Creating better customer experiences requires three core corporate capabilities:

• Customer understanding: A company needs systems that allow them to gather information about their customers, and use that information to drive greater understanding of their customers and their needs. They have to gather it, analyze it, communicate their findings across their firm and and take action based on what they learn. 
• An overarching customer experience strategy: This is a way for the company to align the experiences that they deliver with their brand and with their business strategy. Briefly, your business strategy drives your economic engine. That informs your brand, which – when communicated to your customers as a promise – sets expectations of the experience they will receive. Your experience strategies allow you to deliver the experiences your customers expect.  
• Ability to design experiences: A company needs a process for continually designing new customer experiences and improving existing ones. It needs a design framework and an iterative “prototype, test, learn and improve” process for taking the customer understanding they have gleaned and use it to give your customers the experience they desire.

Delivering a better customer experience over time requires five additional skills:

• Processes to support continuous customer experience improvement.
• Technology that aligns with your systems to deliver experience.
• Governance programs in place to help manage the process of customer experience improvement.
• A monitoring function that gives the organization the ability to measure how well it’s doing at delivering the desired experience.
• A culture that’s customer-centric, and aligns rewards with desired actions.