For years, experience management (XM) has focused on interactions: the moment someone makes a purchase, calls support, or navigates a digital journey. But today, that moment-based approach isn’t enough. Exceptional experiences aren’t created midstream, they're built long before a customer ever walks through the door, clicks the link, or picks up the phone.That’s where experience design comes in.
It’s a shift in how we think about experience. Instead of reacting to what already happened, it starts at the beginning with the decisions that shape the customer journey before it ever begins.
What is experience design?
Experience design is where XM truly starts. It’s when brands decide what to offer, how to deliver it, and how to deliver it.
These are strategic, upstream decisions. They include things like:
- New product or service development
- Menu and pricing design
- Marketing and promotion planning
- Location layout or digital UX flow
- Operational processes like drive-thru design or call center scripting
- Loyalty programs and customer engagement structures
In many organizations, these decisions have traditionally lived in brand or marketing teams, sometimes informed by market research, but not always designed with XM in mind. That’s the gap.
Great experiences aren’t just measured, they’re built
Most XM strategies are still focused on measuring what happens after an interaction. That kind of reactive model has its place, but it’s no longer enough to move the needle. If brands want to deliver truly differentiated experiences, they need to be involved in shaping the journey before it begins.
This means embedding XM into product and service planning. It means using insights to shape menus, promotions, and location layouts. It means ensuring the systems that employees rely on are designed with both efficiency and satisfaction in mind.
What isn't experience design?
To fully understand the concept, it helps to clarify what it’s not.
Experience design isn't a moment of interaction. It’s not when someone clicks “Buy Now,” calls customer support, or completes a survey. Those moments are important, but they’re reaction points. They reflect how well (or poorly) your decisions are playing out in real time. By then, the core experience has already been developed and any changes you make are adjustments after the fact.
It’s also not just about measuring satisfaction or closing the loop on a complaint. These reactive strategies are part of XM, but they operate downstream. They tell you how someone felt after engaging with your brand, not whether the experience was created to meet their needs in the first place.
Here’s what falls outside the scope of experience design:
- Responding to customer issues after a launch
- Updating scripts or retraining staff after complaints arise
- Running NPS surveys post-interaction
- Tuning UI after users struggle with a new feature
- Fixing a loyalty program that didn’t resonate
These are all important, but they come too late to define the experience. They help you repair or optimize what’s already built, not build something better from the start. If you're only looking at what happens after launch, you're missing your biggest opportunity to influence what matters most.
Why experience design matters now
Today’s customer expectations are higher than ever, and harder to meet when you're only reacting to feedback. Real experience transformation is proactive.
By planning with the customer in mind from the beginning, brands can:
- Eliminate friction before it starts
- Deliver more personalized, relevant experiences
- Avoid costly missteps that erode loyalty
- Accelerate the pace of improvement
And there’s urgency behind the shift. In 2024, just 7% of consumers said their experiences had improved. Meanwhile, 55% said their experiences had gotten worse. One of the top reasons? Brands don’t understand their needs.
That’s not a problem brands solve at the call center. It has to be addressed when first designing experiences.
Build smarter from the start with always-on communities
To consistently deliver experiences that reflect your brand promise, you need more than one-off insights, you need ongoing input from the people who matter most. That’s where always-on customer communities come in.
These communities give brands a direct line to their audiences, making it possible to test ideas, gather concept feedback, and even co-create experiences from the beginning. When you involve your customers and employees early, you’re not just collecting feedback—you’re inviting collaboration. And when people feel like they’ve helped build something, they’re far more likely to support and advocate for it.
In fact, according to research from Bulbshare from SMG, 86% of consumers say they’re more likely to trust and stay loyal to brands that invite them to co-create. It's not just about making people feel heard, it's about making them part of the process. And that kind of inclusion builds lasting loyalty.
Always-on communities also help brands stay grounded in real customer and employee needs, preferences, and values. Through digital platforms, surveys, and feedback forums, you can make brand decisions that are more relevant, more resonant, and more impactful long before launch.
Looking ahead: Where experience design connects to BX, CX, and EX
Experience design isn’t just about ensuring product-market fit, it’s about staying nimble in a constantly shifting landscape. By creating experiences with XM in mind, brands can stay close with consumers and employees and adapt quickly to changing preferences, behaviors, and trends. It’s where personalization begins, as early insights help teams understand what different customer and employee segments want and how to design experiences that meet those needs from the start.
Instead of reacting after the fact, brands can proactively shape offerings, messaging, and service models to be more effective, all because they started where it matters most.
Designing great experiences sits at the intersection of BX, CX, and EX:
- In brand experience, it’s about ensuring your identity and values show up consistently, from new offerings to the way promotions are structured.
- In customer experience, it’s about removing friction, creating relevance, and increasing loyalty, all before a customer ever hits a snag.
- In employee experience, it’s about involving your people in shaping the processes and tools they use, because they often know your customers best.
We’ll dig into each of these areas in upcoming posts, but it all starts here: Experience isn’t just what happens at the point of interaction.
It’s what you design from the beginning.
Learn how to bring experience design into your XM strategy, and why it’s key to building loyalty, removing friction, and driving real differentiation.
