When it comes to delivering great service, two terms often appear side by side; Customer Experience and Customer Excellence. They sound similar, but they are not the same thing. In fact, understanding their difference can completely change how an organisation approaches service delivery and continuous improvement.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience (CX) is how customers perceive their interactions with your organisation. It is shaped by every touchpoint, from a phone call and website visit to an in-person meeting or online payment. CX is emotional and subjective. It reflects how a customer feels about doing business with you.
A strong customer experience happens when your processes, systems, and people align to make interactions easy, consistent, and positive. It is not just about being friendly; it is about removing friction and delivering outcomes that meet or exceed expectations.
What is Customer Excellence?
Customer Excellence is the next level up. It focuses on how well an organisation delivers on its promise to customers, not just once, but consistently and sustainably. It is built on culture, leadership, and continuous improvement.
If Customer Experience is about perception, Customer Excellence is about performance. It measures how mature your organisation is in understanding customers, solving their problems, and learning from their feedback. Excellence involves embedding customer-centric practices into strategy, operations, and governance.
How are they related?
Customer Experience and Customer Excellence are closely connected. You could say that Customer Experience is the input, and Customer Excellence is the output. Great experiences feed into excellence, and excellence ensures great experiences happen consistently.
Customer Excellence frameworks often include the management of experience as one of their core pillars. In other words, you cannot achieve excellence without first understanding and managing experience.
Is there an overlap?
Absolutely. The two overlap in the areas of customer insight, service delivery, and feedback management. For example, both require good listening, empathy, and process design. The difference is that CX focuses on the moment of truth — the direct interaction — while Customer Excellence looks at the system behind it that enables quality and consistency.
Customer Experience is part of the broader concept of Customer Excellence. Excellence covers everything that ensures a customer’s experience is continually improving, including staff capability, leadership commitment, technology, and performance measurement.
How are these terms used in customer service environments?
In customer service teams, Customer Experience usually refers to how staff interact with customers, the service approach, tone, communication style, accessibility, and resolution quality.
Customer Excellence, on the other hand, often appears in organisational strategies, performance frameworks, and quality programmes. It is about setting standards, monitoring outcomes, and building capability across the organisation.
Can they be used interchangeably?
While they are related, using them interchangeably can cause confusion. Talking about “Customer Excellence” when you actually mean “Customer Experience” can make it sound like you are focusing on internal quality rather than the customer’s perspective — and vice versa. Each term has its place and should be used with intent.
- Use Customer Experience when talking about the customer’s journey, interactions, or satisfaction.
- Use Customer Excellence when talking about the organisation’s maturity, systems, and commitment to delivering great service consistently.
Both should be part of the same story. Teams can use CX metrics (like customer satisfaction or effort scores) to measure progress towards Customer Excellence goals.
Are they commonly misused?
Organisations sometimes use Customer Excellence as a buzzword to describe “good service” when what they actually mean is a positive Customer Experience. The misuse happens because both concepts are aspirational and sound impressive. But true excellence requires structure, ownership, and measurement — not just goodwill.
Understanding the difference helps organisations focus their efforts. Customer Experience is about designing moments that delight. Customer Excellence is about building a culture and system that ensures those moments happen every time.
In short, Customer Experience is what the customer feels and Customer Excellence is how you make that feeling possible.