Customer experience can make or break a business. For today's consumer, it's everything when it comes to loyalty and making purchases. That consumer expects a superior digital customer journey, regardless of which device they use or what exactly the goal of their customer journey is. That's why it's important to constantly map the customer experience within your organization and compare it with that of your competitors through CX benchmarks. But what exactly is CX benchmarking? A smooth, high-quality CX is one of the most important weapons in the battle for the online consumer. Companies with a distinctive CX grew more than twice as fast in revenue between 2016 and 2021 compared to competitors that fell behind, according to research results from McKinsey. Customers of such CX leaders are also willing to spend more money with them and are less likely to switch to a competitor. A superior CX creates loyal customers and at the same time serves as a means to steal customers from competitors. However, CX encompasses much more than just offering a well-functioning webshop or a bug-free app. But what exactly? And isn't CX the same as UX?
CX is more than UX
There is still regular confusion about what CX actually involves, often leading to confusion with user experience (UX). When we talk about UX, we're referring to the experience a consumer has at the moment they use a specific platform, system or app. What precedes that part of the customer journey or what comes after it remains out of consideration. 
UX can therefore be seen as part of CX, which concerns the total experience a customer has with your organization via all available omnichannel touchpoints, both digital and physical. So it's not just about your company website and what consumers can do there, but about the interplay of that website with your app, social media, physical stores and all other channels and touchpoints.
Control over your CX through benchmarks
A fully optimized CX brings a fundamental competitive advantage and ensures that customers want to spend more with you than with someone else. At the same time, a poor CX can cause even the best offering in the market to result in declining market share and thus contraction. Having control over the CX you offer your customers is therefore very valuable. You need to know where you stand, what you're good at and where improvement opportunities lie, to be able to do better than your competitors when it comes to CX. That's why benchmarking is so valuable. With periodic benchmarks, you get a crystal-clear picture of the quality of your CX and its ongoing development. CX benchmarking works in two ways: internal and external.
Internal CX benchmarks
With internal benchmarking, you look at the performance and results of your CX compared to your own past performance and self-imposed targets. You measure whether your CX improves over time or unfortunately deteriorates. This gives you insight into whether changes you implement in your digital customer journeys have the desired effect and whether you achieve your goals with them. Internal CX is valuable, but doesn't tell the whole story. You have an idea of how you perform, but not whether you're doing better than your competitors. So you don't know whether you can win customers from your competitors in the long term, or whether you can expect an exodus of your customers to other parties. External benchmarking is needed for that.
External CX benchmarks
With external benchmarking, you compare your own CX performance with that of your main competitors in your industry. Becoming a CX leader in your market segment means not only that you must continuously improve your CX, but also that you must do so more successfully than your competitors. Your internal benchmarks may show that you're continuously improving, but meanwhile you could still be losing market share. That's because your competitors are improving faster than you are. Also read: Creating the very best website in your market? Think outside-out Consumers today have an increasingly large abundance of choices. Therefore, the importance of external benchmarking is growing. Switching to a competitor is relatively easy now that customer journeys in most industries have been partially or fully digitized. Being overtaken by a competitor that innovates their CX much more effectively can therefore have lightning-fast consequences in the form of declining market share. That's why you don't perform external benchmarks just once, but they form part of an ongoing process. We made an explanatory video about what Customer Experience Benchmarking is:
CX benchmarking as a mirror for your organization
To remain profitable and healthy in the long term, you must stay ahead of your competitors in terms of CX. Continuously conducting both internal and external CX benchmarks is fundamental to this. Without measuring, you can't improve. These benchmarks provide your organization with three concrete advantages:
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Complete vision of your digital customer journeys. Including insight into possible UX and CX improvements that you can't extract from traditional website measurements.
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Reduce customer churn. Customers come on foot but leave on horseback. Benchmarking makes it clear what drives departing customers to switch to a competitor. You can then respond to this.
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Confident decision-making. You have all the necessary data to know for certain that investments actually deliver something.
Good CX benchmarking delivers the ultimate market information and holds up a mirror to your organization. It makes improvement opportunities visible and objectively shows how the company performs compared to the competition. That's knowledge no successful company can do without.
