Experience Strategy Consulting

Experience strategy consulting is the work of deciding which customer interactions a company should build, who else takes part in them, what each one leaves behind for the next, and how the whole system is judged in financial terms. It sits above experience design, which starts once those decisions have been made. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including Takeda, Schindler and PPG.

This page is the hub for the group: why most experience programs improve moments without improving the business, what the work involves, how to judge a firm doing it, and which of our four capabilities to start with. It is written for companies that have already mapped the customer journey, fixed the obvious friction, and found the numbers barely moved. The group sits inside our brand, innovation and experience practice.

• Since 1999brand, innovation and experience strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• The Interaction Fieldwritten by our founder

When companies bring us in

Nobody asks for an experience strategy. They ask about a number that will not move. These are the five situations we hear most often:

• The scores went up and the economics did not. Satisfaction and effort metrics improved, churn and price realization did not, and the board has started asking what the program bought.
• The journey map is done and nobody knows what to do with it. You have the pain points and the prioritized fix list. What you do not have is a decision about which parts of the path should exist at all.
• Most of the experience happens outside your walls. Partners, resellers, marketplaces, communities and now models answer for you, and your plan covers only the channels you own.
• Two experience models are running side by side after an acquisition. Neither can absorb the other, and picking one by headcount is not a strategy.
• The experience is about to become adaptive and the proposition is not settled. Personalization and agents are being switched on over a system nobody has agreed the shape of.

The buyer is usually a Chief Customer Officer, CMO, COO or chief digital officer. The CFO matters more than most firms admit: an experience investment case that only the customer function signs will not survive the next budget round.

Why most experience work stops improving the business

The standard program is a journey map, a set of pain points and a prioritized fix list. That is a reasonable diagnostic and a poor strategy, because it optimizes what already exists rather than asking what should exist. Three failures repeat.

• The moment gets designed and the path does not. A team ships a better onboarding flow. Nothing about that flow changes what the company knows, offers or builds next. The improvement is real and it does not compound. We made the longer version of this argument in why the journey is the wrong unit of analysis.
• The experience is scoped to what the company controls. Customers experience a brand across partners, resellers, review sites, communities and models that answer questions on the company’s behalf. An experience strategy bounded by owned touchpoints is designing a fraction of the actual experience.
• Consistency is mistaken for coherence. Every channel says the same thing in the same typeface and the proposition is still not worth choosing. Consistency is cheap to audit, which is why it quietly becomes the goal.

Underneath all three is a measurement problem. Satisfaction indices rise and the multiple does not, because nothing connects experience investment to pricing power, retention quality or acquisition cost. Brand spend is argued in marketing language and judged in financial language, and experience spend has exactly the same problem.

What our experience strategy consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements need two or three, and the diagnostic decides which, depending on whether the constraint is choice, compounding, boundary or proof.

1. Deciding which interactions are worth having

Not every touchpoint deserves investment, and treating them equally is how budgets get spread until nothing changes. We start from the activities customers are already trying to complete, in their language rather than your funnel stages, then test which of those the brand has permission to take part in. You leave with a short list of interactions where you can be materially better than the alternatives, and an explicit list of the ones you will stop paying to improve.

2. Designing the feedback path, not only the moment

This is the part most experience work omits, and the part that compounds. We specify what each interaction produces, which can be data, a signal, a relationship or a reason to return, and how that output changes the next interaction. The loop is usually broken between a customer-facing team and a system of record nobody owns, which is an accountability question wearing a technology costume.

3. Extending the field beyond what you control

We treat partners, marketplaces, communities and resellers as participants with their own incentives rather than as channels to be managed, and we write the rules that let them build on the experience without degrading it. That includes the AI systems that now describe, compare and recommend your brand without asking you anything, an argument set out in how AI is changing market logic rather than only discovery. The method is the interaction field: see how interaction fields redefine customer engagement.

4. Building the measurement finance accepts

Experience investment has to be linked to retention quality, pricing power and acquisition cost rather than to a satisfaction index, with a small number of leading indicators the operating teams can move weekly. We have had to make this argument for brand before. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data found that a portfolio of the strongest global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year from 2001 to 2024, and that a dollar invested became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. The companies that failed to capture it did not have weaker brands. They managed brand outside capital allocation, which is exactly where most experience budgets still sit.

5. Putting someone in charge of it in year two

Experience systems degrade quietly. We define the operating model, the decision rights and the governance that keep the field coherent once we leave, including who arbitrates when a partner, a product team and a service team want the same interaction to do different things.

