized interactions at scale, and customers now expect this level of responsiveness everywhere. Automated solutions are increasingly handling routine inquiries while human agents tackle complex issues. 

This shift means that brands excelling at AI-enhanced CX can respond faster, personalize more effectively, and operate more efficiently. But it also means customers have less patience for slow, generic, or frustrating experiences. The bar has been raised across every industry. 

Cookie climate update: The shift to first-party data

While Google scrapped its third-party cookie phase-out in 2025, the broader trend toward privacy-first marketing continues. Marketers still need consented zero-party and first-party data combined with real customer signals from voice of customer programs and social listening. The brands that build direct relationships with customers will have the richest insights to personalize experiences and drive retention. Think loyalty programs, community engagement, and transparent data practices. 

CX as a differentiation opportunity

Forrester's CX Index 2025 reveals a troubling trend: customer experience scores are stagnating or declining across many industries. While this might sound like bad news, it's actually an enormous opportunity for brands willing to invest in measurement and execution. When most brands are delivering mediocre experiences, those who genuinely prioritize CX can capture disproportionate market share and customer loyalty. 

As competition intensifies and acquisition costs climb, keeping existing customers happy becomes not just smart marketing but essential for survival. 

The marketer's CX strategy

Step 1: Map journeys and identify friction

Begin by mapping your customer journey across five key stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase, and loyalty/advocacy. For each stage, identify the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand and where friction might occur. 

Customers don't think in terms of lifecycle stages. They experience your brand as a continuous flow of interactions. Your job is to understand this flow from their perspective, spotting moments where the experience delights or disappoints. Remember that every organization's journey will be unique based on what products you offer, how customers are acquired, and what level of ongoing support is needed. 

Step 2: Build a voice of customer (VoC) program

Combine qualitative and quantitative data sources to understand what customers truly think and feel: 

• Social listening: Monitor what people say about your brand, competitors, and industry on social media, forums, and review sites 
• Surveys: Gather structured feedback at key journey moments 
• Support data: Analyze customer service tickets, live chat logs, and call transcripts 
• Reviews: Track product and service reviews across platforms 

Using a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can monitor audience sentiment, identify themes in customer conversations, measure share of voice, and spot competitor gaps. Build a dashboard that brings together sentiment analysis, emotion tracking, trending topics, and verbatim customer quotes. This gives you both the big-picture view and the granular detail. 

The beauty of social data is that it’s real time. You can be agile and pivot based on what emerges, rather than waiting months for formal research to complete. 

Step 3: Prioritize fixes using impact vs effort

Not all CX improvements are created equal. Map potential fixes on an impact vs effort matrix: 

• Quick wins: High impact, low effort. Tackle these first to build momentum. 
• Strategic projects: High impact, high effort. Plan these for longer-term execution. 
• Fill-ins: Low impact, low effort. Handle when resources allow. 
• Avoid: Low impact, high effort. Deprioritize or eliminate. 

Start with quick wins to demonstrate progress and secure stakeholder buy-in. Then tackle the systemic changes that require cross-functional collaboration. 

Step 4: Operationalize on social

Social media is where much of the modern customer experience plays out publicly. Create operational excellence by establishing: 

• Publishing workflows: Use Brandwatch Social Media Management's integrated calendar for planning, approvals, and consistent brand voice 
• Engagement routing: Automatically route customer inquiries to the right team members 
• Response SLAs: Set and track first response time and resolution time targets 
• Agent assist: Provide your team with context, suggested responses, and escalation paths 

The integrated nature of Brandwatch's social suite means your listening insights feed directly into your engagement strategy. This creates a faster journey from insight to action. 

Step 5: Measure, benchmark, and iterate

Establish baseline metrics, track them consistently, and iterate based on what the data tells you. We'll dive deeper into specific metrics and benchmarking approaches in the sections below, but the key principle is continuous improvement. CX is never done. 

Customer expectations evolve, competitors innovate, and your business changes. An always-on approach to measurement ensures you stay ahead. 

