Here’s Why Your Customer Experience Needs an Experience Membrane

If you think about it, there’s truly nothing more important than the experience your customers have with your app and brand. Provide a satisfying, even delightful experience, and your customers will be more likely to sign up, shop, stream, or spend — and ultimately convert and become loyal, lasting customers. Provide a poor experience and every aspect of your business becomes that much more challenging.  
Gartner® has been doing a deep dive into many aspects of the customer experience (CX). We’ve been making their research available to you, to help support your efforts to engage and retain your users. Their latest report is available below. 

In this report, Gartner outlines the challenges many enterprises face in optimizing their customer experience. These challenges include a lack of a 360-degree view of customers, a lack of CX maturity that’s cross-functional and guided by shared principles, and the ever-dreaded siloed data. 

The Experience Membrane

But what is the experience membrane? The ‘membrane’ is defined as “where the customer meets the organization. It is what the customer experiences and what defines the customer experience.”
Elements of a membrane include:

• Interaction principles that will help deliver an empathic and appropriate customer interaction while also protecting the customer from internal organizational dysfunction
• A customer-centric cross-functional team that designs the interaction principles based on empathy and with the customer at the core
• The membrane design brings together functional silos and reconciles possible channel conflicts and competing functional objectives before they are exposed to the customer, thus protecting the customer from the organization [S1] 

But, when thinking about the membrane and its critical role, the details of every single interaction possibility can be overwhelming. This can cause analysis paralysis and abandonment of the high-level goal — getting started. 
Identifying the critical steps of whom to involve and what to do or what not to do will be based on putting the customer first. What should you do that will be just enough? Organizations will need to examine all relevant data signals to see if anything should be done either in a positive or negative situation. 
The Gartner model suggests starting by creating categories of interactions, and then using the business capabilities to increase the scale. These categories include: 

• Organizing customer-centric cross-functional teams
• Developing interaction principles by focusing on business capabilities
• Creating data-driven models and profiles
• Creating emotional connections with a customer-centric culture
• Determining how you measure success

How to analyze and accomplish each of the above processes is explained in detail in the report, and real-life examples help to further your understanding of each interaction. 
The report also provides key recommendations and the kinds of positive outcomes that could occur once you have applied an experience membrane to your own CX CORE model (which stands for customers, organization, relationships, experience).
Learn more about the Gartner experience membrane and how it can help improve how your business interacts with your customers, based on the customer’s stage, the customer’s preferences, and the type of interaction.

Gartner, Your Customer Experience Needs an Experience Membrane — Here’s How to Get Started, Melissa Hilbert, Don Scheibenreif, Mike Lowndes, Kathy Ross, Maria Marino, Sandy Shen, Marcus Blosch, 12 May 2022.
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