Although user experience and customer experience are absolutely different notions, they have never been closer. The difference between them lies in the fact that customer experience is actually a sum of all the experiences that a person has from interacting with your brand, team, website, app, etc. In other words, user experience is just a part of customer experience and can be illustrated as shown in the image above.
We will now analyze each notion separately to give you an even better understanding of their roles in the process of interacting with your audience:
User Experience (UX) is the experience people receive from interacting with your product. Factors such as error rate, time to perform a planned activity and abandonment rate make it possible to accurately measure the UX. Proper UX enables a user to find all the necessary information on the website effortlessly and browse through all the pages with ease. Users are thus guided to their desired destination very quickly.
User experience tasks are usually performed by a usability engineer, information architect, interface designer and developer.
Customer Experience (CX) shows a whole set of interactions with your brand across all the possible touch-points. The metrics for CX are measured by the willingness to continue using your product and recommending it to others, overall communication experience and project management accuracy. Proper CX will let individuals enjoy a professional and positive interaction with the company and will leave them with a good impression.
Customer experience tasks are usually performed by a marketing manager, business analyst, project manager, CRM manager and the customer.
Good User Experience Does Not Necessarily Mean Good Customer Experience
- Reason 1 – No connection between UX and CX: When a UI designer is unaware of all the customer experience objectives, it creates gaps between the UX and CX. Creating a product that is easy to use is just one step. Creating an environment where a customer receives great service and support is usually challenging.
- Reason 2 – Lack of support: There exist countless examples of excellent products with perfect usability, but their support teams fail to pay special attention to interaction with the customers.
- Reason 3 – Treating all customers equally: Good UX can be excellent for one person but pose dozens of questions for someone else. Either due to technical incompetence or unwillingness to take any efforts to understand the product peculiarities, some customers may find it difficult to figure out how to implement the solution and use it. Even an ideal UX project can require different levels of customer experience.
When Good User Experience Is Not Enough
If the difference between the CX and UX is still vague, it will become clearer when you understand the difference between a user and a customer. Quite often, these are the same people, but sometimes a user is only a user and a customer is only a customer.
Even though CX and UX are two different things, should we treat them separately? Different companies have different thoughts about that and thus get different results. Who wins more customers and delivers more successful projects? Discover who and why.
In 2014, Forrester Research surveyed the companies that combine UX and CX (or don’t combine). 38% of surveyed companies had their own UX and CX teams, but preferred to keep them separate. 13% of companies have chosen to combine CX and UX efforts and they enjoyed more successful project implementations.
Today, poor attention paid to your website & app UX means losing up to 90% of sales. However, the role of customer experience is huge too. If your product is released with an excellent UX, offering poor customer service will result in losing up to 68% of customers who will gladly go to your competitor.
Closing Thought
Good customer experience shouldn’t just exist within your company – it should go hand-in-hand with the user experience. Even if these are two separate processes carried out by two different teams, the importance of interrelation is critical.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research – Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
(Lead image: Depositphotos)
