Customer Experience & Marketing: Why CX is the Most Important Marketing KPI Right Now

Customer experience and marketing go hand in hand. Every marketing effort should meet customer wants and needs. Fluent Support reported that 89% of companies will compete primarily on customer experience by 2025. Brands can no longer rely solely on great products and strong marketing; they must also ensure a consistently positive customer experience to stay competitive.

Marketing is pivotal in shaping, communicating, and managing the customer experience. This article explores the intersection of customer experience and marketing, examines who holds responsibility for CX, and outlines marketing best practices that support a cohesive and compelling customer experience strategy.

Customer Experience and Marketing

Customer experience encompasses a customer’s overall perception based on their interactions with a company across various touchpoints. As the marketing team often leads efforts in developing buyer personas, analyzing customer data, and engaging with potential customers, it plays a vital role in shaping this experience. To ensure consistency and quality, marketing must collaborate closely with sales and customer service, aligning organizational efforts to deliver a seamless and positive customer journey.

The Importance of Customer Experience

Creating experiences that truly resonate with customers requires a strategic, proactive, and comprehensive approach that spans the entire customer journey and lifecycle.

According to Rightpoint, the foundations of a practical customer experience (CX) strategy include customer-centric thinking, a deep understanding of customer needs, journey mapping, cross-functional collaboration, continuous feedback, and employee empowerment.

Customer experience extends well beyond the point of sale. Interactions through service and support after a purchase often present some of the strongest opportunities to build lasting customer loyalty.

Models like HubSpot’s Flywheel highlight how organizations can thrive by placing customer experience at the center of their strategy. In this approach, the “delight” phase fuels the “attract” phase, as satisfied customers often share their positive experiences with others, making word-of-mouth one of the most influential drivers of new customer acquisition.

Why Customer Experience and Marketing Must Work Together

There is often a question of whether customer experience falls under the scope of marketing. While it has traditionally been viewed as a focus for sales and service teams, integrating customer experience into marketing efforts has proven highly impactful.

1. Brand Promise and Follow-Through

   Marketing is responsible for shaping brand messaging and setting expectations through strategic communication. When customer experience aligns with those promises, it strengthens brand authenticity and builds trust. Delivering on these expectations reinforces transparency and fosters long-term loyalty.

2. The Customer Journey

   The customer journey begins with marketing and continues through every touchpoint of the customer experience. These stages are interconnected. While marketing creates awareness and drives acquisition, customer experience supports retention by ensuring consistent and satisfying interactions beyond the initial engagement.

3. Revenue Growth

   Organizations integrating customer experience as a core marketing strategy often experience significantly higher revenue growth. Research shows that businesses aligning CX with marketing initiatives grow faster than those not prioritizing the customer experience.

4. Customer Loyalty

   Positive experiences contribute directly to customer loyalty. Brands that deliver strong support and engagement see higher retention rates. Moreover, satisfied customers are likelier to become brand advocates, sharing their experiences and influencing others through word-of-mouth recommendations.

5. Hyper-Personalization

   With technological advancements, marketing can leverage data and AI to understand better and predict customer behavior. This enables the delivery of highly personalized experiences, making interactions more relevant and efficient. Such efforts reduce customer friction and enhance overall satisfaction, tying marketing and customer experience closer together.

Who Owns Customer Experience?

Customer experience is not the responsibility of a single person or department. Instead, it should be a shared priority across the organization, with each team contributing differently.

While some companies appoint a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to oversee customer experience efforts, this role is not yet standard across all industries. As a result, customer experience is often managed collaboratively by departments such as marketing, sales, and operations.

The rise of digital marketing has equipped marketers to engage with customers at a more personalized level across multiple touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. As a result, customer experience has become increasingly crucial to the success of marketing strategies.

Although experience delivery involves the whole organization, marketing is often uniquely positioned to capture, analyze, and represent customer insights. By using data to identify trends and pain points, marketing can help unify cross-functional teams and reduce silos, which is essential for maintaining a consistent and compelling customer experience.

