“Essential” or “if only I could”? How customer experience is really managed

Today, 88% of companies consider a holistic management of customer experience a fundamental lever for Sales Excellence. Yet the gap between strategic ambition and concrete results remains wide. This is highlighted by the research Customer Experience Management, quo vadis?, conducted by Paolo Guenzi and Paola Caiozzo of the Commercial Excellence Lab (CEL) at SDA Bocconi.

The importance of effectively managing customer experience in order to achieve business objectives receives an average score of 8.01 out of 10. The problem lies in how this priority is translated into operational choices. Customer experience is too often fragmented across channels, functions, KPIs, and piecemeal initiatives, without a truly unifying model. As a result, even when companies report a good level of maturity (average satisfaction with management capability is 7.43 out of 10), outcomes risk being unstable, hard to scale, and difficult to monetize.

An integration yet to be achieved

The research stems from a widely shared tension. On the one hand, the customer is increasingly at the center: personalization, continuity along the customer journey, and the overall value of the experience have become competitive imperatives. On the other hand, organizations struggle to overcome channel silos, integrate data, and turn best practices into replicable models.

The context is further complicated by the hybridization of touchpoints and the growing outsourcing of certain phases of the customer experience: 67% of companies delegate significant parts of the customer relationship to external partners. The risk is turning customer experience into a “distributed system,” difficult to govern coherently.

This leads to the questions guiding the study:

• How is customer experience actually managed today in Italian companies?
• Which phases and decisions have the greatest impact on overall management capability?
• Where are the main gaps between strategic importance and operational performance concentrated?
• Which priorities should guide managers in the coming years?

The four phases of Customer Experience Management

The Commercial Excellence Lab analyzed 362 Italian companies, well distributed by size (employees and revenue) and sector. Respondents were managers deeply involved in customer experience decisions and came from different functions: marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and other business areas. The sample consists of 68% men and 32% women, with a predominance of senior profiles (over 55% are between 45 and 64 years old).

At the core of the research is a structured Customer Experience Management model articulated into four phases: analysis; design; implementation; monitoring.

For each phase, the researchers assessed the importance of decisions (based on their impact on overall performance) and the companies’ self-reported ability to manage them.

Between KPIs and monetization

The first relevant finding concerns the strategic scope. Only 48% of companies manage customer experience exclusively through fully controlled touchpoints; in the remaining 52% of cases, partners, distributors, or third parties are involved. Management capability does not vary significantly as long as control is shared, but it drops sharply when customer experience is entirely delegated to third parties, signaling a governance issue rather than a channel issue.

In the analysis phase, an imbalance emerges: companies are relatively good at measuring customer behaviors and satisfaction ex post, but far less capable of understanding customers’ desires, expectations, and pain and gain points. These analyses, which are highly relevant for guiding innovation, are among the most important and at the same time among the least adequately managed.

Design is another critical area. On average, companies assign 3.4 objectives to their customer experience strategy, but struggle to translate them into concrete results. The most problematic objective is expanding opportunities to sell through different touchpoints: it is perceived as very important, yet shows below-average levels of achievement. In other words, companies manage to make the experience coherent across different customer contact points, but fail to monetize the improvement in that experience.

In the implementation phase, nearly three out of four companies rate cross-functional collaboration as good or excellent.

In monitoring, process KPIs prevail over metrics that are truly customer-based. The average number of indicators used is 4.2, but the research identifies four distinct clusters of companies:

• The Essentials (few objectives and few KPIs): average satisfaction 7.73
• The Measurers (few objectives and many KPIs): 7.39
• The Sophisticated (many objectives and many KPIs): 7.70
• The “If only I could” group (many objectives but few KPIs): 6.83

The least satisfied cluster is the one with the greatest ambition and the weakest measurement capability, confirming a central point of the research: more objectives without adequate KPIs generate organizational frustration and a loss of internal credibility.

Rituals do not generate economic value
 

Improving customer experience means doing things better and in a more integrated way. The design and monitoring phases are where companies perform worst. Investing here yields higher returns than multiplying surveys or touchpoints.

The research suggests several directions:

• strengthening oversight of less-controlled touchpoints,
• reinforcing the analysis of needs and expectations,
• limiting the number of objectives and KPIs while making them coherent and measurable,
• explicitly linking customer experience to project ROI,
• fostering genuine cross-functional collaboration, supported by strong top management sponsorship.

Companies must move from a “well-managed” customer experience to a customer experience that generates measurable economic value. The risk to avoid is that customer experience becomes a self-referential ritual, periodically analyzed through a handful of key indicators but never truly questioned. What is needed is the courage to look at the data, accept potential “cold showers,” and use customer experience as a training ground for continuous improvement.

The results of this research will contribute to the teachings of the program Sales excellence. Idee, metodi e strumenti per ottimizzare la funzione vendite (in Italian), as well as to those of the custom courses run by CEL researchers.

Paolo Guenzi, Paola Caiozzo, Customer Experience Management, quo vadis?.