By Heike Young, Salesforce

The customer experience is greater than the sum of its parts. With the breakneck speed of innovation, devices, and digital tools, many companies haven’t kept up on the experience side. Who owns the customer experience? Marketers are in a prime position to help their companies transform.

On the latest episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, we interviewed Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group and an award-winning author, prominent blogger, and marketing keynote speaker.

Brian is an expert on customer experience. In fact, his new book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, focuses exclusively on experience as part of business. We picked his brain on why customer experience is rising to the spotlight, and what companies can actually do about it, instead of just talking about it.

Check out Brian’s episode of the podcast below, then subscribe on iTunes to get it on your podcast-listening device of choice.

Ready to take action on the customer experience in your own business? Here are a few takeaways and talking points to get you started.

Mobile search and email have overtaken desktop, yet the urgent need for digital transformation hasn’t registered with many companies. To illustrate the importance of micromoments: on average, a customer consults 10–11 content sources before they narrow it down and decide what to buy. Is your content easy to find, everywhere that a customer in a micromoment might look?

Business leaders must think bigger and broader. Take the word “customer” out of “customer experience,” and focus on the experience. People have experiences in every moment of engagement, whether they’re shopping, Googling, getting customer service. Those all add up to the total customer experience. It’s not any one thing.

Digital customers are incredibly different from your old customers. By digital customers, Brian means people who are digital- or mobile-first customers in the majority of their transactions. The top of the funnel is unfolds differently for these people. Yet Brian shared that 75% of companies don’t have a mobile-centric strategy.

Your business strategy must be designed for humans. Increasingly, companies aren’t acting like there’s a person on the other side of the screen. Customer service, product design, marketing, social, and mobile work in different departments, yet they’re all responsible for contributing to that unified customer experience.

Different departments either compete against one another or work toward the same journey. Where does your organization stand?

Get Brian’s podcast episode now on iTunes! Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.