The dominant assumption in Customer Experience is linear: invest more, get more. Better journeys produce better outcomes. More sophisticated tools produce better measurement. And once the measurement is right, the business case will follow.

This assumption is wrong — not at the margins, but structurally. And until organisations understand why, they will keep repeating the same pattern: strong belief in CX, inconsistent investment, weak evidence, and eventual retreat under financial pressure.

CX Elasticity is the framework that explains why. It is grounded in twelve in-depth expert interviews across four different organisations - a three-round Delphi study with senior practitioners, and a quantitative survey of 316 CX, sales, and marketing professionals. Co-developed with Prof. Dr. Phil Klaus.

What the research found is not one problem but two — and the interaction between them is the real explanation for why CX remains so hard to defend.

The elastic band

Customer Experience is the accumulated sum of promise made minus promise delivered. That formulation — which emerged independently from multiple practitioners in the research — has one important advantage over more abstract definitions: it captures the relational, expectation-dependent nature of experience. The same absolute level of service quality can represent over-delivery for one customer and under-delivery for another, depending on what was communicated upfront.

The elastic band metaphor follows from this: the relationship between CX quality and financial outcomes behaves like a tension system. When the promise-delivery gap is positive, the band stretches — loyalty builds, advocacy grows, switching intention falls, pricing power strengthens. When the gap is negative, the band contracts — and the contraction is not the mirror image of the expansion.

This is the central empirical finding of the research: negative CX experiences generate disproportionately stronger financial consequences than equivalent positive improvements. Customers weight bad service moments more heavily than good ones in forming their decisions, intentions, and long-term behaviour. The band snaps faster than it stretches.

More later

I will publish more later when the paper is published

→ Read other publications
→ Experience Capitalism — the paradigm that follows
→ What this means for executive decision-making