Welcome - or hopefully welcome back - to my series covering the metrics you can use to see the link between each step of your customer experience and your organization's business performance.

Last week I shared with you five metrics you can monitor to see how your business is performing during the first step of the customer experience: triggering a need.

One of the most popular series I've run here on the Customer Experience for Profit blog is what readers call "the steps series." There I defined the six steps common to any customer experience, from both the customer's point of view and from an organization's point of view.

Recently, over on the Deliver Bliss blog penned by wise man Tim Sanchez, a discussion erupted over the question: What is the definition of customer experience?

Apple is a company long renowned for its customer experience, and for inventing products that fill needs customer didn't even realize they had. Customers have rewarded Jobs and his crew for this. As an example, did you notice that the company sold 3 million iPads in 80 days?  Unlike many CEO's, Jobs had the pleasure of gushing a bit about second quarter financial peformance recently: “We’re thrilled to report our best non-holiday quarter ever, with revenues up 49 percent and profits up 90 percent,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve launched our revolutionary new iPad and users are loving it, and we have several more extraordinary products in the pipeline for this year.”

I'm a Clayton Christensen fan.  Highly revered for coining the phrase disruptive innovation and championing the theory, Christensen has guided product and business strategy decisions since his Innovator's Dilemma was published in 2003. Quickly, he defines disruptive innovation as: "A process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors."

Have you ever noticed that when you put a single event or idea into a larger context, its impact becomes more clear? Time can be just the context you need to make better choices about your customer experience.

Here we are at the sixth and final step common to any customer experience. Earlier, we covered the triggering need, earning consideration, demonstrating how you solve the problem, affirming your customers decision, and delivering on your promise. Today we're talking about anticipating your customers' needs as they evolve.

We've reached Step 5 in the six steps common to any customer experience. So far we’ve covered the triggering need, earning consideration, demonstrating how you solve the problem, and affirming your customers decision. Today, we're talking about problems solved.