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

A common question that I get in my class on Omnichannel UX and Customer Journeys is: Are customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) the same? Well, the answer is yes and no — and here’s why.

NN/g has defined user experience to encompass all aspects of a person’s interaction with a company, its services, and its products.

Originally the term was meant to describe the totality of the interactions that users have with an organization. But because it was proposed in an era where computers were the main form of digital interaction, some have started to assign to it a limited interpretation: that associated with one interaction, as opposed to the lifetime relationship between the customer and the company. Instead, the term customer experience (CX) has been used to describe the totality of the interactions that a user has with an organization over time.

Although we rant against vocabulary inflation and creating new names for old things, we can’t fight the way in which language evolves. Whether you use the newer term “customer experience” or prefer the older “user experience,” the point to remember is: there are multiple levels of experience and each is equally important in delivering a good experience to your users.

Varying Scopes and Why They Matter

If you consider the relationship between a person and a company across that person’s lifetime, you can define that user’s experience at three different levels:

• The single-interaction level, which reflects the experience the person has using a single device in order to perform a specific task
• The journey level, which captures the person’s experience as she works to accomplish a goal (possibly using multiple interaction channels or devices in order to do so)
• The relationship level, referring to all the interactions between the person and the company, throughout the life of the customer relationship

What it takes to deliver good user experience at each level can be quite different.

Interaction Level

Interaction-level experience is what is commonly understood as the focus of UX and is concerned with designing the experience of a single interaction that a user has with a company to perform a task. Most UX designers work at the interaction level: they design the interface for a website or an application. But interaction-level experience pertains not only to digital channels, but it can also apply to physical channels. Examples of interactions include:

• Receiving support on the phone
• Getting money at a teller window in a bank
• Filing a claim on an insurance provider’s website

Each of these interactions has a specific experience that is just a small part of the relationship between the customer and the company.

At the interaction level, we design using channel-specific principles, guidelines, and patterns.

Journey Level

The next level of experience is the journey level. A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through in order to complete a goal over time. This process may use multiple devices and interaction channels (e.g., web, desktop or mobile apps, email, online chat, phone). Customer journeys can technically consist of one interaction if a user goal is completed as a single task and no other related interactions take place. However, most journeys consist of a series of related interactions aiming to complete a single goal.

Providing a good experience at the journey level introduces unique design challenges that require more focus on integration and coordination of elements than is necessary for interaction-level design. Some journey-level challenges include:

• Delivering consistent messaging across channels and interactions
• Creating seamless cross-channel transitions
• Delivering a cohesive look, feel, and tone of voice across interactions
• Back-end technology integration to allow customers to move effectively between channels over time with the same quality of experience

Relationship Level

The widest scope of user experience is the relationship level (aka the customer experience). At the relationship level we focus on the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and his cumulative impression as a patron of that organization. Rather than assessing the quality of one interaction or one journey, the holistic level is concerned with all interactions and journeys between that person and the company. Some examples include:

• The combined experience of researching, buying, using a product, and receiving support for that product
• The experience of subscribing to a software as a service platform, using it, troubleshooting issues, and receiving newsletters from the organization through termination of the account
• The combined experience of researching and buying an insurance policy, and interacting with the provider via phone calls, agents, and the website, throughout the life of the policy

A good relationship-level experience requires good interaction-level and journey-level experiences, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It’s not enough to have good interaction- or journey-level experiences to get a good relationship-level experience. A good relationship-level experience involves effectively weaving together broad experience components such as key customer journeys, ad campaigns, print-to-mail items, product and service offerings, and call-center procedures and supporting graceful transitions across all different interactions and journeys. Examples of relationship-level experience components include:

• Coordination between internal departments to tie together awareness and procurement campaigns with interaction-level experiences that truly deliver on expectations set in acquisition marketing.
• Being a steward of the ongoing relationship with users by anticipating their needs and proactively delivering the right content and service offerings at the right time
• Front-end staff training to utilize customer data to provide personalized support based on user’s prior engagements

Conclusion

Whether you use the term “UX” or “CX” is not important, because they basically mean the same thing if you have the “correct” interpretation of the terms. What’s important is: (1) that you understand the different scopes of experience and strive to optimize the experience at all levels; and (2) that you and your team use these terms consistently so that you minimize friction and misunderstanding.

Designing the experience should not only take place at the interaction level. When individual experiences are designed and evaluated in silo, they will often pass acceptance criteria. But when you put independently designed interactions together into a realistic user journey, things often begin to break down, impacting the broader scopes of UX.

For example, the claims process may function flawlessly and meet user needs when tested in the lab, but if the information provided in the confirmation email contradicts or confuses the messaging from the claim workflow, the journey breaks down. And if the entire claims process changes dramatically without proper communication, longtime customers could face unexpected challenges completing tasks that were once easy. Then, the relationship-level user experience has been affected.

However, it’s not the case that the relationship-level experience is better or more important than the experience of a single interaction. We’ve seen many grandiose plans falter on a few poorly written words of UI copy. While it is important to design the longitudinal experience, it’s equally important to design its components. If people can’t understand your website, they won’t become customers in the first place. Or if callers are offended by their treatment when they place a support call, they won’t remain customers much longer.

For more about evaluating customer journeys and designing high-quality customer experiences, we offer a full day training course, Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience.