CX vs. UX: Their Differences and How They Overlap

It's easy to confuse "customer experience" with "user experience." Many people even use the terms interchangeably. Although they overlap in some areas, they are distinct concepts. Understanding the difference between customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) is vital for your brand to form meaningful connections with your audiences and stand out from competitors with a stellar user experience.

To help you differentiate the two, we’ll dive deep into what CX and UX mean, how they differ, and why they matter. We’ll give you a clearer understanding of how to leverage both to improve your organization’s digital experience and enhance its customer loyalty.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience, abbreviated as CX, involves everything an organization does to prioritize customers and serve their needs. In the digital world, where customers interact and share their experiences online, it's more important than ever to connect with customers on an emotional level.

Each time a customer interacts with a brand or product, it's labeled a "touchpoint." Touchpoints can include everything from visiting your website, making a phone call to customer service, receiving a product in the mail, to how they feel about your brand while using something they purchased from you.

The COVID-19 pandemic tested how well brands could pivot their in-person strategies to provide thoughtful, positive experiences during a crisis. A great example of CX that emerged in 2020 was companies prioritizing customer safety. For instance, eCommerce companies and food delivery services developed methods of contactless delivery to keep customers and drivers safe as the virus spread.

Key Elements of Customer Experience

1. Customer Journey: The winding path customers take when interacting with your brand — from the first time they hear about your product to post-purchase interactions.
   
   
2. Touchpoints: These are the various stages where customers interact with your brand. Touchpoints can include your website, social media, customer service, in-store visits, and even physical mail.
   
   
3. Emotional Sentiment: CX is heavily influenced by the emotions your brand evokes. Emotional sentiment is the thoughts, attitudes, or judgments prompted by that emotion or feeling. A positive customer experience is often about how your brand makes people feel rather than the concrete services it provides.
   
   
4. Customer Support: How well your brand handles inquiries, complaints, and follow-up conversations shapes your customer experience. Are you proactive in addressing potential issues your customers face? Or are you reactive, waiting until they’ve been on hold for five minutes before they can air their grievances?

Why CX Matters

Customer experience is critical because it directly impacts customer loyalty and retention. A positive experience can lead to repeat business, while a negative one can drive customers away — often permanently. PWC’s study on the future of CX states 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

What Is User Experience (UX)?

User experience (UX) focuses on how users interact with a product, particularly in digital environments like websites and apps. UX covers everything from how well users can navigate the product, how easy it is to use, and how accessible it is. UX focuses on optimizing a user’s interactions with a product, ensuring they are as smooth, intuitive, and enjoyable as possible.

Like sound design in movies and podcasts, we often take UX for granted until it falls short, and its faults become glaringly obvious. If you want to learn more about how not to design a user experience, visit "User Inyerface," a deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on good design to interact with websites.

Key Elements of User Experience

1. Usability: How easy and intuitive is the product to use? Usability is often the cornerstone of UX, ensuring users can accomplish their goals without unnecessary friction.
   
   
2. Information Hierarchy: Information hierarchy involves organizing and labeling content to make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. In this post, our hierarchy uses bullets in this section to make it easy to read these elements. Bold words at the beginning of each bullet draw your eye to key information.
   
   
3. Accessibility: UX also considers how accessible a product is to people from all walks of life. An inclusive design approach ensures everyone can have a positive experience, regardless of limitations. For example, screen readers are software programs that allow blind or visually impaired users to read the text displayed on the computer screen. Ensuring websites work well with screen readers is a big part of UX.
   
   
4. Performance: This refers to a product’s speed, responsiveness, and reliability. A slow or buggy interface can severely detract from your user experience. Also, some global locations do not always have high-speed 5G internet. Ensuring that your pages load quickly and aren't weighed down by too many large images or videos is part of performance.

Why UX Matters

When a product is intuitive and enjoyable to use, it not only feels great, but it also encourages continued use. Poor UX, however, can result in frustration and friction, leading users to abandon the product altogether — often in favor of a competitor. User experience is also a ranking factor for search engines, particularly with performance. Sites that load slowly and have other UX issues can receive lower rankings in search engines, which means fewer people will discover them.

The Overlap Between CX and UX

While CX and UX are distinct concepts, they overlap in key areas. After all, a positive user experience is a critical component of the overall customer experience. If a customer finds your website difficult to navigate (poor UX), it can negatively impact their perception of your brand (poor CX). That will set your customer service team up for a difficult interaction down the line, leading to even poorer CX.

