Customer experience (CX) refers to the cognitive, emotional, sensory, and behavioral responses of a customer during all stages of interaction with a product or service, including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.

Different dimensions of customer experience include senses, emotions, feelings, perceptions, cognitive evaluations, involvement, memories, as well as spiritual components, and behavioral intentions. The pre-consumption anticipation experience can be described as the amount of pleasure or displeasure received from savoring future events, while the remembered experience is related to a recollection of memories about previous events and experiences of a product or service.

According to Forrester Research (via Fast Company), the foundational elements of a remarkable customer experience consist of six key disciplines, beginning with strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance and culture. A company's ability to deliver an experience that sets it apart in the eyes of its customers will increase the amount of consumer spending with the company and inspire loyalty to its brand. According to Jessica Sebor, "Loyalty is now driven primarily by a company's interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs".

Barbara E. Kahn, Wharton's Professor of Marketing, has established an evolutional approach to customer experience as the third of four stages of any company in terms of its customer centricity maturity. These progressive phases are:

In today's competitive climate, more than just low prices and innovative products are required to survive in the retail business. Customer experience involves every point of contact you have with a customer and the interactions with the products or services of the business. Customer experience has emerged as a vital strategy for all retail businesses that are facing competition. According to Holbrook & Hirschman studies (1982) customer experience can be defined as a whole event that a customer comes into contact with when interacting with a certain business. This experience often affects the emotions of the customer. The whole experience occurs when the interaction takes place through the stimulation of goods and services consumed.

In 1994 Steve Haeckel and Lou Carbone further refined the original concept and collaborated on a seminal early article on experience management, titled "Engineering Customer Experiences", where they defined experience as "the 'take-away' impression formed by people's encounters with products, services and businesses — a perception produced when humans consolidate sensory information." They argued that the new approach must focus on total experience as the key customer value proposition.

The type of experience seen through a marketing perspective is put forward by Pine & Gilmore which they state that an experience can be unique which may mean different individuals will not have the same level of experience that may not be memorable to the person, therefore, it won't be remembered over a period of time. Certain types of experiences may involve different aspects of the individual person such as emotional, physical, intellectual or even spiritual.

Customer experience is the stimulation a company creates for the senses of the consumers, this means that the companies and that particular brand can control the stimuli that they have given to the consumer's senses which the companies can then control the consumers' reaction resulting from the stimulation process, giving more acquisition of the customer experience as expected by company.