First, off the block, customer experience and user experience are not the same things.

CX vs UX: How the Difference Matters

User Experience encompasses all aspects of a person’s interaction with a brand’s digital interface. On the other hand, Customer Experience deals with all the interactions a person has with a brand; that is to say that UX is a subset of CX. Going an inch deeper, let’s get a better look at both the fields and see why business owners should care.

CX should focus on a framework whose goal is to consolidate the relationship between a brand and its customers by delivering the extra mile beyond the transaction.

CX Scope

CX has a broad scope as it concerns itself with all the channels the brand has to offer, including the UX division. Advertising, sales, product delivery, UX, and customer service are the main pointers that the users perceive as CX. Considering a user’s relationship with a company over a lifetime, his experience could be classified at various levels:

• One-time interaction level where he uses a product or service only to perform a specific task once;
• Journey-level where the user uses the service until a goal is accomplished, such as sending and receiving messages across channels.
• Relationship level where the interactions are maintained throughout the customer relationship lifetime. This goes beyond leaving a one-time impression and journey-level scope and is concerned with a more holistic approach where the sum is greater than its components.

It is also worth mentioning that customer service does not fall as a core concept in the CX context.

Keeping small and medium businesses in mind, a much more flexible approach could be taken towards CX to respect the budget and resource constraint in mind. However small the application, Customer Experience is bound to bring brand differentiation, increase the perceived market value and retain more customers.

UX Scope

Since customers are the direct users of the products and services offered by a business, the experience one takes home from these entities matters a great deal. UX mainly deals with the interaction level of the product the company offers. The entire focus of UX is a customer experience design and is based on leaving a pleasant memory of a great one-time interaction the user has with the product. For most purposes, UX is the user’s experience with a company’s website or digital application. It concerns itself with the usability, navigation, visual hierarchy and the overall information architecture of the product at hand.

But this is not limited to the digital arena. For instance, receiving a simple support phone call or being able to file an insurance cover easily online without any hassle count as great benchmarks of UX. All these interactions add to the experience of the user with the company and its product, and in a small way adds to the solidification of trust and commercial relationship between the two parties.

All in all, UX is important, yet another part of the CX landscape.

While UX is limited to the user’s interaction with the company’s product, CX deals with all the other spectrums which inherently include the digital product viz. website and mobile applications. Both CX and UX individually play important roles in building brand reputation, strengthening the customer-brand relationship and by extension, the overall success of the company’s program.

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