Experience is a big part of any journey. It can make or break the deal. Though customer experience and user experience are related, there are certain stark differences between the two. There are overlapping concepts in bothexperiences. While customer experience is a huge differentiator for any business, user experience is a huge factor in knowing how customers like the look and feel of the brand.

User experience forms a major part of the customer experience. Improving customer experience requires you to improve the user experience. In this blog, we will see how CX and UX are related and their difference.

What is Customer Experience or CX?

Customer experience or CX is the total of all relationships and experiences a person has with the company, the product, touchpoints, employees, interactions, content, and more. Customer experience is a large concept keeping customer happiness in mind. Defining CX and their interactions will help improve customer engagement. However, customer experience is a highly personal concept and keeps the individual in mind while charting a process.

Customer experience is considered to be the most important factor for customer success, improved services, processes, and interactions.

What is User Experience or UX?

User experience is the experience one has while using a software application, product, interface, or website. User experience is how the user feels while navigating across a platform. Delivering the best, optimized experience to users to improve efficiency, usage, and utility. User experience is specific to your offering product or service. Aspects such as navigation, usability, and visual feel are important to enhance the user experience.

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Customer Experience (CX) VS. User Experience (UX)?

Customer experience is an all-encompassing process, while UX deals with the product or system alone. For UX designers, the core focus is on improving product usage experience and not the brand. For CX professionals, the core focus is on improving the entire customer experience and not the product alone. Here are some major differences between CX and UX: customer experience and user experience.

Definition

Customer Experience is used in every field and deals with how the customer feels about the brand, product, or professionals. User experience is specific to technology fields and how the user reacts while using the product- its interface, intuitiveness, and ease of use.

Backgrounds

Customer experience has folks from the customer success background, marketing, customer service, and maybe even sales. User experience professionals come from design, technical, and other such backgrounds.

Focus

Customer experience professionals focus on increasing revenues by improving customer service. Customer experience keeps all experiences in mind, including user experience. It is imperative for customer success professionals and all other teams to keep CX in mind while charting a plan. UX or user experience focuses on improving usability, mapping, and problem-solving.

Metrics

Customer experience is measured in every B2B SaaS organization. There are a set of metrics that help understand the complete picture. Some of them are-

• Customer Satisfaction Score: Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT is a popular CX metric. It is rated on a scale between 1 and 5. Take, for example, ratings of your favorite restaurant on Google. It is rated based on five stars. CSAT helps measure customer service, and customer satisfaction, and can adapt to the company’s needs. CSAT helps evaluate if the customer service department is working well or not.
• Net Promoter Score: Net Promoter Score or NPS is a highly famous customer experience metric. More than two-thirds of all worldwide companies use NPS to understand customer experience working in their organization. NPS is a blend of two questions- both related to customer experience. NPS is a standard, simple, fast way for companies and customers to get the right feedback on customer experience. NPS is an industry-wide benchmark to predict revenue gain or loss.
• Customer Effort Score: The Customer Effort Score is a popular customer experience metric that shows how tough it was for a customer to solve an issue and why. It comprises a simple question- how easy was it to get the solution to your problem? The customer has to rate whether it was difficult, easy, very easy, very difficult, or somewhat manageable. You understand if the service was complex or simple.
• Retention rate: This is a measurement of how the business keeps or retains customers over a defined time period. The higher the retention rate, the better it is for the company.

User experience metrics focus on product usage, usability, functionality, and more. Some of the common metrics include-

• Error rate: This rate is the number of mistakes a user could possibly make during or after completing a task
• Success rate: In any app, the success rate is the percentage of users who finish the task or goal to reach the desired stage.
• Abandonment rate: This rate measures the number and percentage of users who leave a task before it starts. Users who click on start but never really start are counted as part of this abandonment rate.
• Task time: Task time is when it takes for a user to finish the task successfully.
• Clicks to completion: This is the number of clicks it takes for a user to complete a task. More clicks mean the user can get irritated and feel the process is too long.

Is UX a part of CX?

Yes. UX is an important subset of CX. User experience effectiveness means that the user is happy with the product and is comfortable using it. Customer experience effectiveness means the customer loves the experience with the brand and would like to be associated again. While UX is an important differentiator from a tech perspective, CX is one from a business perspective.

If a customer is facing bad UX- their pages are not loading, it is tough to figure out anything, the website is not navigable, the colors are bad, and they are unhappy due to a lack of solution. They will quickly decide if some other platform serves their needs or not.

CX rises above that- it is more than the functionality and usability of the product. It is about how customers associate with the brand at a natural level. UX influences CX heavily, and hence they are related and interlinked.

Final Thoughts

Although there are some differences between CX and UX, it is important to note that both are equally important. A bad UX may frustrate the user towards churn. A bad CX definitely will do that. Keeping the customer and end-user in mind, companies need to chart policies that will enhance the entire ecosystem of business. Both CX and UX need to offer customers and users a positive, usable, comfortable feeling. The end goal needs to be to solve customer problems in a simple, succinct manner to enhance customer loyalty and brand reputation.

WRITTEN BYShivani Chaturvedi

Shivani is a talented CS manager with the skillsets to elicit, scope and manage end-to-end B2B SaaS project delivery. She has a keen interest in depicting her learnings in customer success by writing resourceful blogs and articles.

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