In the grand scheme of the creative industries, customer experience is, arguably, perceived as one of the less ‘sexy’ disciplines. Perhaps it lacks the glory of a 60-second ad, or maybe it’s the challenge of succinctly defining what it is – which inevitably leads to confusing jargon. The Wikipedia page for customer experience offers up the ‘four realms of customer experience’ chart, which includes entertainment, educational, aesthetic and escapist, and does little to clarify matters.

David Yates, the founding partner of a new customer experience practice that’s just been integrated into Uncommon London, agrees that it’s hard to offer a concise expression. “Internally and externally it’s a challenging definition, because it’s any interaction a consumer has with a brand,” he tells CR. “But that obviously also overlaps with what an ad agency would do, and down into customer service, which would be entirely in-house with a client.

“The honest answer is it’s every single touchpoint because it’s all of those things…. The other distinction I find useful is that it’s a real authentic bit of the customer experience as opposed to a PR stunt. So it’s not just the things you’re doing to grab a headline, it’s things that grab a headline because it’s genuinely true to your experience – you’ve created a new service in store, if you’re a physical retailer, or a website that does something different.”