Lifecycle playbooks

Pre-purchase: Building trust and removing friction

Before customers buy, they're evaluating whether you're worth their money and trust. The pre-purchase phase is about: 

• Social proof: Showcase customer reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content prominently 
• Creator content: Partner with influencers and creators who genuinely align with your brand values 
• Seamless information: Make it effortless to find product details, pricing, shipping info, and policies 

Purchase: Frictionless transactions

The moment of purchase should be smooth, secure, and reassuring: 

• Frictionless checkout: Minimize form fields, offer guest checkout, and support multiple payment methods 
• Accurate ETAs: Provide realistic delivery estimates and order tracking from the start 
• Choice of support: Give customers options to get help (chat, email, phone, self-service) 

Even small frustrations at checkout can trigger abandonment. Unclear shipping costs or complicated account creation will send customers elsewhere. Test your purchase flow regularly from the customer's perspective.

Post-purchase: Turning buyers into advocates

The post-purchase phase is where brands either cement loyalty or lose customers to competitors. Understanding the psychology here is crucial. After making a purchase, customers experience a mix of excitement, anxiety, and impatience. They're eager to receive their product, worried they made the right choice, and highly receptive to communication. 

Proactive communication is essential

• Thank you messages: A simple "thank you" can make a meaningful impact on the post-purchase experience and help build longer-term relationships. 
• Order confirmations and tracking: Keep customers informed at every stage. Order received, shipped, out for delivery, delivered. 
• Transparent returns: Clearly communicate your refund policy and returns process before issues arise. Being transparent builds trust and shows your brand isn't all about sales. 

Provide product value and education

Help customers get maximum value from their purchase with care tips, usage guides, and educational content. For complex products, don't wait for customers to struggle. Proactively share resources that help them succeed. 

Consider the product lifecycle when timing follow-up communications. A shirt might be tried on immediately, but a computer needs several uses before a customer can provide meaningful feedback. 

Gather feedback strategically

Getting feedback from customers on their purchased products improves future offerings and makes customers feel valued. Timing matters enormously. Some companies ask for feedback on the day of purchase, others wait up to 30 days. Consider your product type. Items that require extended use need longer evaluation periods before requesting reviews. Net Promoter Score surveys, for example, are often sent 30 days post-transaction to ensure customers have formed an informed opinion. 

Loyalty & advocacy: Creating community and champions

The final stage transforms satisfied customers into brand advocates: 

• Community experiences: Create spaces (online forums, social groups, events) where customers connect with each other and your brand 
• Member-exclusive benefits: Offer early access to products, VIP sales, or exclusive content 
• Personalization at scale: Use zero-party and first-party data to tailor experiences, regardless of cookie changes 

Loyal customers are your best marketers. Amplifying their voices via social media and your website is a powerful way to attract new customers. When advocacy happens organically (customers sharing their positive experiences publicly), it creates a feedback loop of social proof that reinforces preference.  

The Iconic's "Front Row" loyalty program was co-created with customers, ensuring the rewards and experiences actually matter to members. This approach to loyalty enrollment and post-purchase engagement demonstrates how brands can deepen relationships beyond the transaction. 

Where Brandwatch helps across the lifecycle

Brandwatch Consumer Research allows you to: 

• Spot churn drivers before customers leave by identifying early warning signals in social conversation 
• Discover "love drivers" (what makes customers become advocates) by analyzing positive sentiment and advocacy themes 
• Track sentiment across the journey to understand which stages need improvement 
• Benchmark your CX against competitors in real-time 

Brandwatch Social Media Management enables you to: 

• Route customer inquiries efficiently to the right team members
• Reply promptly with context and consistency
• Close the loop publicly, showing other customers how you handle issues
• Manage all your social channels, approvals, and campaigns in one collaborative calendar

Together, these platforms create an insights-to-action loop that makes CX improvement continuous and measurable. 

