User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) have many similarities, but ultimately User Experience is just a piece of the bigger puzzle that is Customer Experience. Having a great UX is fundamental to the daily use of an app. If it doesn’t look good or is confusing to use, you’ll lose customers.

Customer Experience (CX) allows you to determine what things need to be fixed, clarified, or added on to when it comes to your digital product as defined by customers’ relationship with your digital product through customer loyalty and customer feedback. And to really begin to put together these puzzle pieces, it’s vital first to understand why User Experience and Customer Experience are important, individually, before comparing CX vx UX. 

What is User Experience?

User Experience (UX) encompasses everything that your user, well, experiences, when they use your app. From the color scheme to the font size to how the information is laid out. At the end of the day though, UX is based on a single interaction, and can still make or break your app if the CX designer is not careful.  

Bad UX looks like a user having difficulty navigating to another page due to the buttons being hard to find, poor color combinations that make it hard to read text or information that isn’t laid out as expected.

On the other hand, good UX is as easy as one, two, three, and makes it so the user can easily achieve their end goals with no problems. Having color choices within your interaction design foundation that easily signal the next steps, and making it easy to find the correct buttons and links through effective sizing, font, and colors are just two examples of good User Experience.

Based on this information, it can seem as though if an app has a great User Experience due to a well-built user interface design, then they’ve won. They’ve won the Great App Experience™ award, which as of now isn’t an actual award but maybe it should be. But User Experience is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait, there’s more? Yes, there’s so much more to creating a positive experience. 

User Experience is only one part of Customer Experience

As earlier stated, User Experience revolves around a single interaction. The user logs into your app and the UX is what they see and how they navigate. 

Customer Experience, on the other hand, is made up of every single interaction your customers have over time with your brand.  In other words, Customer Experience is the understanding behind the how and why in regards to your users’ interactions with your company in any context. 

Depending on your brand or company, it can be with your digital products (app, website), physical locations (employees at a store) or remote support (employees at a call center). Creating a holistic and positive experience that connects each context to support the goals and needs of your customers is no small job. Where do you start?

Customer Experience is about listening to your users

Customer Experience is about reading into customer satisfaction to learn what your users want and need from your company and figuring out ways to improve their overall experience. Maybe your users are telling you that the wording on your app could be better and therefore make it easier to find what they need. It could be as simple a fix as swapping out the word ‘portfolio’ for ‘profile’. It could be that the system your employee is using doesn’t have access to the same information your customer facing app does and this causes confusion when they try to solve a support problem.  

But how can a company figure out what its users need? Great Customer Experience design is about listening to your users when they tell you what is and isn’t working within the overall experience. How do you “listen” to your users? You use research techniques that allow you to capture what is really going on whether that is interviews, observations, surveys or analytics. They’re basically offering you the cheat code to creating a fantastic digital product. It’s up to you to use it to create a positive experience.

So what is the ultimate difference between user experience and Customer Experience?

In short, UX is what your customer interacts with on a day-to-day basis. It’s each and every button tap, search, or form fill out in your digital product. Customer Experience, on the other hand, is the entirety of all of those interactions for each and every customer. 

So, having a great UX design throughout the entire customer journey is fundamental to the daily use of your app. If it doesn’t look good or the user’s interaction with it becomes confusing, you’ll lose customers. Customer Experience allows you to take a relationship’s worth of use and determine what things need to be fixed, clarified, or added on to when it comes to your digital product. It also enables you to make changes to your app that make sense in the long run, helping you avoid things like Design Debt. 

In other words, the understanding that comes from Customer Experience can inform the details of your User Experience. Considering hiring customer experience experts? Check out the four things to look for in a customer experience agency. 

Are you ready for your own cheat code? 

Here at the Ranch, we take a measured and informed approach to Customer Experience. Since there are often multiple ways of solving challenges related to a customer interactions, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success for a good customer experience. 

Ready for change? Reach out to us and let’s get started.

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In the digital space, that means not only does your digital product have to look great and work well, but it means that you have to consider the overall experience your user will have with your app. That’s where Customer Experience (CX) comes into the picture. But what exactly is Customer Experience? 

Building Relationships that Matter

The old way of thinking had us looking at each customer interaction as a separate entity and judging the value of that point of contact on its own. The major downside of that approach is that it’s impossible to see beyond one experience or another. That leads to a very limited view of both how your customer interacts with your product and your product itself. Customer Experience aims to change that by looking at your users from a holistic viewpoint. 

So, in essence, Customer Experience is the relationship a person builds with your company over time. The keyword being “build,” since this isn’t something that happens overnight. Because of that, it’s best to think about Customer Experience at three points—A Single Interaction, The Beginning of the Journey, and A Lifetime Relationship.

A Single Interaction

The interesting thing about Customer Experience thinking is that all that came before is still vitally important—it’s just not the end goal anymore. The single interaction is a perfect example of that. Basically, a single interaction is an experience that’s limited to a specific task, system, or device. It’s logging into an app, ordering your lunch, or completing a form for work. This is frequently called the User Experience (UX).

These are all vitally important to the day-to-day users of your app and if they don’t work, then your digital product suffers. But we can’t rely on them to tell us the whole story. 

The Customer Journey

The Customer Journey begins to piece together all the single interactions to begin building out a more complete picture. So, the user’s goal is typically more complex than a single interaction and will likely span multiple tasks and even several systems or devices. More often than not, the Customer Journey is spread out over time. 

The goal of Customer Experience in this regard is to begin to draw a line between all these interactions so we can get a more complete picture of the user and their overall experience. 

A Lifetime Relationship

Once you have a better understanding of your customer, their interactions, and journey, then you can begin to get a sense of what their relationship with your digital product looks like over the lifetime of their time using your product. So, every interaction your customer has had with your company and your app from the first download to the most recent form fill. 

By its nature, this is a dynamic and ever-evolving look at the customer. There will always be new interactions to consider and to inform your approach to both your users and your digital product. And, ultimately, that’s the goal—to get as complete a picture of how your customer uses your app as possible so you can make the best decisions for both their experience and your bottom line. 

Why does Customer Experience matter?

In short, Customer Experience matters because it can be the difference between a digital product that works and one that doesn’t. 

Not that long ago you could create a great-looking app full of amazing functionality and features and then release it into the world, never to think of it again. Now, the expectation is that companies provide an amazing digital experience, which means you have to look beyond the performance and UI/UX of your app to learn the how and why behind the customers using your app. 

So, why does Customer Experience matter? It matters because there is so much to learn from your users that can better inform not just how to best meet their needs but to attract even more users down the road. Want to learn more? Read about the five principles of customer experience. 

Your users are talking about you. It’s time to start listening. 

Here at the Ranch, we take a measured and informed approach to Customer Experience. Since there are often multiple ways of solving a challenge, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success. 

Are you ready to start listening to your users? Check out our blog post on the four things you must look out for in a customer experience (CX) agency or reach out to us and we’ll get started. 

The post What is Customer Experience (CX) and Why it’s Important appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.