What's the difference between UX (User Experience) and CX (Customer Experience)?
The difference between UX and CX is a hot topic among the design community, but is it something that concerns people who don’t measure apps in user flows and pixels? It is. And it’s actually quite important. In this article, you’ll learn what the difference means from a business perspective, as well as how to employ both UX and CX in an effective strategy.
Table of contents
CX vs. UX – the definitions
First things first, let’s quickly go through the definitions and point out the similarities and contrasts between the two. Customer Experience (CX) is how a person perceives an organization based on all their experiences with it. It’s a long-term phenomenon that encompasses a wide spectrum of both digital and analog touchpoints.
User Experience (UX) is how a person feels and what they think during and after an interaction with a product or a service (usually a mobile app, website, or other types of software). It embraces everything that affects a user’s interaction with the product/service. UX is strongly interconnected with UI (User Interface), which refers to the product’s look and feel, and determines the visual layer of the interaction with a product.
The difference between CX and UX
So, UX is a part of CX, but CX extends beyond UX and includes aspects such as marketing, the tone of voice used in communications, customer service, etc. The daily job of UX designers is focused on analyzing how people use a particular product or service, and optimizing it for better usability (usually making sure the business KPIs are met at the same time). CX professionals, on the other hand, study and improve people’s overall satisfaction with the business, based on how many customers the company gained and lost over a time period, whether the customers are willing to recommend the company, etc.
Looking at an example, banks interact with their customers through a variety of channels: TV and online ads, websites, web and mobile apps, call centers, physical branches, etc. The general impression people have about their bank, based on the way they are treated as its customers as a whole, is the Customer Experience. The impression those people have when using a mobile (or web) application provided by the bank is the User Experience. It refers only to the app and is related to how convenient, fast, etc. it is to use.
Customer Experience vs. User Experience - why the difference matters?
If customers love their user-friendly banking app, we’re talking about good UX, if they find using it troublesome, the UX is bad. At the same time, most customers are interacting with their bank in many ways, for example by visiting their website, reading updated terms and conditions, talking to its representatives on the phone, etc. When the overall experience, on all or most of the channels is pleasant, we can say that the bank’s CX is good.
The CX and UX difference matters because UX is a super-important ingredient of CX, so it can significantly improve or damage CX, but at the same time, it is not wholly responsible for the CX of a company.
CX vs. UX – why is it important and how to achieve good CX and UX?
Good CX
Good CX is all about satisfied and loyal customers. It’s achieved through a human-centric approach that begins with understanding the customer’s needs. CX employs all resources not only to respond to those needs but also to delight people so that they want to come back for more. And that’s why great CX is so important – it directly affects customer loyalty and willingness to promote the product/service. It’s not only that CX comes with a good ROI. Businesses simply can’t afford to have poor CX (unless they’re monopolists).
Key metrics used to assess CX include:
- net promoter score
- customer satisfaction score
- customer effort score
- repeat purchase rate
- customer retention rate
- customer churn rate
But how to achieve good CX? Let’s take a look at a few CX tactics that will lead your company towards happy and loyal customers.
Start with your employees
Your employees are on the front line and know your customers best. By carefully listening to your employees, you will gather the best insights about clients’ pain points, needs, and improvement ideas. At the same time, empowered customer service, i.e. giving employees a degree of freedom in how they solve client requests, give discounts, or out-of-the-box bonuses, is what can turn a problem into a win. Seemingly unimportant misunderstandings tend to escalate to major social media dramas, while they could have been nipped in the bud by an empathetic and effective customer care agent.
Develop an omnichannel mindset
Providing a consistent experience across all channels requires close collaboration between marketing, sales, customer care, and most importantly, management. In order to choose the right tools and tactics, it’s best to start with customer journey mapping. Only after understanding the customer journey can one add chatbot assistance at the stage when customers expect immediate assistance, but also make sure that any issues not solved by the bot are automatically taken over by customer agents and solved immediately. The goal is to employ activities aimed at providing seamless, personalized, and streamlined experiences. Another key tool is a CRM – when powered by both updated input from employees and analytics from all channels, it’s a baseline for effective marketing and sales automation.
Use customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping will provide you with both an overview of all the interactions as seen by your customers and an in-depth understanding of each touchpoint. Based on that, you will be able to improve the CX in an unbiased way, focusing on what’s important for the clients. Customer journey map is a key tool used by CX and UX professionals, so if you were to invest in one thing, it should probably be that.
Employ new technologies
Chatbots, user-friendly apps, or systems using machine learning help companies get closer to their customers. Those solutions are supposed to make people’s lives easier, but also to amaze, surprise, and make them curious. A great user experience should be your key concern when building any tech for your business.
Personalize
If you want to delight your customers, personalize their experience. People love T-shirts and gadgets with their names on them for a reason. You can personalize their journey on your website by suggesting accessories that will go well with the jeans they purchased (for example), in the app by providing shortcuts to the most frequent actions, in packaging by adding a name card of the person who prepared their order, in sales by sending birthday wishes and a discount code, etc.
Good UX
The ultimate goals of customer and user experience are the same – improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. But while good CX is achieved through optimizing customer journey across various stages of the service, UX focuses on improving people’s interactions with a particular physical touchpoint. The benefits of good UX are: increased conversion rate, higher average customer spend, improved SEO ranking in the case of websites, and reduced development costs when the UX phase is carried out beforehand.
UX metrics used to assess and optimize the quality of user experience include:
- behavioral metrics: task success rate, conversion rate, average task time, average order value, pageviews, abandonment rate, number of unique problems, user feedback about problems and frustrations,
- attitudinal metrics: customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS) and other customer satisfaction and loyalty measurements, system usability scale, task performance indicator, user feedback about the product’s usability and overall appearance.
Where to start if you want to work on better UX? Let’s go through some user testing techniques to improve customer experience:
- Surveys with current or potential users - the most straightforward method that provides quantitative data on what real people do and their feelings about the product/service. These simple online forms enable companies to gather data from large groups and identify issues for further study.
- User interviews - used to gather information about users’ feelings, and motivations, as well as how they use the product/service. The interviews generally follow the same methodology as qualitative interviews. The interviewer follows a structured scenario, making a record of what is said at the same time. After the interview, the conversation is systematically analyzed to formulate conclusions.
- Usability testing - this method gets users to interact with a product/service while a researcher observes and analyzes their behavior and reactions to it. Usability testing is exercised to assess whether products/services provide user-friendly, enjoyable, and effective experiences.
- A/B testing - a randomized experiment in which 50% of users interact with one version (version A) of a product/service (usually a website or part of an app), and the other half with a variation of this version (version B). Then the performance of both designs is compared to determine which is preferable. Website A/B testing can be carried out through Google Analytics or marketing tools such as Hubspot, GetResponse, Mailchimp, etc.
- Card sorting - a method used to design an intuitive information architecture of a website or an app. Card sorting involves real people who are asked to organize topics (written on cards) into categories that make sense to them and optionally label these groups.
A successful strategy requires both good UX and CX
UX and CX both play a vital role in branding, customer loyalty, and the overall success of a business. However, UX for digital products may be one of the most important elements of CX, but even the best UX won’t cover for poor execution of other CX aspects. An effective growth strategy requires a holistic approach towards Customer Experience, which includes thought-through and careful User Experience (and User Interface) design.
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