Customer Experience vs User Experience – these two terms are often used interchangeably what leads to misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Although they have similar associations, they have slightly different meanings. What’s the difference between CX and UX? After reading this article, you’ll have no doubts about it!
Customer Experience
Generally speaking, CX is the total sum of what customers feel and experience interacting with your brand or company. CX’s goals are to examine the overall customers’ attitude toward the brand as a whole and also to measure the likelihood to continue using the product by the clients and recommend it to others. The clients start their customer journey at the moment they first hear about your brand, and end at the time they recommend your products or services, and tell their friends and colleagues about it. In the meantime, they interact with your brand on particular touchpoints across the customer journey. It can be, for example, your website or app, a complaint call, or a post-purchase e-mailing. We can also distinguish a few different types of experiences that CX consists of, depending on the levels of touchpoints between the client and the brand. They are:
- customer experiences related to the product or service
- customer experiences related to the selling process
- customer experiences related to the marketing activities
- customer experiences related to the customer service
- previous experiences of the customer with the brand
In order to provide a good Customer Experience, the CX professionals analyze and improve each aspect of it by gathering and measuring customer feedback. The next step is to take appropriate actions in order to improve the selling process and increase conversion rates.
Customer Experience refers to the overall impression a brand has on customers and general connotations the user has with a company. A good Customer Experience should give the users an opportunity to have a nice, professional, and helpful interaction with the company’s representatives and generally feel optimistic about everything connected to the brand.
User Experience
Today’s customers become more and more conscious about their choices and purchases, especially when the competition in the market grows and the product you sell is a mobile app or another type of digital product. That’s why acquiring and maintaining them is now harder than earlier. They are no longer guided just by the functionality and price of the goods but customers more and more often choose products that arouse positive emotions in them.
Although the user experience is an integral part of CX and also the key to consistency, the two concepts are not identical. On the other hand, the UX describes the experiences of the user directly from using the product or service. It characterizes the way how people interact with the product or service and how they inform about their experiences – for example, in the digital world, UX professionals use the following key metrics to measure and analyze it: the number of clicks, the error rate, the churn rate, the amount of time needed to complete a task or the rate of overall success.
A good UX design should give users the possibility to find the desired information on the website quickly and easily and should allow for efficient execution of the user’s request.
UX and CX metrics – ways to measure and increase customer satisfaction
CX metrics: NPS, CSAT, CES
NPS (Net Promoter Score) – Net Promoter Score is a tool to examine customers’ loyalty and satisfaction with the use of a simple survey. With its help, you can determine how likely your clients are to recommend your product or service to their colleagues and friends. Depending on the results, you should allocate them to the group of promoters, passives, or detractors. You can calculate your NPS score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) – Customer Satisfaction is an indicator measuring the level of customer satisfaction that we can estimate on the basis of their opinion shared with us in a survey. Usually, it consists of a question (or a few) about the level of satisfaction with the product/service and a scale from 1 to 10. After gathering all information, you have to take the number of satisfied respondents, divide it by the number of all responses and multiply it by 100 – the result your receive is your CSAT score.
UX metrics: Usability, Engagement, and Conversion metrics
Usability metrics – these are aimed to measure how easy and effective the product is for people to use. For this reason, usability tests are carried out, where the users are asked to complete a task. In the meantime, the researchers observe their behavior and make notes. It’s recommended to conduct such tests with 20 users.
Engagement metrics – their purpose is to measure how much time, effort, and attention the users engage with the product and also how they feel emotionally while using it.
Conversion metrics – last but not least. The most important of all UX metrics, although it is carried out on the smallest group of those users who are able to commit to your website or app or are expected to increase their engagement.
Both CX and UX metrics: CES
CES – Customer Effort Score – usually, it’s a survey containing one question to determine how much effort it took for the client to find a solution to a request or problem in the context of a given product or service. This method can be successfully applied to both CX and UX measurements.
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To have a high level of CX, you need a well-designed UX
To sum up and make it all more understandable to you, we can say that UX is a smaller part of CX – a strong Customer Experience strategy should take care of a well-designed and optimized User Experience at first. You may have great branding, high-quality products, and a perfect marketing strategy – but if your mobile app or website is hard to navigate, your potential customers will probably choose the offer of your competitors. On the other hand, focusing just on the UX part is insufficient if you want truly satisfied and loyal clients. Try to balance them both instead, and aim them at one common goal – results may surprise you. That’s all, I hope you won’t confuse user experience with customer experience anymore!