1. Listen to Customers at Scale and Share Their Insights

Conversational Data:

To create marketing that resonates, teams must understand customer experience through data analytics and the interpretation of conversational data. This data isn’t just used for targeting campaigns — it also plays a significant role in refining and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Segmentation:
Digital marketing automation platforms enable organizations to collect and respond to data efficiently. By leveraging information such as customer behavior, preferences, and history, marketers can build targeted segments and use those insights to tailor experiences that meet specific customer needs.

KPIs:
Key performance indicators including conversion rate, churn rate, retention rate, and customer satisfaction scores should be clearly defined, consistently monitored, and made accessible to all relevant teams. These shared insights are crucial for identifying opportunities, measuring progress, and fostering a culture where delivering an outstanding customer experience is everyone’s responsibility.

2. Know the Voice of the Customer

Direct feedback from customers is essential for improving and personalizing experiences. Traditional methods like satisfaction surveys, interviews, and focus groups remain important tools in capturing the voice of the customer and evaluating the overall experience.

Today, digital tools offer additional ways to gather feedback in real time. These include social listening platforms, live chat interactions, and web analytics, all of which help keep organizations connected to customer sentiments as they happen.

Feedback can also come from frontline observations, sales team reports, or service logs. Regardless of the method, using customer journey or experience maps ensures feedback reflects the full experience rather than isolated touchpoints.

Templates for journey mapping, such as those available from various platforms, help businesses visualize customer engagement across different stages — from lead nurturing to post-sale interactions — and guide marketing teams in viewing the customer experience from the buyer’s perspective.

3. Collaborate Cross-Functionally to Foster Change

In many organizations, marketing teams focus on lead generation and awareness but have limited involvement after handing over qualified leads to sales. This siloed approach can create inconsistent customer experiences.

Instead, insights gathered from listening at scale should be shared across departments to support more customer-centric business processes. When marketing provides data-driven customer insights, teams gain a common foundation to work collaboratively on improvements.

Marketing can further support customer experience by producing meaningful content tailored to each buyer journey stage and identifying audience segments that align with specific needs or goals.

Moreover, the impact of listening at scale becomes more powerful when insights are used to remove friction points, solve customer challenges, and reimagine internal processes. Cross-functional workshops or brainstorming sessions effectively encourage collaboration and secure organizational buy-in for customer-first changes.

To sustain momentum and earn executive support, teams should demonstrate the return on investment from improving the customer experience. Metrics like satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Score (NPS), churn rates, resolution times, and conversion rates can be used to measure and communicate impact.

4. Invest in Automation

To deliver a seamless and timely customer experience, investing in both marketing and service automation is essential. Automation enables businesses to engage customers with the right information at the right time, helping to streamline touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

One of the most critical benefits of automation is reducing response times. While the average customer service chat response time is approximately two minutes, customers often expect a reply within 45 seconds or less. Automated workflows help meet and exceed these expectations, increasing satisfaction and responsiveness.

Marketing automation enhances customer experience and is vital for lead generation and nurturing. Platforms that integrate marketing and service tools allow for a connected and consistent customer journey—from initial contact to post-purchase support.

With access to shared customer data, marketing and service teams can work together. Marketing teams gain insights into common customer concerns to refine messaging, while service teams can leverage marketing data, such as customer profiles and engagement history, to deliver more personalized support.

This synergy between automation tools and shared insights enables organizations to break down departmental silos, create cohesive strategies, and consistently prioritize the customer across all interactions. Ultimately, automation helps build a stronger, more responsive, and more customer-focused business.

Conclusion: Making Customer Experience a Core Marketing Strategy

Customer experience is no longer just the responsibility of service or sales—it’s a vital component of modern marketing. From the first brand interaction to long-term retention, marketing teams play a pivotal role in shaping and improving customers’ feelings at every touchpoint.

By aligning efforts across departments, listening to customer feedback at scale, investing in automation, and using data-driven insights, organizations can deliver more than just a product or service; they can deliver memorable experiences. When customer experience becomes a shared goal across teams, businesses boost loyalty and retention and drive sustainable growth.

In today’s competitive landscape, companies that put customer experience at the heart of their marketing strategy don’t just stand out—they stay ahead.