CX metrics that matter in 2026

Core CX KPIs

• Net promoter score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by asking "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" Scores range from -100 to 100, with promoters (9-10) minus detractors (0-6) giving your NPS. While NPS is widely used, use it with caution. Combine it with behavioral data and sentiment analysis for a complete picture. NPS alone doesn't tell you why customers feel the way they do. 
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Typically measured with "How satisfied were you with your experience?" on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale. CSAT is useful for measuring satisfaction at specific touchpoints (post-chat, post-purchase, post-support ticket). 
• Customer effort score (CES): Measures how easy it was for a customer to complete a task ("How easy was it to solve your problem today?"). Lower effort correlates strongly with loyalty. Customers value ease and efficiency. 
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): The total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with your brand. Increasing CLV should be a priority metric because it considers the full value of retention and loyalty, not just individual transactions. 
• Churn rate: The percentage of customers who stop buying or cancel subscriptions in a given period.

Operational metrics

• First response time: How quickly you respond to customer inquiries. Critical for social media and live chat. 
• Average resolution time: How long it takes to fully resolve a customer issue. 
• First contact resolution: The percentage of issues resolved in a single interaction. Higher is better, reducing customer effort and increasing satisfaction. 

Brand health metrics

• Sentiment: The emotional tone (positive, neutral, negative) of conversations about your brand, measured across online sources like social media, forums, and news. 
• Share of voice: Your brand's share of the total conversation in your industry. An indicator of visibility and mindshare. 
• Engagement rate: How actively people interact with your content and brand on social media. 

Putting it into practice

Let's translate those metrics into activities you can set up with Brandwatch:

• Set response time SLAs: Measure and improve how quickly your team responds across channels 
• Create escalation paths: Identify when issues need to be routed to specialized teams 
• Track topic sentiment: Monitor sentiment around specific topics (product launches, features, customer service) with real-time alerts when negative sentiment spikes 
• Identify trending complaints: Surface the most common issues customers are discussing so you can address them proactively 
• Automate alerts that flag customers indicating they're about to leave: Capturing these pivotal moments online can mean the difference between retaining a valuable customer and losing them to a competitor. 

Benchmarking CX and showcasing improvement

Benchmarking gives you the context to understand whether your CX is good, mediocre, or excellent, as well as where to focus improvement efforts. Effective benchmarking spans two dimensions: 

Internal baselines

Establish your starting point across key metrics, then track changes over time. Show "before vs after" comparisons when you implement journey fixes. For example, if you improve your checkout flow, measure the change in abandonment rate, completion time, and CSAT scores pre- and post-launch. 

Internal benchmarking is crucial for demonstrating ROI and securing continued investment in CX initiatives. When you can show that a specific change reduced customer complaints by 30% or increased NPS by 10 points, you build the business case for further improvements. 

External competitive benchmarks

Compare your performance against competitors and industry standards. Social listening is great for competitive benchmarking because the data is public and real-time. Using Brandwatch, you can compare: 

• Sentiment: How does sentiment toward your brand compare to competitors? 
• Share of voice: Are you winning or losing mindshare in your category? 
• Response times: How quickly do competitors respond to customer inquiries on social platforms? 
• Common themes: What do customers love or hate about competitors that you can learn from? 

The best CX benchmarking spans the entire customer journey. Map your customer journey and find the right metrics for at least three important customer touchpoints: 

1. Engagement benchmarks: How people feel about your brand, messaging, and marketing before they buy 
2. Usage benchmarks: How customers feel when they use your products or services 
3. Retention and customer service benchmarks: When and why customer issues arise, and what triggers them to want to leave 

For engagement, consider metrics like social visibility (how often your brand is mentioned), sentiment (the tone of mentions), and engagement rate (how actively people interact with your content). These factors paint a vivid picture of your brand health and the image potential customers see online. 

For usage, analyze the emotions and language customers use when discussing your products. For example, automotive brands can benchmark whether customers associate them more with "heavy-duty," "speed," or "luxury." These insights inform positioning and marketing strategy. 

For retention and customer service, measure response rates and times on social media. Additionally, track the volume and urgency levels of different customer service message types, from simple questions to indications of canceling or switching providers. 

Championing CX at the leadership level

Some CMOs now steer customer experience initiatives, taking responsibility for engagement across the entire lifecycle. If you're in a position to champion CX, remember that the early challenges are often internal. Getting buy-in at the leadership level, breaking down silos, and building a shared vision that everyone in the organization can rally behind. 

