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, the era has arrived where corporate value is determined not by "what offers to make," but by "what kind of experience to provide." 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, under a new approach called "The Next Best Experience," presents perspectives and insights for transforming customer experience into a competitive advantage.

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

▼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. On the other hand, this whitepaper points out the importance of shifting to "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 the key to competitiveness.

AI-enabled "Context Understanding" and Experience Design The progress of generative AI and advanced analytical techniques is making it possible to understand context such as customer intent and situation in real-time, going beyond just behavioral history, and to provide optimal experiences. This requires companies to go beyond mere personalization and dynamically build meaningful experiences for each customer.

Transformations Required for Companies To achieve "The Next Best Experience," end-to-end experience design from a customer perspective, advanced decision-making utilizing data and AI, and strengthened cross-organizational collaboration and operating model reconstruction are indispensable. These are important transformation themes that affect the competitiveness of the entire company, not just the marketing domain.

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