Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference?

Quick Summary: Are you creating a digital product but confused the terms like User experience and customer experience? Yes, they are complex as they appear identical, but they are they different and used for different purposes. We have solved this perplexity in this article by explaining customer experience vs user experience. Just stay stick with the article.

We have many clients who connect with us to design their digital products. But, instead of user experience, they often use customer experience. When they use customer experience, they do not mean customer experience (CX); they are discussing UX. It's not a new thing for us, and we do not face any issues in understanding what our clients have to say. But what if you explore CX instead of UX? It will definitely leave a wrong impression. So, we have created this article to help you understand the difference between CX and UX.

TheFinch Design is the most celebrated design agency that helps businesses, like startups and enterprises, create outstanding designs for their digital products, irrespective of their industry. Contact us today and see how our synergy works.

What Is User Experience (UX)?

User experience (UX) refers to how users interact with your products. Whether it is Mobile websites or any software, UX plays a crucial role in keeping users engaged and retained. UX design focuses more on creating digital products that are easy to access, relevant stuff to explore and intuitive features to stay engaged. Even though UX is identical to UI and used for the same purposes when discussed and designed, the former deals with usability while the latter deals with visual aspects. UX designers need to stay informed about various aspects, like information architecture, navigation, features, trends and more, as part of the UX design process.

What Is Customer Experience (CX)?

The customer experience (CX) refers to customers' overall experience with your products, from pre-interaction and post-interaction to pre-purchase to post-purchase. The kind of experience your customers have with your products, brands or services will be counted under customer experience. It includes everything from user interface and user experience (UX) to marketing materials, quality service and customer services.

What Are The Key Differences Between UX And CX?

User experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) are often used interchangeably, but they are completely upside down. They have different meanings, are used for different purposes, and require different skills to master in two terms. So, the best way to differentiate the two is the understand them on different terms and factors —customer experience vs. user experience. Here, we have done it for you.

UX vs CX: Metrics & Measurement

While user experience metrics are all about success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and clicks to completion, customer experience refers to how satisfied your customers are. What are the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the churn rates?

CX vs. UX: Focus

Focus in Customer experience (CX) is the overall or entire experience of your customers, starting from logging in to the website, exploring products, engaging with content, buying products, referring products to friends, and coming back to the products. However, user experience (UX) focuses on the end users of the product. For example, if you have digital, it will be all about giving excellent user experience when they log in to your website.

UX and CX: Goals

User experience (UX) has one goal, which is to help users complete tasks easily with your product. For example, they should have easy-to-use features, navigate across menus and more. Customer experience (CX), on the other hand, aims to create an excellent customer journey map and provide outstanding experiences to your customers throughout the process.

User Experience vs Customer Experience: Research

User experience is all about design, as the research is limited to user experience (UX) design, such as features, functionalities, and easy-to-access products, and name just a few. Customer experience research deals in broader terms, not just limited to customers' journey on your product, but the entire customer experience.

User Experience (UX) vs Customer Experience (CX): Target Audience

While UX targets actual users (the one who actually uses the product), their experience with the product and the comfort of using it, the CX targets the customers who are not just buying products or services but also searching for the products.

How Do CX And UX Work Together?

Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) are different, but at some point in places, they are similar and work with the same goals. They work together to create a better customer experience journey. While customer experience is about creating the overall experience of customers with the brand, products and services, the UX focuses on specific touchpoints. But the goal remains the same -they work together the bring in better customer experience. User experience is a subset of customer experience, as their customer journey will remain incomplete without good UX.

To better understand how UX and CX work together, you need to understand the common areas of UX and CX.

For better UX and CX, both require the following things;

User research:

You cannot achieve better UX and CX unless you know your market, target audiences, preferences, buying behavior, pain points, and things that they want to solve the trends.

Customer journey mapping:

You need to create excellent user journey maps to understand potholes, obstacles and breaks your customers might face while searching, interacting and buying products.

Apart from this, they share a similar side of empathy and communication, but you need to explore dip to understand the nitty-gritty of both. With this, you know what common area these terms have. Now, let's explore how they work together in detail;

Collaborate:

UX designers create user experience for end users, basically for single interactions. For example, it could be a website, app or other digital product. CX experts prepare questionnaires or survey forms to collect customer feedback. Now, the two parties can work together to leverage each other's expertise. With the perfect collaborative techniques, they can create human-centered designs that address complex issues. Let's take an example: UX design can create effective UI and UX strategies for generating user solutions, while CX experts work on generative research and problem definition.

Work Together to Provide Better Experience:

Both UX and CX follow the same goals to provide experience to users. They take different approaches but work in the same direction and purposes. For example, UX experts work on creating conversational user interfaces with easy-to-use features, navigation and usability to guide the user seamlessly through the product. That means they help them solve problems and it comes by understanding their users' needs. Similarly, they can benefit CX experts to create an outstanding experience for users throughout processes.

Make product easy for users:

Both work together to make things easy to find for users. For example, CX experts work compressive parts, such as marketing, design, PR, and more, so that users can access your product right from researching or searching the product in the search engines. The benefits of UX experts, though limited to product only.

To Identify pain points:

They can both work together on the research market and understand their users and their pain points. They have similar goals —to provide a better user experience. It can be achieved when they are aware of their end users and their pain points.

Final Thoughts

We hope you understand UX and CX along with the things that differentiate the two terms and the common areas they follow. We at TheFinch Design provide quality, driven, and user-oriented UX design services to help you create products that not only keep your users engaged and retained but also keep your business thriving. Connect with us today with your project scope and get the best product from the powered industry's top design professionals.