Create a common language that speaks to everyone. Demystify data to make it accessible. Help people across the business see how they're contributing to the bigger vision. When customer experience becomes embedded in company culture (not just a marketing initiative), sustainable transformation happens. 

Practical wins with AI in customer experience

AI is delivering tangible improvements to CX in several key areas: 

• Agent assistance: AI helps customer service agents by suggesting responses, surfacing relevant knowledge base articles, and providing customer context instantly. This makes agents more efficient and consistent without sacrificing the human touch. 
• Content automation: AI can generate personalized email campaigns, product recommendations, and social media responses at scale, ensuring customers receive timely, relevant communication. 
• Risk detection: Advanced AI analyzes customer messages to understand what's driving them. For example, Brandwatch’s React Score categorizes online mentions based on advanced natural language processing models and adds a risk level label of low, medium, or high. You can use this kind of technology to route inquiries to the appropriate team or trigger alerts. 
• Proactive outreach: Predictive AI identifies customers at risk of churning or experiencing issues, enabling proactive outreach before problems escalate. 

Guardrails for keeping AI human-centric

While AI delivers efficiency and scale, maintaining authentic customer relationships requires guardrails: 

• Human-in-the-loop: For complex issues, sensitive topics, or high-value customers, ensure human oversight and intervention capabilities. 
• Brand voice controls: Train AI systems on your brand voice and values to ensure consistency across all automated interactions. 71% of marketers agree that leveraging AI without losing the ‘human touch’ is a key challenge. 
• Data governance: Implement strict data privacy and security protocols. Customers need to trust that their information is handled responsibly, especially as AI systems access more personal data to enable personalization. 

The brands that succeed with AI in CX are those that use it to enhance human capabilities, not replace human connection entirely. 

Case studies: How Brandwatch has helped customers improve CX

Case 1: Enabling rapid product iteration for a tech company

A technology company used Brandwatch's Data Upload API to analyze app review data alongside social mentions after a soft launch in a key market. By monitoring sentiment, feature requests, and bug reports in real-time, they identified critical issues quickly and prioritized fixes based on user impact. 

This example of CX in action allowed the company to decide whether the soft-launch should expand to a wider release. And to make targeted improvements before scaling. The result: a smoother full launch with higher satisfaction scores. 

What to copy: 

• Upload first-party data (reviews, support tickets, surveys) into your analytics platform for holistic analysis 
• Set up real-time monitoring during product launches to catch issues early 
• Use customer feedback to prioritize product roadmap decisions 
• Act quickly on insights. Speed matters in the market 

Customer story 2: Leveraging community conversations for a fitness brand

A gym used Social Panels to track UK fitness enthusiasts' conversations about gym reopening after lockdown. By creating a panel of fitness enthusiasts and monitoring their discussions, the brand identified specific questions and areas for improvement that would enhance customers' return experience. Things like booking systems, cleaning protocols, and class schedules. 

What to copy: 

• Create audience panels to monitor key customer segments continuously 
• Listen to what customers are saying even when they're not directly mentioning your brand 
• Identify opportunities and concerns before launching major changes 
• Use real customer language in your communications to show you're listening 

Next steps: Your CX checklist

Here's a 10-point CX implementation checklist for marketers ready to get started 

1. Map your complete customer journey with all major touchpoints
2. Establish baseline metrics (NPS, CSAT, CES, sentiment, churn rate) 
3. Set up a VoC program combining social listening, surveys, and support data 
4. Create customer panels for key audience segments 
5. Identify top five friction points based on customer feedback and data
6. Prioritize fixes using impact vs effort framework
7. Implement quick wins to build momentum 
8. Establish social media engagement workflows and response SLAs 
9. Set up competitive benchmarking dashboards 
10. Schedule monthly CX reviews to track progress and iterate 

Take action

Ready to transform your customer experience strategy? See how Brandwatch’s suite of tools can help you understand your customers deeply and engage with them effectively.