You’ve probably heard of the terms – customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) – and even used them interchangeably. Though they are closely related, they’re not exactly the same. CX is a broader concept that covers every interaction a customer has with your brand. Conversely, UX focuses on how a user interacts with your app or website. Understanding the differences between the two can help your online business create better experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and boost loyalty. Let’s find out how.
CX Explained: What It Is and Why It Matters
Customer experience can refer to the overall perception a customer has of your company based on all interactions they’ve had with it. It can include marketing, customer support, sales, and other touchpoints throughout their buying journey. Customer experience is a reflection of how customers feel about their experience with your brand at every stage of their relationship with it.
All interactions and touchpoints matter. Whether your customers are browsing your website or interacting with customer support, it’ll contribute to their overall customer experience. Customer experience goes beyond point of sale and customer service. It is built on the sum of all interactions a customer has with your business, including post-purchase interactions, etc.
Positive customer experience matters for several reasons, including increased customer loyalty, repeat business, word-of-mouth referrals, brand reputation, and more.
Why Customer Service Plays a Role in CX
Customer service plays an important role in customer experience for several reasons. It directly impacts how a customer feels about your brand through their interactions with customer support teams, etc. As many as 63% of customers would switch to your competitor after a couple of negative customer support experiences.
Addressing their issues, offering prompt assistance, and displaying genuine care can shape their overall perception of your brand. Eventually, this leads to increased customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth recommendations, and customer loyalty.
- Direct interactions: For a customer, customer service is often the primary point of contact with a company, especially when they have any queries or concerns regarding your product or service. This makes customer service an essential element in shaping their experience.
- Building loyalty and trust: When your customers feel their needs are being prioritised and sense a willingness from the customer support team to resolve issues promptly, it builds trust, fosters loyalty, and encourages repeat purchases.
- Positive perception: You can leave a positive impression of your brand and enhance their overall shopping experience by providing quick and reliable service to your customers. Almost 67% of customers expect their issues to be resolved within three hours.
- Resolving issues quickly: Proactively addressing their issues and preventing negative experiences and dissatisfaction from escalating can also help you minimise customer churn rates. Customer service is not only essential to address complaints and problems but also to prevent damaging customer relationships.
- Competitive advantage: Prioritising customer service can help you differentiate your brand from competitors, gain an edge in the market, and attract more customers.
- Brand reputation: Providing high-quality customer service consistently can contribute to a strong brand reputation, which can help you attract more customers and retain the existing ones. For 63% of customers, bad customer experience leads to negative word-of-mouth marketing. It means you lose not only the existing customers but also the potential ones.
- Generates referrals: Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your products or services to others. Positive customer experience can help you boost word-of-mouth marketing and bring in referral business.
- Provides valuable feedback: Analysing customer service interactions can help you gather feedback and insights about products, services, and customer pain points. You can use this feedback to improve the overall customer experience.
What is User Experience (UX)
User experience refers to interactions end users have with your product or service instead of overall interactions with your brand across multiple touchpoints. It’s a relatively broad term that includes a user’s emotions, interactions, perceptions, and other factors that influence their interactions with a product or service.
User experience can reflect a product’s ease of use, relevance, accessibility, efficiency, integrations into user workflows, and overall user satisfaction. The main goal of user experience is to create an intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable experience for the end user.
A good UX can lead to more customers choosing your product over those of your competitors. A good user experience will improve user satisfaction and ensure retention, higher engagement, and business success. In fact, 88% of online customers won’t return to a website after a poor experience and 90% of users stop using an app due to poor performance.
Your UX strategy should ensure that users have a positive experience before, during, and after they use the product. To do so, you’ll have to understand their behaviours, expectations, and pain points. It’ll enable you to design solutions that are not only more targeted but also accessible and efficient. Studies show that boosting the UX development budget by 10% can increase conversions by 83%.
CX vs. UX: How Do They Differ?