How an experience strategy engagement works

1. Diagnose. Customer research in the language of the activities people are trying to complete, a review of the current journey work, and an audit of what each interaction currently produces and where that output goes.
2. Decide. The interactions worth building, the ones to stop investing in, and the participants beyond your own channels who belong in the field. The output is a set of choices with the exclusions written down.
3. Build. The feedback path, the data and signal model behind it, the measurement that ties it to retention quality, price realization and acquisition cost, and the design briefs for the moments themselves.
4. Embed. Operating model, decision rights, governance and the leading indicators, so your organization runs the field without us.

Deciding which interactions matter and designing the field usually takes about a quarter. Building the feedback path and the measurement takes longer, and depends more on who owns the data than on the design work.

Experience strategy results

Takeda: six places to meet patients, found in the journey rather than the pipeline

Takeda wanted in-market solutions across parts of its brand portfolio and category leadership behind them. Vivaldi analyzed the patient journey through cultural, industry and consumer lenses, with a single view on patient experience and expectations, and highlighted six opportunity areas where Takeda could play a role in the future lives of patients. The work produced a model for the patient ecosystem, a category playbook and narrative, and a broader purpose: enabling patients to live their fullest, healthiest lives. Read the Takeda case study.

Schindler: one value proposition two business units could both run

Schindler needed one global value proposition for both Existing Installations and New Installations, after two similar projects had failed. Vivaldi assessed the current proposition inside out and outside in, and found Schindler positioned on hygiene factors rather than on relevant customer value drivers. Twelve platforms were developed, three examined in depth, one chosen: “Schindler. Your first choice.” With it came a customer-oriented global service naming structure that reduced complexity and made the service portfolio easier for customers to navigate. Both were approved by the CEO, the executive team and the board, and the new service naming launched in 2015. Read the Schindler case study.

PPG: a retail experience rebuilt across 600+ stores

PPG asked Vivaldi to revise the retail branding of its 600+ professional paint stores across the US and carry one brand message across every touchpoint. The work started with business reviews, Vivaldi’s Customer First interviews and visual audits, then a mobile app that let store employees contribute to an audit of all 600+ locations, which is what made a modular rollout possible at that scale. Vivaldi oversaw fabrication and installation of the signage and built the regional launch. The rollout delivered a reinvigorated sales force and an improved customer experience, including expanded store footprints, customer-friendly service counters and advanced color selection tools. Read the PPG case study.

Where to start: the four capabilities in this group

Four capabilities, each answering a different question. Most engagements start with one.

• Customer Ecosystem Strategy and Interaction Field Design if the question is how customers, partners and employees create value for each other, and how to design that system deliberately.
• Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) and Adaptive E-Commerce Strategy if the constraint is owning the customer relationship directly rather than through intermediaries who hold the data.
• Marketplace Ecosystem Growth Strategy if the company is becoming a place where others transact and needs the economics and governance of that to work.
• User Experience (UX) Design if the decisions are settled and the question is how a specific product or interface should actually work.

Adjacent work sits elsewhere in the estate: customer journey mapping when you need the current path documented before you redesign it, service design when the constraint is the operation behind the counter, and brand strategy when what the experience should mean is itself unsettled.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for experience strategy

• We design fields, not funnels. The Interaction Field, written by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler, is the method behind this group: systems in which customers, employees, partners and models create value for each other.
• We measure it in the CFO’s currency. Retention quality, price realization and acquisition cost, with the attribution built during the engagement rather than promised after it.
• We have done it at operational scale. PPG was 600+ stores, audited, rebranded and installed, not a slide about retail experience.
• Strategy and expression in one team. The firm that decides the interactions also designs them, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
• Independently recognized. WirtschaftsWoche has named Vivaldi a top consultancy for Strategy and Innovation in its Best of Consulting awards five times.

How to evaluate an experience strategy consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us. If you are still building that shortlist, our guide to the ten best customer experience consulting firms for enterprise CX strategy sets out who does what.

• Ask what happens after the moment is improved. If the answer describes a better interaction and not what that interaction feeds, you are buying design, which is a legitimate purchase and a different one.
• Ask where the boundary of the experience is drawn. A firm that scopes only to owned channels will produce a plan that works right up to the point a customer asks a third party about you.
• Ask how they will measure it. Satisfaction and effort scores are inputs. Retention quality, price realization and acquisition cost are the measures a board can allocate against.
• Ask who runs it in year two. If the operating model, the decision rights and the feedback path are not part of the deliverable, the system will degrade in your hands.
• Ask what they would tell you not to build. Any firm that finds every touchpoint worth investing in has not prioritized, it has inventoried.

Experience strategy consultancy, CX agency or experience design studio?

The three are often shortlisted together and do different jobs. The useful question is which decision you need made.

Experience strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima. Read who Vivaldi Group is and how we work.