Customer Experience might be the “new Quality” (as in: the new Holy Grail everybody is pursuing), and I’ve heard several speakers attack the issue at the just concluded Telecoms CRM & User Experience Forum here in Prague.

It differs from Quality in one important aspect, though.

Quality is a characteristics of the product. Once you nail it down, you can probably keep the unknowables in check. You’ve fixed the fundamentals: the product works as advertised.

Customer exeperience is defined and perceived by the customer. In a large retail environment, this means – if you aggregate similar experiences – still a huge variety of scores.

Which is why a think a technocratic approach to this isn’t going to yield a result similar to that achieved in the hunt for Quality.

It’s quite a different game here.