Customer experience vs. user experience: What's the difference?
Customer and user experiences sound similar, but they serve different purposes. Together, they can improve organizations' relationships with customers.
While the terms user and customer might be interchangeable for many organizations, customer experience and user experience are not the same.
Customer experience focuses more on people -- mainly an organization's customers or prospects -- while user experience focuses more on products and services. Despite their differences, which include their overall goals and target audiences, organizations need both customer and user experience strategies to retain happy, loyal customers and ensure their products deliver what's promised.
What is customer experience?
The customer experience, or CX, encompasses all the ways a person can interact with an organization -- including marketing, sales, customer service and success teams. Overall, organizations want to ensure their customers have positive experiences, which include successful marketing campaigns or proper support if issues arise.
CX encompasses the entire customer journey, which is a map that organizations can follow to understand all touchpoints where customers can interact with them. These touchpoints include the following:
Awareness. The customer discovers the brand.
Consideration. The customer compares one brand to one or more competitors.
Purchase/decision. The customer buys a product or service.
Retention. The organization continues to engage with customers to ensure they continue to buy its products or services.
Advocacy. Customers share their experiences with the brand in online reviews, on social media or with friends and family.
Each phase of the customer journey affects CX.
What is user experience?
User experience, or UX, is narrower than CX. It specifically applies to how a user interacts with a product or service, like a website, software or app. However, when UX was first coined as a term, its definition was closer to CX and focused on all aspects of a user's interactions with an organization. Over time, CX took on this definition, while UX came to focus on a person using an organization's product or service.
Ultimately, UX is part of CX. However, while anyone in a customer-facing position plays a role in CX, UX is more the domain of designers, product developers, engineers and other product-facing positions.
Ultimately, UX is part of CX.
Differences between customer experience and user experience
While CX and UX can complement one another, they differ regarding their goals, target audiences, metrics and job roles.
1. Goals
CX's goal is to ensure organizations can find and retain customers while offering them positive experiences throughout their journeys, while UX's goal is to ensure users can easily use and access a company's website, product or service.
For example, a CX team could include marketers who start a new campaign to draw in a new demographic to their brand. This leads to sales reps closing deals with those new customers, and customer service teams helping them adopt the product or service as smoothly as possible.
On the other hand, a UX team could include developers who want to release a new product or service. They would work with engineers to help build and test the product and designers to ensure it is easy to use and looks appealing to users.
2. Audience
CX teams focus on the organization's target audience, which includes all its current and potential customers. This includes everyone along the customer journey, from people who see an ad or marketing campaign to people who decide to make a purchase.
UX teams focus on existing customers, who actively use the brand's products or services. While this audience can range from brand new customers to those who have been with the business for a long time, the brand's offerings should meet or exceed their expectations, which is what the UX team aims to do.
UX falls under CX in the post-purchase stages of the customer journey.
Each metric represents something different. For example, NPS measures a customer's loyalty to the business, including how likely a customer is to recommend its products or services to a friend, while CLV measures the total revenue a business might get from a customer's account. Together, all these metrics measure the value that the business brings to the customer and vice versa.
UX teams measure UX with metrics about the product or service itself, including page load speeds and adoption rates. These metrics let UX teams know how their product functions and how many people adopt it. For example, if it takes users too long to complete a task on the brand's website or the page takes too long to load, the adoption rate will likely be lower. User acceptance testing and usability testing can help UX teams evaluate these metrics.
4. Job roles
CX teams comprise marketers, sales representatives, customer service agents and other roles in customer-facing positions. Their priority is the customer, whether it's getting a prospect's attention, completing a sale or ensuring existing customers are satisfied with the business. CX teams want to ensure customers have a positive overall experience with the brand during every step of their journey.
UX teams include designers, engineers and other product team members. These roles prioritize the product or service, including how users interact with it and getting their opinions on what they like and what to improve upon.
Overall, CX focuses more on the customer, while UX focuses on the product or service.
Examples of CX vs. UX in practice
Examples of CX in practice include the following:
Research to map out buyer personas and customer journey maps.
Communication with customers through surveys, chats, phone calls, etc. to learn how they feel about the business and its offerings.
Addressing customers' issues when they arise through customer service channels.
Collaborating with other teams and departments to ensure CX is consistent across channels and aligns with overall business goals.
Tracking common CX metrics for growth, churn, satisfaction, customer loyalty, etc.
Examples of UX in practice include the following:
Brainstorming and designing websites, services, digital products, etc.
Creating prototypes and mockups for different design ideas.
Conducting usability testing to see how actual users interact with the offering.
Gathering insights from actual users to improve, change or update the product or service.
Continuously testing and updating the offering based on user feedback to ensure it operates smoothly and users have a positive experience.
How CX and UX work together
Overall, CX and UX have a shared purpose: to ensure a brand's customers have a positive experience. To glean the most success from both strategies, CX and UX teams can collaborate and share customer feedback to see what works and what doesn't within the customer journey. CX teams could also make a point to include UX teams in the customer journey during the purchase and post-sale phases.
Together, CX and UX teams can identify pain points that customers experience when they interact with the business or its products, and aim to create a seamless, positive experience for all.
Michaela Goss is the senior site editor for TechTarget's customer experience and content management sites. She joined TechTarget as a writer and editor in 2018.