The table below highlights the key differences between customer experience and user experience.
| Customer experience | User experience |
| It refers to a customer’s overall perception of and relationship with your brand over time. | It can be defined as the experience a user has after a single interaction with your product or service. |
| CX focuses on the entire customer journey, from awareness to loyalty. | It focuses on interactions with a particular product, app, or website. |
| The goal of CX is to build brand loyalty and customer relationships, and ensure customer satisfaction in the long run. | The primary goal of UX is to ensure a product’s ease of use, accessibility, and effectiveness. |
| CX comes with a broad scope that involves marketing, sales, and customer support services. | The scope of UX is specific and limited to design, usability, performance, and efficiency. |
| For example, a seamless shopping experience, including checkout, ads, and support. | An example of UX includes a website with an intuitive design and smooth navigation. |
| It helps retain customers, attract new ones, improve brand reputation, and increase revenue. | UX helps reduce friction, enhance usability, and improve engagement. |
The Power of CX and UX Working Together
When CX and UX work together, they create a holistic approach to designing and improving a customer’s journey across all touchpoints. Combining a broad understanding of customer needs from customer experience with a comprehensive user interaction design and expertise in UX can help you ensure a positive and seamless experience. Eventually, user experience is considered a key element of CX strategy, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Improving both CX and UX by addressing customer pain points and creating an intuitive and user-friendly experience can help you enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can enable your teams to collaborate on customer journey maps. It will help them identify critical moments of interactions and develop solutions that optimise overall experiences.
CX teams can share valuable customer data, feedback, and insights with UX teams, which will enable them to make informed decisions and ensure user needs are met. For example, the CX team identifies common pain points during the checkout process of an eCommerce website after analysing customer surveys. They share this information with the UX team, based on which they redesign the checkout page for better flow and improved usability. Similarly, UX teams can proactively communicate any potential usability issues identified during design to the CX team. This will help prevent customer frustrations in the future.
Enhanced customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty, and improved business performance are some of the biggest benefits of CX and UX working together. Creating a more positive overall experience means repeat business, customer advocacy, more sales, less customer churn, and better operational efficiency.
Steps to Boost CX and UX
Here are some effective ways to improve CX and UX:
- User Research
The first step to improving CX and UX involves understanding your target audience. Conduct in-depth research through surveys, usability tests and interviews, and analyse user behaviour, needs, preferences, and pain points. It can help you design solutions that truly meet your customers’ needs.
- Map Customer Journeys
Map out the complete customer journey. It can help you identify potential pain points across all touchpoints and pinpoint areas that need improvement.
- Customer Profiling
You can tailor experiences based on specific customer segments and their needs by creating detailed customer personas.
- Customer Feedback
Create a feedback loop to gather customer feedback extensively to improve the experience continuously. You can do so through reviews, surveys, feedback forms, and other methods.
- Personalisation
Use targeted content, recommendations, and interactions based on customer data and feedback to deliver personalised experiences. Tailoring interactions to individual users can help you create a more relevant and engaging experience. A personalised and well-designed user experience can boost sales and website conversions by up to 20%.
- Accessible and Intuitive Designs
Incorporate inclusive design principles to ensure your products and services are accessible to all users. 75% of customers will judge your website’s credibility based on aesthetics. Make sure you design solutions with empathy for the user by prioritising their needs and pain points at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The user interface should be easy to understand and navigate, with clear CTAs and consistent visual cues.
- Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Optimise your app or website for different screen sizes and make them more responsive. It’ll help you provide a seamless omnichannel experience and ensure consistent interactions across all channels.
- Employee Training
Make sure your employees understand the importance of good customer and user experience by providing them with relevant training to deliver excellent customer service and support. You should also ensure that all departments within your organisation are aligned around the goal of delivering a positive customer experience.
- Proactive Support
Offer extensive self-service options in addition to excellent customer support to address customer issues and concerns promptly and effectively. In fact, 55% of customers prefer self-serve customer service channels as compared to speaking to a representative from customer support.
- Data Analytics
To make more informed decisions regarding enhancing CX and UX in the future, use data analytics to track key metrics, identify trends, and measure the impact of design changes.
How Shiprocket Checkout Improves CX and UX
Shiprocket Checkout is designed to help online businesses like yours simplify, streamline, and speed up the checkout process. With advanced features, we can help you minimise friction points and convert customers in just 40 seconds.
- One-click, smarter checkout solution for a seamless and delightful shopping experience
- Multiple payment gateway options
- Comprehensive data analytics for identifying trends and patterns
- Over 10,000 discount configurations to drive more conversions
- Personalised checkout solutions
With a quick and user-friendly checkout process for eCommerce businesses, we ensure faster checkout, reduced cart abandonment rate, real-time shipping calculations, easy integrations, and personalised experiences, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, both CX and UX shape how people feel about your brand. A smooth UX keeps users engaged, while a great CX ensures they stay loyal. If you want to build lasting relationships with customers, you need to focus on both. Prioritising UX makes interactions effortless, and strengthening CX creates a seamless journey from start to finish. When done right, they work together to boost customer satisfaction, retention, and business growth.