Consider this scenario: A customer visits your large retail website to buy back-to-school supplies last minute. If they find it easy to browse products, add items to their cart, and check out to purchase their items (great UX), they’re likely to have a positive experience with your brand after using the site (great CX). They may even receive a nice rush shipping offer, so the supplies arrive before the first day of school at no additional charge (great CX).

However, if your website is slow, difficult to navigate, or crashes during checkout (poor UX), it will likely sour their entire experience, leading to dissatisfaction with your brand (poor CX). The customer ends up driving to a store upset at the last minute, late at night, and remembers not to trust buying items online from you the following school year.

Where They Diverge

1. Scope: UX is often more narrowly focused on a specific digital product, while CX encompasses the entire relationship a customer has with a brand.
   
   
2. Touchpoints: CX covers every possible interaction across various channels, from digital to physical, whereas UX focuses specifically on the user’s interaction with the product itself.
   
   
3. Ownership: UX is usually the responsibility of strategists, UX designers, and developers, while CX often falls under marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

How to Improve Both CX and UX

Improving both customer experience and user experience requires a holistic approach that considers the broader customer journey, and the specific interactions users have with your products.

1. Understand Your Audience: To enhance CX and UX, you must deeply understand your audiences. This involves gathering data on your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Tools like customer feedback surveys, user testing, and analytics can provide invaluable insights. But nothing is a shortcut for good old-fashioned empathy — spending time regularly, mentally, and physically (if possible) stepping into your audiences’ shoes.
   
   
2. Map the Customer Journey: Mapping out the customer journey helps you identify all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. By understanding their path, you can optimize each stage to improve the overall experience.
   
   
3. Personalize the Experience: Personalization is a powerful tool in both CX and UX. For CX, this might mean sending personalized emails or offering tailored product recommendations. In UX, personalization could involve dynamically changing your content based on user behavior or preferences. Learn more about how we approach personalization at Velir.
   
   
4. Use Data to Drive Decisions: Leverage data to continuously improve CX and UX. Customer feedback, analytics, and user testing data should inform your every decision, ensuring your broader experience and specific interactions are optimized.
   
   
5. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture: Creating a customer-centric culture within your organization ensures that CX and UX are prioritized at every level. This means fostering team collaboration and keeping the customer at the forefront of all your business decisions. It's easy to let tension between internal teams and customers slowly creep up, but it's imperative that internal teams empathize with the experiences of others, even those from different walks of life.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Even with the best intentions, businesses often make mistakes that can negatively impact CX and UX. Here are some common pitfalls to watch out for.

1. Neglecting Mobile and Tablet Users: Neglecting mobile users is a surefire way to lose customers. Ensure that both your website and product interfaces are fully optimized for mobile devices. According to recent statistics, mobile devices account for approximately 50.48% of web traffic, while desktop devices account for 46.51%.
   
   
2. Overlooking Customer Support: A stellar product can still suffer from poor CX if customer support is lacking. Ensure your support teams are accessible, knowledgeable, and equipped to resolve issues quickly. Don't bury your contact information to save money and limit interactions.
   
   
3. Ignoring User Feedback: User feedback is gold when it comes to improving UX. Ignoring it can lead to persistent issues that frustrate users and damage your brand’s reputation.
   
   
4. Focusing Solely on Acquisition: Many businesses focus heavily on acquiring new customers while neglecting the experience of existing ones. Remember that customer retention is just as important, if not more so, than acquisition.
   
   
5. Lack of Consistency: Inconsistencies between different touchpoints can lead to a fragmented customer experience. Ensure your messaging, design, and service levels are consistent across all channels.

The Power of Integrating CX and UX

Both customer experience and user experience are crucial to your brand’s success. CX provides the broader context in which UX operates, while UX offers the detailed execution that makes up part of your overall customer journey.

By understanding and optimizing both CX and UX, your brand can create a seamless, positive experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations. This, in turn, can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, and a stronger competitive edge in the marketplace. CX and UX are not just about creating good experiences — they’re about creating experiences that people will remember, come back to, and look forward to.

To learn more about how you can level up your CX and UX game, contact us. Our CS and UX experts would be happy to help you craft the kind of customer and user experiences that will help your brand stand out.