In Memory of an Apostrophe: Is the Customer’s Experience Gone Forever?

The term “customer experience” is searched over a million times a month worldwide, according to Google. A cursory search on Amazon for books brings back more than 6,000 titles on the topic. We’ve even seen the conversation take on a whole different nuance as technology providers argue about who buys, who operates, and who controls customer experience (CX). Is it marketing…but perhaps they own the strategy while service leadership owns technology because they own the conversation? Then what about commerce? Do they control the experience journey while sales owns the transactional systems?

In the decades-long game of corporate culture tug-of-war, not to mention our quest to “own” the customer, we conveniently removed the possessive nature of an experience, erasing the apostrophe that once granted ownership to the customer. We’ve grossly and intentionally misunderstood the difference between our customers’ experiences and a strategy known as customer experience, reducing it all down to categories of technology known amorphously and ambiguously as CX.

Time to Release Experience Back into the Wild

A customer’s experience is the accumulation of reactions to the variety of engagements and interactions that customer will have, over time, with a brand. These moments add up, and the sum of these sometimes emotional, sometimes ambient, and often uneventful moments builds to create a lasting perception that shapes an individual’s attachment to that brand. If a customer has an explosive, heated call with a service agent at their hotel brand of choice, the likelihood of another stay is rescued by the accumulated goodwill, happy memories, and stores of positive exchanges had over the years.

Deplete that reserve too often or with consistency, the balance shifts and new brands have new opportunities to displace legacy memories and build positive experience stores that could chip away at loyalty or brand exclusivity. Only the customer calculates the exchange rate that balances perception and attachment. No technology can manipulate, force, or manage a customer’s experience—that is the sole domain of the technology known as the customer.

CX, on the other hand, is a companywide strategy that orchestrates an organization’s delivery of engagements and experiences purpose-built to establish a durable, profitable relationship with a customer. This companywide team sport has functional groups and centers of excellence that most often represent the front line of successful CX strategy deployments, including sales, service (including digital service desks and contact centers), commerce, and marketing.

Although CX strategy must be played as a companywide team sport, the equipment needs of each player can and should be fit for purpose. In this modern age of open, composable cloud architectures, there is no reason that the core foundational platforms of frontline teams can’t share a collective understanding of a customer’s current relationship with their company, sharing calendars, data, and outcomes. This is even more critical in this age of ever-evolving artificial intelligence (AI) that has seen us race from machine learning-based recommendation engines all the way to fully conversational agentic AI interactions and interfaces for customers and employees.

AI Isn’t a Guaranteed CX Home Run

AI dominated boardroom discussions throughout 2024 as business leaders looked to capitalize on the buzz. As 2025 unfolds, headlines blare news of massive investments being made at a global scale to bolster the digital infrastructure that will be required to continue the innovation advancements across AI, creating a new global race for dominance that rivals any moon landing or deep-space exploration. Almost every business organization has invested in multiple proof-of-concept initiatives with core use cases focused on driving efficiencies and calculating incremental cost savings. Many of these early initiatives targeted customer-focused experience automations spanning core frontline functions, including customer contact and service centers. But many of these projects have been limited experiments that are now proving hard to shift beyond random acts of automation. Early warning signs point to experiments not standing the test of time or being far too limiting, trapped within a siloed function or task.

In Constellation Research’s most recent “State of AI in the Enterprise” study, 92 percent of C-suite leaders surveyed have deployed AI in some form, noting a significant focus and drive for AI utilization. Although 79 percent of executives are focused on AI’s capacity to automate and eliminate manual work for their teams and employees, 58 percent of leaders say they are in a more wait-and-see mode, admitting that what led to the decision to implement AI was a desire to be better prepared for AI “if and when” it emerges as a competitive differentiator in their market. This skepticism could prove to be counterproductive, because 47 percent of these executive leaders are also looking to AI to seek out exponential growth for the organization.

This is especially true of core CX teams including contact center and service functions, which have proven to be the lowest-hanging fruit for AI process and automation makeovers. When asked where AI has been implemented, applications centered on innovation in product design (60 percent) and generalized employee productivity (57 percent), sales and marketing (46 percent), customer service including the contact center (40 percent), and IT (40 percent) topped the list. To measure the success of these program investments, executives rank their top points of return as operational efficiency (76 percent), revenue and growth (73 percent), and cost reduction (52 percent).

In fact, in Constellation Research’s study, 42 percent of respondents admit that although they have deployed AI, they have yet to realize the full value or return from their investments, indicating that while operational efficiency is nice, growth indicators are missing. Notably, only 3 percent of respondents believe their AI investments from the past 12 months have reached their maximum potential.

This clearly shows that investments—especially into key customer-facing points of experience, such as sales, marketing, and service—have yielded immediate results, thanks to efficiency gains and revenue improvements. The challenge for CX executives isn’t in AI’s ability to drive fast wins; it will lie in the durability of growth and whether a given measure truly meets expectations for AI investments. But accelerated growth and success with AI could just lie in admitting a simple truth: It was never our experience to own, and not even AI can change that.

In Defense of the Customer’s Ownership of Experience

By releasing possession of experience back to the customer, we release ourselves and our businesses from the mindset that we’re ranchers forced to herd, brand, and trap livestock known as customers. It brings us back to an age of relationship building, now empowered by AI to act and react in highly contextual and personal ways. We as CX practitioners have a renewed permission to be creative and personal while AI gets personalization executed at scale. We don’t need to erase an apostrophe to fire up our growth engines. 

Liz Miller is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the broad landscape of customer experience strategy and technologies.

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