User experience vs. customer experience: is there a difference? It’s a common question, but ultimately both play important roles in attracting and retaining clients for any business.
Despite their individual importance, only 55% of companies are currently conducting any user experience testing. If you’re still struggling to understand the difference between these two commonly referenced (and crucial for your business) concepts, don’t worry — we’re going to take a deeper dive into both, including what each entail, what makes them important, and how you can expect them to play a role in your business.
What We’ll Cover:
1. Definitions of both user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX).
2. Prime examples of both.
3. Is one more important than the other?
4. Common statistics of UX and CX.
5. How to start your journey toward designing better experiences for your customers.
User Experience vs. Customer Experience: The Difference
User experience describes how a customer interacts with a particular product or service and is most commonly associated with a website, mobile app, or other technical interface. Certain metrics like clicks, abandonment rate, time to navigate, etc. can be used to measure the effectiveness of a product’s user experience. Whether you’re designing an interface or redesigning a product from the ground up, UX focuses solely on its usability.
Customer experience, on the other hand, describes a customer’s interaction with various different parts of your business as a whole. Customer experience focuses on things like the customer’s perception of your advertising strategy, brand image, customer service, pricing, and also encompasses the user experience of your products as well.
This diagram from the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies summarizes the relationship very well:
Courtesy of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies
You can think of CX as the umbrella that encompasses UX. Together, they make up all of the touchpoints your customers have across your entire business.
Importance of UX and CX: How Do They Measure Up to Each Other?
Due to their close relationship, UX and CX have a big impact on a customer’s opinion of your business. To help paint this picture, here’s a hypothetical example:
User Experience (Good)
Lisa is using a mobile app that will let her shop for new outfits and other accessories. When she opens the app, she has no trouble finding where to search for clothes and even has the ability to filter her search to narrow down her choices. It only takes her a few seconds to quickly navigate around the app and place multiple items in her cart. The app even has a guest checkout option that will save her information to allow her to make an account later. After inputting her shipping and billing information, Lisa successfully checks out and receives a confirmation email with details relating to how she can track her package. Overall, the entire process only takes a few minutes.
Lisa’s story serves as an example of a great user experience. She had virtually no issues with the interface and was able to quickly identify features, functionality, and layout.
Customer Experience (Bad)
Due to how smooth her shopping experience was, Lisa decides to create an account and keep using the app for future purchases. However, at some point down the line, she forgets her password and decides to call the company’s support line for help to get back into her account.
When looking up the company’s phone number, Lisa finds that they have multiple numbers listed with little information as to which one she should call. She calls the one she thinks best fits her problem, only for the representative to say that she’ll need to be transferred to a different department. After waiting on hold for what feels like forever, Lisa briefly hears a new representative pick up the phone and immediately hang up — ending the call and forcing Lisa to restart the whole process.
Lisa feels aggravated and ignored, and ultimately decides to remain locked out of her account. From now on, she’ll shop elsewhere.
Lisa’s second encounter with this fictional retailer is an example of a bad customer experience. So bad, in fact, that this clothing company just lost a customer.
Lisa’s stories answer whether UX or CX is more important: they are equally important due to their symbiotic relationship. Just because your company may have products with great user experience design doesn’t guarantee your customers have a good opinion of the company as a whole. If your entire customer experience isn’t up to snuff, you may find yourself losing customers left and right.
This story could also be flipped with the same outcome. Your company might have an award-winning support team and a beautiful brand image, but if your interfaces are difficult to interact with, customers can quickly start leaving for competitors. 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience, so don’t discount the impact of bad UX!
Common Concerns of UX and CX
Whether you think your user experience is perfect or in need of a tune-up, it pays to invest. For every $1 invested in UX, it can result in a return of $100 — an ROI of 9,900%. Let’s look at some of the common statistics on the impact of bad UX.
- 70% of online businesses that fail do so because of bad usability. (Source)
- 90% of users have stopped using an app due to poor performance. (Source)
- 48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. (Source)
- 13% of customers will tell 15 or more people about their bad experiences. 72% will tell 6 or more people about good experiences. (Source)
- Only 1 out of 26 customers complain when they are unsatisfied, the rest churn without saying anything. The absence of negative feedback isn’t a sign of satisfaction. 91% of unsatisfied customers who don’t complain simply leave. (Source)
The user experience across all of your products and platforms plays into your overall customer experience. When 32% of customers will leave a brand they loved after just one bad experience, it becomes apparent that it pays to invest in both UX and CX.
How to Improve Your UX and CX
There are many ways of determining how well your customers are interacting with your various interfaces, as well as metrics that point to your overall customer experience. Measuring both will provide you with valuable data to determine where customers might be experiencing most of their pain points — whether they’re cropping up within your product, your website, support or somewhere else.
You don’t have to tackle this task alone. If you’re ready to take the next step with your technology and discover what’s possible, let’s start talking strategy. We’ll get to know your organization, your goals, and your existing tech infrastructure before mapping the journey to your moonshot so you can reach your greatest potential.
