UX and CX, which to pursue further?
To quote Don Norman (creator of Nielsen Norman Group, or NN/G) and Forrester,
[UX is] all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products and has been coined a term since the 70’s.
And CX is actually a fairly “new” discipline in comparison. It’s been around for 12 years, but only became well recognised in the last 6-8 years.
[CX is] how customers perceive their interactions with your company.
So what’s the difference? Is there even one? How did we get from a more encompassing definition of UX to such defined realm in the workplace now?
Yes, there is a difference, but there’s also a lot that overlaps.
The same:
The goal of UX (user experience) and CX (customer or consumer experience, depending on if your B2B or B2C) are rooted in building better experiences overall. Knowing your audience or users, having empathy and understanding their pain points/motivations are still crucial in both these roles. Psychology ties into both realms significantly to understanding human behaviors and cognitive science.
The difference:
UX ties closer to web and app based solutions in a traditional sense. It focuses more on usability, navigation and IA and is typically more product focused. CX, on the other hand, is more overarching and not necessarily “device” specific and can be both online and offline. It ties into overall brand strategy, as well as how that gets communicated to our users via advertising, sales, marketing, operations etc, as a sum of all experiences across different touchpoints. It’s how consumers interact with your brand holistically.
An example I like to give often when explaining the difference is this: When you see an ad on social media for an item on sale, you click it to try to find that product so you can learn more…only to find that once you get to the website, that product isn’t available. Or you have to spend more time searching to find that deal you saw in the first place. This happens because the various teams involved here didn’t think about the end-to-end experience from our customer’s perspective. When you ask the customer about their experience, they don’t see that one team failed them, but that the entire brand created a bad experience.
Another example is when you hear a spot on the radio or TV about a product or service. You want to learn more about the sale, but can’t find it successfully online. You try to reach out to their chat bot to then only get redirected to the customer service or sales team, and it turns out, they are not even aware of this promotion.
These are two very real examples that exists everyday, pinpointing the disconnect between teams because of the lack of customer experience as a holistic perspective. According to Forrester, customers will pay 4.5 times more if the customer experience is good. And one-third (32%) of consumers said they would walk away from a brand they love after one single bad experience and 59% after several bad experiences.
Both UX and CX plays a role in impacting the overall user’s perception of an experience and brand. But understanding that they are different and they play different roles in impacting the overall customer experience is crucial.
Being in the UX field for almost 10 years now…How’d I decide to shift from UX to CX?
It’s not that you necessarily have to choose UX or CX. In fact, you can grow down a UX path in your career. However, I shifted my career from UX to CX. That’s not to say I won’t continue to expand and pursue UX further, but I want to see the bigger picture of how it all ties together, “beyond the web”.
I realized I didn’t want the confines of “whether it’s digital or not” restrict me from problem solving for the consumers. A lot of times, companies and senior management thinks UX is website or mobile app experiences. Anything outside of that, they see as not your speciality. But at the end of the day, a lot of the skillsets are transferable. You might even be doing some CX work without even realizing it.
What I did find interesting is that with a lot of CX folks, the path to get there is typically through MBA and a business mindset. Whereas with UX, there are a variety of paths to getting to this role, from visual design to psychology or development backgrounds, or even now through bootcamps. But if there’s one thing I learned doing UX work, it’s that there’s not one right solution in most cases. It’s how you decide what to do with the skills you have to determine what’s next.
So.. now what?
Understanding the difference between UX and CX is important in exploring what’s next in your career path. This is a question I discuss quite often with others at conferences, or even comes up from mentees. I wrote a post to complement this one about different roles/titles and their responsibilities (from UI to UX, CX to service design to BX or brand experience to product and even designOps), as well as some of the overlaps between all the roles.
In the meantime, here’s a funny article to explore different “titles” within UX & CX.
