One afternoon in the spring of 2010, a colleague and I ducked into a fruit smoothie place in Manhattan. We had just finished a meeting and were halfway back to our hotel, put off by record breaking 95 degree heat and humidity on an afternoon in April. I settled in, opened my email and found a note from Aimee Lucas.

I recently had the outstanding opportunity to lead a Webinar for MarketingProfs (transparency alert: I blog for the MarketingProfs Daily Fix regularly) members on how to strengthen customer experience using four key social media platforms. For an hour-and-a-half we discussed where customers are in their experience online, what customers expect from brands on social platforms and 10 tips you can use to strengthen your customer’s experience using four social media platforms (blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube).

This is by no means meant as a panacea. If only it were so easy to transform a customer experience by implementing just five simple tips --voila! Our work here would be done. That certainly isn't the case. As you know, every customer experience is a chronological process customers pass through, and there's always room for improvement.

Let's say your CEO just tapped you on the shoulder and asked you to take on a new responsibility: "We need you to drive customer experience strategy and actions for our organization. Define the strategy. Strengthen our customer experience. Differentiate us in the marketplace. Will you do that?"

It’s Friday afternoon as I type this, and I’m shaking my head that I have been away from my blog for a while. I've had some great adventure of late. Right now I’m thinking about the 3 days I was in Washington, D.C. with 175 other women health care executives at one of my favorite events of the year: The Women Business Leaders Summit. We collaborated on business challenges. We laughed. We learned. I flew back to the Twin Cities inspired, filled with great ideas and more than a few new business connections.

Over coffee a few days ago, I got to listen as a client leader reflected on his organization's journey using customer experience to drive performance. It was a fun conversation, because over the last two years a groundswell of positive change has occurred. Satisfaction is up. Dollars have been freed because activity that customers didn't value was purged. And the organization has been able to sustain what was already heady growth.

Doctors. Teenagers. IT managers. There are infinite kinds of customers. Some have job titles; some have Facebook walls. Their needs are as infinitely variable as are their demographic or behavioral profiles. Because they - and their needs - are unique, their customer experiences are infinitely variable too.

It may seem to go against everything you learned in business school, but making your customers happy isn’t the same as delivering a good customer experience.

Customer studies and statistics. The web is full of them. You’ve seen them, right? You’ve probably seen this stat from Nielsen: “90 percent of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know and 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online.”