The term Customer Experience (CX) refers to the customer's experience and is a concept that is becoming increasingly important.


Initially, it was limited to post-purchase commitments and was viewed as a cost of doing business. However, it's now understood to be part of the customer journey.

It has moved from the back rooms of customer service to the forefront, originating from disparate sources such as call center technology and marketing analytics.

The history of CX begins with a critical practice: market research, which emerged in the 1920s as a way to test and improve advertising.

Psychologists like Dan Starch and George Gallup advanced this emerging field by applying scientific principles. However, it was after the post-World War II consumerism boom that market research began to emerge as a distinct field truly.

With roots in advertising and marketing, the demand for market research expanded into almost every sector by the 1970s.

This was the "golden age" for traditional market research firms, focusing on customer satisfaction.

As a result, people like Bradley Gale, author of Managing Customer Value, and other contemporaries were shifting the discussion around value and customer satisfaction.

CVM, or Customer Value Management, is a methodology for creating value by managing the customer base to minimize risk and ensure an adequate return from each segment.

Customer Value Management (CVM) expanded the field from merely examining post-purchase aspects to considering quality, pricing, communication, and other elements of the experience that drive customer value. In the early days, customer experience research was mainly conducted via telephone or direct mail. However, with the advent and evolution of the internet, research firms began transitioning to outbound email and created custom reporting portals.

As a result, clients quickly became interested in these web reporting sites, and research firms, which were used to handling ad hoc requests, gladly embraced them. This practice led to each client having their own highly personalized reporting website.

In 2001, Esteban Kolsky, then a Gartner analyst, began writing about customer feedback systems, which became known as Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM). A few years later, in the mid-2000s, several tech companies emerged in Silicon Valley, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Toronto, and parts of Europe.

Call centers were places where customer satisfaction feedback systems took root and flourished.

Companies like ResponseTek and others recognized this need and offered a platform that could handle the complexities of systems with many agents and constantly changing organizational hierarchies. It was only a matter of time before call center software companies designed their EFM platforms.