The customer experience and the user experience may sound syllable, but they are completely different from one another. Many of us find it difficult to differentiate them but it is easy to recognize them in real time.
In today’s post let us discuss on the differentiation of these experiences and understand how important they are in technological aspects, let’s get started with User experience vs Customer experience.
Before we could dive in deep let us understand the origin of these two experiences.
Origin of the User Experience and the Customer Experience:
The origin of the user experience was in the early 90’s and it was coined by Don Norman when he was first appointed at Apple as Vice President in the product design team.
The customer experience was later introduced and may age 12 years. It was recognized in the past 6 to 8 years. And it was not understood when Tony Hillson from Service Design NZ first time spoke about it at the summit.
Now let us see in detail.
What is Customer Experience?
To be concise a customer experience is something that a user or a customer experiences when they interact with a company, brand or an organization. Whereas the user experience is considered the subset of customer experience.
What is User Experience?
User Experience is when a user interacts with your product and the experience obtained through it. User Experience is measurable, and it is identified through success rate, time evolved and the clicks to complete the process.
The difference between UX and CX:
Let me explain both the experiences with two different examples;
Example #1: Good UX and Bad CX:
You want to order food from a restaurant, and you find the app for it and get it downloaded and make orders instantly. The experience you had in ordering your food was very easy and with clear navigation.
At the same time, when you wanted to reach out to the restaurant to dine, it was ridiculous. The restaurant had poor cushions, bad kitchen, and other sanitary facilities. This badly spoils the impression that you had about the restaurant while using its application.
Both UX and CX and interdependent and you need to make sure that both support one and another. Missing any one of the experiences can affect your business and the reliability of your customer.
Example #2: Good CX and Bad UX:
Consider that you have purchased an app for shopping, and you installed it as you are someone who makes online purchases very often. Once you have installed it to your device, you find some issues in handling it hence you reach out to the customer service and get it resolved in a matter of minutes.
Provided you are given a credit score of $25. Doesn’t that sound good? Here you have a better customer experience when compared to the user experience that you with the application rendered by the company.
This can be a good example of Good CX and Bad UX.
So, what can be done to improve both CX and UX?
Ways to improve both CX and UX:
Here are a few important steps to improve both customer experience and user experience. Never skip any of these steps you might end up with a bad impression.
#1 Make “Help” Visible:
Most of the time, the “HELP” button gets buried on the website. In case, if a customer gets held up in the middle of a transaction or a purchase on your website, make sure the help button is visible to reach out to you immediately.
If the customer or the user is not able to find it, you might lose a potential customer instantly. It is because the customer might fear the cause of losing their money or they might even lose their trust about your website.
This is why it is really important to display the help button in a place where the customer could easily reach out. At recent times, websites have made it float across the website, that the customer might find it even when the scroll through the website.
#2 Respond to feedbacks:
The second most important thing is to reply to feedbacks which most of the retailers fail to do. Neglecting customer feedback or not responding them might lose credibility. Make sure you go through your customer’s feedback and reply to them.
You can step a further and keep them notified about the changes you have made to your website or application that was insisted earlier. This improves trust and lets your customer return to you whenever needed.
#3 Effective customer service:
You might have noticed a few supply chain or customer service experts dictating the design of the product. This should be avoided, rather a customer service expert should be involved in the design process and explain to customers how the roles help to enhance the promise about the product. This can really help your customers to rely on your service every time they face an issue.
#4 Make experience the same on all channels:
This is one of the major issues that customers face when they switch between devices. If a customer had to complete his purchase on a mobile device as a continuity of his desktop device, make sure that your customer is able to navigate through the app the same way he was able to, on a desktop.
If the customer had to log in from first whenever he switches between devices, then he/she would neglect the process rather than continuing it anyway. So, make sure the channels are connected to one another that the customer finds it easy to make purchase or transaction.
Wrap up:
User experience is definitely a part of the big customer experience.
A customer experience observes the entire customer interaction with the brand which includes all channels. Whereas, the user experience is just oriented with product entities. But it is important to get them balanced.
The article helps you in identifying the importance of both user experience and customer experience. Make sure you follow them when you implement ideas to your business without affecting the experiences.
