Many organizations, analysts, business advisors and strategists talk about customer experience as a competitive advantage. Many have developed frameworks for looking at experiences customers have with web sites, but most of them use the perspective of “customer satisfaction”.
I would suggest that from a competitive standpoint it might be more useful to analyze the customer experience from a more, dare i say, interactive standpoint, as an exchange of value above and beyond the purchase price. Customers on the web are not just consumers, they are integral parts of an organizations value network, analyze amazon.com from the standpoint of customer satisfaction and you are missing a large part of the picture.
Experience Design is a process that co-creates value with customers/users, and that is where it can contribute most significantly to the competitive advantage of an organization.
Check out:
HBR article called Co-opting Customer Competence by C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy
and
The Future of Marketing Mohan Sawhney
