Customer Experience: From "What to Do Next" to "What to Feel Next"

May 7, 2026 McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company (Japan Representative: Naoyuki Iwatani) has announced its latest whitepaper, "The Next Best Experience," which analyzes the evolution of customer experience in companies and its source of competitive advantage.

As customer touchpoints become more sophisticated, an era has arrived where "what kind of experience to provide" rather than "what offer to make" determines corporate value. While the advancement of generative AI makes it possible to design experiences that capture customer context and intent in real-time, many companies still remain in fragmented optimization. This whitepaper aims to bridge this gap and presents perspectives and insights for transforming customer experience into a competitive advantage under a new approach called "The Next Best Experience."

This whitepaper was supervised by Partner Yasuaki Sakurai and Associate Partner Masaaki Omachi, specialists in corporate strategy in the consumer goods and retail industries.

▼Whitepaper https://www.mckinsey.com/jp/~/media/mckinsey/locations/asia/japan/our%20insights/the%20next%20best%20experience/next-b_1.pdf

From "Next Best Action" to "Next Best Experience" Traditional marketing has focused on deriving the optimal action (Next Best Action) at each individual touchpoint. This whitepaper, however, points out the importance of shifting to "The Next Best Experience," which designs the entire most valuable experience for each individual customer. Customers build relationships with companies across multiple channels, and consistent experience design is key to competitiveness.

AI-enabled "Contextual Understanding" and Experience Design With the advancement of generative AI and sophisticated analytical techniques, it is becoming possible to understand customer context and intent in real-time, beyond just behavioral history, and to provide optimal experiences. This requires companies to dynamically build meaningful experiences for each customer, going beyond mere personalization.

Transformation Required for Companies To realize "The Next Best Experience," customer-centric end-to-end experience design, advanced decision-making utilizing data and AI, strengthened cross-organizational collaboration, and restructuring of operating models are indispensable. These are critical transformation themes that affect the overall competitiveness of a company, not just the marketing domain.

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