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On the other hand, some customers expect an in-depth, long-term partnership where seller and buyer work together to create unique solutions to meet the customer's needs.

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Customer experience - Customer experience is more than customer service, whether that be in the call center, at retail, or during a face-to-face interaction with a salesperson or field service technician.

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Those are all integral to delivering a compelling customer experience, but for many enterprises, those touchpoints are just the beginning.

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The experiences customers have with advertising, products (e.g., how they look, how they work), back-office operations (shipping, billing), a website, all impact their likelihood of continuing or discontinuing doing business with a company, as well as their likelihood of doing more or less business or recommending the product or service to others.

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One challenge for companies today is that increasingly there are aspects of the customer experience, or the perception of that experience, that are out of your control, like online product rating systems or sites and blogs and online communities that discuss your brands.

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Good or bad, what is said may be accurate or inaccurate; it's imperative to have a plan for appropriately addressing the issues raised in these forums.

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Customer - An organization can't create an effective CRM strategy without first understanding who its customer actually is. 

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Is it the end consumer? Is the channel your partner or your customer? 

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Consider, for example, a hospitality operation that franchises its hotels. 

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Is the customer the franchisee or the people who come to the hotels and sleep in the beds? Without an agreed upon definition of the customer, employees will work to best serve the constituency they each feel is the "right" customers--the result being employees working at odds instead of in tandem.