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The Key Differences Between CX and UX

Contributed article by Lindsey Allard 

Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) sound quite similar. After all, customers are also users, right?

Well, not so fast.

Although there are overlaps, using CX and UX interchangeably is a mistake. If you don't fully understand the importance of both concepts and neglect one or the other, you are putting your company at risk.

This article will tell you what customer experience and user experience are, give some key differences between them, and also a list of ideas you can put into practice if you want to make sure your company gets the most of a great customer experience.

Customer experience (CX) in a nutshell

 

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The overall impression your brand makes on customers through every interaction is what constitutes customer experience.

For direct customer experience, everything matters – your services, products, customer support, ease of use, onboarding, documentation...

The indirect customer experience extends to your marketing collateral and content creation, as well as customer reviews, recommendations, and brand mentions in the media.  

A Microsoft survey showed that as many as 61% of users had switched brands due to poor customer service, an integral part of CX. That number shows why it matters to pay close attention to customer experience.

User experience (UX) in a nutshell 

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UX focuses on ways and the experience a user has while interacting with your products. This can be the digital product itself (for example, your SaaS) but also your website, mobile app, and the services you provide.

Good UX design relies on ease of use, information architecture, navigation, hierarchy, and performance. Good user experience design aims to create an intuitive product that works flawlessly. Users should be able to navigate through the product without getting lost or wasting time figuring out what to do next.

CX vs UX – what are the differences? 

As you can see, customer experience is a much broader term than user experience.

CX focuses on the overall impression your brand leaves on a customer. UX focuses only on singular touchpoints each user has with your products, for example, your site or your mobile app.

Also, UX is predominantly technical, focused on the products and ensuring that users can use them as intended. It includes usability testing, user journeys, workflows, menus, navigation, architecture, performance, and tackling concrete technical challenges to ensure each user has an optimal experience.

On the other hand, CX is people-centric as it focuses on emotions that a brand leaves on the customers across all channels. It uses marketing to draw attention, while service tries to strengthen the brand image by worrying about broader and more abstract issues such as brand value and alignment, messaging, and similar.

Don't focus on one while neglecting the other 

Customer experience is the broader term that contains user experience. In fact, great user experience is a critical component of good customer experience. You can hardly imagine a satisfied customer faced with a slow website littered with 404 errors.

But, UX isn't the only part of CX, and a good user experience alone isn't enough. UX is the technical part of CX, while the rest requires a "human" touch.

Let’s say a person navigates your super-fast website easily and buys one of your digital products. If they feel abandoned afterwards, not knowing what to do because you don't have any onboarding, while support tickets remain unanswered for days, their customer experience will be ruined.

On the other hand, if your marketing efforts are spot on, you have an outstanding sales team and the best customer service representatives who helped them with onboarding, it will all be ruined if your SaaS has a cluttered, outdated interface littered with bugs. In that case, poor UX will destroy all of your other excellent CX efforts.

Quick tips to improve CX 

While customer experience is complex, there are some boxes you should check to make sure you aren't making some basic mistakes:  

• Promise only what you can deliver: meeting customer expectations is one of the fundamentals of a good customer experience. To do that, you should focus on not promising things you can't deliver. Bragging too much in your marketing will lead to unreasonable expectations while setting realistic ones and then delivering outstanding results will leave a lasting positive experience.
• Cut wait times: even if you can't fix the issue or give a full answer immediately, ensure that customers know you are aware of the problem and working to help them. If it takes long, send them an update, but don't keep them waiting without a reply.
• Stay transparent: if something breaks, don't try to hide it. Let customers know there's a bug and that you are working on a solution, but also as soon as you fix the problem. That will eliminate support requests and improve satisfaction overall, as they will know that help is on the way.
• Work on your FAQ section and customer onboarding: not only will this help your customers get familiar with your products, but it will also cut support time, as people will be able to figure out everything on their own.  

Quick tips to improve UX

Improving your UX means polishing technical aspects of your products consistently, which can be a lot of work. Here are some key areas to focus your efforts:  

• Clean design and navigation: never overwhelm users with too many options. Keep the most important buttons visible, and display only the essential information, with one intention per page.
• Website performance: investing in quality hosting and ensuring your site is error-free will improve users' overall experience while also helping your ranking.
• Responsiveness: you want your site to work equally well on mobile phones and tablets, on all operating systems. Try it yourself from several devices, don't just rely on "preview" options while building.
• Fewer distractions: avoid overwhelming users with annoying pop-ups and interruptions that take up their whole screen and are hard to get rid of. These include cookie policies, autoplay videos, location and notification access requests, subscription fields, and the latest deals. If you have to display them, at least make them easy to close with a visible "X."  

Bottom line 

As you can see, even though UX is a part of CX, they aren't the same. Even if you have a fully digital product, it is very important to focus on the customer experience as a whole and not just worry about the experience a user has with your app.

On the other hand, even traditional, physical, service-based businesses need to have a sound digital presence, as most customers get in touch via the internet, which is why UX matters too. Bad UX will lead to a poor customer experience, as many customers will have second thoughts about contacting them if their website is hard to use, slow or outdated.

Therefore, don't neglect CX or UX, as both are exceptionally important for your business as a whole. Put into practice at least some of the tactics from this article, as each will improve the overall experience customers have when interacting with your business.

About the author   Lindsey Allard is the CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user feedback software. After seeing how time consuming and expensive gathering feedback was, Lindsey made it her goal to create a solution to streamline the user feedback process.