Harley Manning, co-author of , told Computerworld UK that companies need to rethink how they approach customer experience.

"If you look at customer experience from the perspective of what it can do to decrease your costs, what it can do to increase your revenue, and then look at the return on investment from doing those kind of projects, then the discussion of customer experience happens on a very different level and you realise that is probably the greatest untapped source of profits in business today," said Manning.

"If you set out to be the best in the world at marketing you would struggle because it is a mature discipline and well understood. However, if you said you are going to focus on providing a better customer experience than your competitors, suddenly you are competing in a different arena."

Manning said that it is hard to assess your systems internally to understand what impact they are having on the customer's experience, and as a result the technology department should take an 'outwards-in' perspective, whereby it assesses every point at which the customer interacts with the business.

"Take each of those touches that the customer has with your company. Perhaps in a retail location, over the phone, on a website, on a mobile app - looking at whether the underlying people, processes, policies and technologies that contributed to the experience that the customer had at each of those points makes you quickly realise that you have an opportunity to do very specific things with technology to improve that experience," he said.