Customer Experience Is Not a Nice to Have. It Is your Brand.
Customer experience isn’t what you say in your ads. It’s what happens when the shoe breaks, the phone gets stolen, or the system fails.
Customer experience has quietly become one of the most overused and least understood phrases in modern marketing.
Everyone claims to be customer-centric. Every strategy deck says “put the customer first”. Yet customers are more frustrated than ever, loyalty feels increasingly fragile, and brands are still surprised when churn creeps up or reputation takes a hit.
In this episode of Canned, Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill are joined by customer experience specialist Sarah Clearwater, founder and CEO of Reframer, to explore customer experience.
Customer experience isn’t a layer on top of your brand. It is the delivery of your brand promise.
And more importantly, the moments that define brands aren’t when everything works perfectly. They’re the moments when things go sideways.
What customer experience actually is (and what it isn’t)
One of the first myths the conversation tackles is the idea that customer experience is just another department, or a glossy artefact like a journey map that lives on a wall.
Sarah puts it simply:
Customer experience is the practice of making visible how customers actually experience your organisation, end to end.
That means:
From first awareness and marketing messages
Through sales, onboarding, product usage and service
Including cancellations, complaints and edge cases
What it is not:
A replacement for marketing
A single tool or metric like NPS
A one-off workshop or research project
Instead, customer experience acts as the connective tissue. The “glue” that keeps marketing, sales, product, service and technology aligned around the same human reality.
Marketing makes the promise. Experience keeps (or breaks) it.
A recurring theme in the episode is the tension between what brands say and what customers feel.
Marketing’s job is to make promises:
This product will save you time
This service will be easy
This brand will look after you
But those promises are kept or broken elsewhere in the organisation.
When the experience doesn’t match the message, customers don’t blame the process. They blame the brand.
And crucially, people remember broken promises far longer than clever campaigns.
This is why customer experience isn’t a threat to marketing. It’s one of marketing’s most powerful allies.
Why customer experience matters most in commoditised categories
In categories like banking, insurance, telco and B2B services, products are often hard to differentiate. Features converge. Pricing tightens. Switching becomes easier.
What remains?
The experience.
Sarah notes that organisations tend to invest seriously in customer experience when business as usual stops delivering growth. Often this happens when:
They’re trying to reach a new segment or generation
They’re entering a new market or business model
Retention or acquisition metrics start to stall
In these moments, understanding customers deeply isn’t a nice to have. It becomes a resilience strategy.
The reality inside most organisations: silos and blind spots
One of the most relatable parts of the conversation is the honest acknowledgement of how organisations really work.
Marketing attracts the lead.
Sales converts it.
Product delivers it.
Service fixes it when it breaks.
Each team is doing their best. Each team has KPIs. But no one owns the whole journey.
The result?
Handoffs become failure points
Promises get diluted
Customers experience inconsistency
As Ben points out, this is especially painful in B2B, where:
Sales cycles are long
Multiple stakeholders are involved
Buyers are often not the end users
Problems can take months to surface, by which point trust has already eroded.
Why journey mapping still matters (when done properly)
Customer journey mapping gets a bad reputation when it’s treated as a tick-box exercise.
But when done well, it becomes one of the few tools that forces organisations to see themselves from the outside in.
Sarah explains that journey maps help teams:
Step out of org charts and into customer reality
See invisible moments, especially in B2B decision making
Understand where value is created or destroyed
Importantly, journeys are often the only place where conflicting KPIs become visible.
Marketing might be optimising for lead volume.
Sales for readiness to buy.
Customer success for speed to value.
Without a shared view, everyone is “right” and the customer still loses.
Personas over segments: a smarter tool for marketers
One of the most practical takeaways for marketers is the shift from demographic segmentation to behavioural understanding.
Traditional segments often focus on:
Age
Gender
Income
But these factors don’t always explain why people choose, hesitate or leave.
Personas and customer archetypes focus instead on:
Decision making patterns
Motivations and anxieties
Context and constraints
Two customers may look nothing alike demographically, yet behave identically when buying from you.
For marketers, this unlocks:
More relevant messaging
Better alignment with sales
Fewer assumptions disguised as insights
For small teams: start with real conversations
You don’t need a six figure CX platform to improve experience.
For smaller teams or solo marketers, Sarah’s advice is refreshingly grounded:
Don’t ask customers “how was your experience?”
Ask them about specific moments that matter.
Better still, talk to customers who recently cancelled.
Those conversations reveal more than dashboards ever will, if you’re willing to listen and act.
Lip service vs real customer centricity
Many organisations claim to be customer-centric. Fewer can prove it.
A simple test Sarah offers:
Are your biggest decisions informed by customer insight or by internal opinion?
Real customer centricity shows up when:
Strategy is shaped by customer evidence
Investment decisions link back to customer impact
Insights lead to action, not just reports
If insight doesn’t change behaviour, it isn’t insight. It’s decoration.
The ROI question every CFO asks
Customer experience often struggles to justify itself because it feels intangible.
Sarah’s analogy lands hard:
You don’t notice the nails in a house until the storm hits.
The ROI of customer experience shows up in:
Acquisition
Retention
Churn
Conversion
Cost to serve
The work isn’t about measuring everything. It’s about linking experience improvements to the metrics that already matter.
Where great brands really shine: when things go wrong
The most human moment in the episode comes when the hosts share personal brand experiences.
A stolen phone abroad, resolved with calm, empathetic support.
A broken shoe, handled personally and consistently.
A hardware store employee who doesn’t just sell products, but gives confidence.
The common thread?
None of these moments were planned. All of them were stress tests.
Great brands aren’t defined by perfect journeys. They’re defined by how they respond when reality intervenes.
Experience is how strategy becomes real
Customer experience isn’t separate from brand, marketing or strategy.
It’s where all three meet.
When organisations invest in understanding and improving experience, they’re not just fixing friction. They’re building resilience, trust and long term relevance.
And in a world where customers have more choice than ever, that might be the most defensible advantage of all.
Watch, listen, and go deeper
If you want to hear the full conversation, including practical examples and real world stories, watch or listen to this episode of Canned.
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And start mapping the moments where your brand promise is truly tested
Because that’s where your brand is really built.