If you’re old enough to have worked through Total Quality Management’s (TQM) heydays in the 1980s and 1990s, there’s a good chance you remember an interesting paradox when it came to measuring customer satisfaction: If your customers had a problem that you fixed for them, their total customer lifespan could grow enormously. The trouble, of course, was that if you didn’t know a customer was having a problem, that customer was highly vulnerable to being snatched up by competitors.

Though TQM is but a memory for most, the “problem paradox” looms larger than ever. In today’s market, 25 percent of customers will switch providers after just one negative experience. “Experience” is the operative word here. So much focus these days is on the ever-elusive—if undeniably vital—idea of mastering the “customer experience.”

Customer experience is larger than customer touchpoints in that it takes into account both direct experiences and customer journeys with your organization.

Here are some examples:

As a solutions provider, you’re likely familiar with the concepts of customer experience at least to an extent since many of your technology solutions promise to simplify (read: improve) customer experiences. Unified communications (UC), call centers, cloud services, automatic backup and recovery—all of these help your clients improve the experiences of their customers.

But what about the experiences customers’ have with your organization: Do they measure up? If you’re unsure, consider the following:

The bottom line is the idea of “customer experience,” like all concepts that catch fire, has been both overhyped AND underleveraged. This is largely because most business managers don’t have the tools to properly address it. We’re here to provide you some knowledge that will help you to tackle this tricky issue.