What is customer experience (CX)?

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Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all the interactions a person has with a brand throughout the entire buyer’s journey. The more positive interactions someone has, the more favorable their overall perception of the brand. Every customer touchpoint has an impact on CX, from marketing to product use to customer service. 

Importantly, CX isn’t just about transactions. It’s about how your brand personalizes interactions as customers browse, buy, and even return items. A significant part of that full-circle personalization means making it easy, and even fun, for customers to self-serve. 

For example, someone may decide to buy a product from your brand after seeing a YouTube ad, hearing another ad on a podcast, subscribing to your newsletter, browsing certain product categories on your website, then getting a recommendation from a friend. 

After they order the product, they may realize they want it in another color. Through a self-serve hub, they can make an easy switch through an AI customer agent before it ships—and get complementary recommendations based on previous browsing behavior, all from the same place.

All of these customer touchpoints, from awareness to post-purchase, make up the CX.

Why customer experience (CX) matters

According to Klaviyo’s latest state of B2C marketing report, 73% of marketers report rising customer acquisition costs (CACs) in 2025. At the same time, customer expectations are the highest they’ve ever been—74% of customers expect personalized brand experiences in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report. 

This places a lot of pressure on brands to reduce their acquisition costs by not only improving the brand experience across the entire customer lifecycle, but also turning customer service into a revenue driver.  

As a solution, more brands are creating win-win exchanges that are folded into the customer service experience. Through self-serve hubs, they’re offering customers the convenience of tracking orders, managing returns, and getting help in one place—all while collecting more customer data they can use to personalize future brand interactions. 

After launching a self-service customer hub, jewelry brand Caitlyn Minimalist saw a 90% YoY drop in traffic to their static Shopify Accounts page. That means fewer customers are leaving their shopping journey to check their order status—they’re managing everything in the hub instead.

Key features of a strong customer experience (CX)

A strong customer experience relies on features that give customers control and personalization while driving business value, such as:

  • Self-service management: Customers can track orders, initiate returns, and update account information in one place. This reduces friction and provides immediate answers so that customers don’t have to wait around for support agents.
  • Personalized offerings: When customers log in to their self-serve hub, they see dynamic product recommendations, exclusive offers, and saved wishlist items guided by their own history and preferences. Their shopping experience feels more unique because it’s guided by their own history and preferences.
  • Omnichannel support options: If a customer needs help with something, they can reach out via email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, or web chat for assistance solving their problem.

How to personalize the customer experience (CX)

Personalizing the customer experience first means functionally connecting marketing and customer service efforts. 

This link—between your data infrastructure, your marketing automation platform, and your customer service hub—is the foundation on which a full-funnel, personalized CX rests. 

When these core functions operate from a single source of truth, you can personalize the CX by:

  • Offering product-specific coupons after a return
  • Creating on-site experiences specific to past purchase behavior
  • Recommending products based on wishlisted items
  • Making it easy to manage subscriptions and re-orders through your website
  • Starting AI and customer service chats with full customer insight
  • Rewarding repeat purchases and referrals with personalized on-site offers

All of these interactions stem from that win-win exchange we mentioned earlier: the customer is able to self-serve on-site, while your brand is able to encourage repeat purchases in a way that’s reflective of that customer’s personal experience.

How to measure customer experience (CX)

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Given that customer experience is all-encompassing and holistic, there are a lot of ways to measure it. Here are just a few of the anchor metrics to look to when you’re trying to improve CX:

  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT measures how satisfied customers are after a brand interaction or a purchase. You typically collect it through post-interaction surveys. 
  • Net promoter score (NPS): NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. This is a great way to measure overall customer sentiment, although you need more information to assess reasons behind low or high scores.
  • Customer effort score (CES): CES measures the ease or difficulty of customer interactions with a brand. A high score indicates an easy experience, whereas a low score indicates a difficult experience. 
  • Self-service engagement rates: This metric measures how many of your customers are using the self-serve options you provide them to solve their own problems, without getting your support team involved. 
  • Support ticket volume: This metric tells you how often customers need help from your support team to solve a problem. For evidence of strong CX (and strong internal efficiencies), look for increasing self-service engagement rates alongside declining support ticket volume. 
  • Average order value: This metric tells you how much money the average customer spends on a single purchase from your store. Track it alongside the other metrics listed here to understand the correlation between CX and revenue.

In addition to these CX-specific quantitative metrics, you should also collect qualitative feedback through customer reviews and social media listening. This approach can do a better job of illustrating the quality of customer interactions as a whole, especially when you analyze the data for trends.

Klaviyo Customer Hub shifts CX from external account pages to a branded, personalized, on-site experience—keeping shoppers logged in and check-out ready. As a data-gathering engine, the hub also feeds future personalization efforts. Sign up to get started today.