This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Offering products or services alone is no longer enough: Organizations must provide their customers with satisfactory experiences. Competing on this dimension means orchestrating all the clues that people detect in the buying process. Customers always have an experience--good, bad, or indifferent--whenever they purchase a product or service from a company. The quality of the experience lies in how effectively the company manages it--in all its facets and from beginning to end. Organizations that simply tweak design elements or focus on improving isolated pockets of the customer experience--by providing a quick hit of entertainment, for example--will be disappointed in the results. An organization's first step toward managing the total customer experience is recognizing what the authors call clues: the signals or messages given off by everything involved in the buying process. Clues can include the product itself (Does it work as advertised?), the layout of a retail outlet (Are the signs easy to follow?), the salesperson's tone of voice (Did he really mean it when he said, "Have a nice day"?), and so on. Organizations that orchestrate the sum total of all the clues can create an optimal experience for their patrons. Addressing the clues that speak to emotions is especially important. Emotional bonds between companies and customers are difficult for competitors to sever. The internalized meaning and value that the clues assume can create a deep-seated preference for a particular experience--and, thus, for one company's product or service over another's. Discusses the tools that are available to help organizations rethink the signals they are sending to customers. Presents two case studies in which organizations dramatically improved their customers' experiences.

Rather than follow the make-and-sell strategies of industrial-age giants, today's successful companies focus on sensing and responding to rapidly changing customer needs. In order to survive in this sense-and-respond world, big companies need to consider a strategy called "managing by wire." In aviation, flying by wire means using computer systems to augment a pilot's ability to assimilate and react to rapidly changing environmental information. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Coherent corporate behavior needs more than blockbuster applications and network connections; it must be governed by a coherent information model that codifies "how we do things around here," and "how we change how we do things around here." This article describes managing by wire at Mrs. Fields Cookies, Brooklyn Union Gas, and a financial services organization that the authors call Globe Insurance.