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Customer Journey vs Customer Experience (CX): Definitions & Differences

  • Understanding customer journey and customer experience is essential for business success, as 73% of consumers prioritize experience in their purchasing decisions.
  • Customer journey maps touchpoints, while customer experience delves into emotional and psychological experiences.
  • Commonalities between them include customer focus, a holistic approach, continuous improvement, emotional connection, value creation, and data-driven decision-making.
  • Differences include the focus (functional vs. emotional), scope (linear vs. holistic), measurement (metrics vs. qualitative/quantitative), and outcome (improving conversions vs. enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty).
  • Customer journey examples include the steps customers take in purchasing or engaging with a brand, while customer experience examples illustrate the emotional aspects of those interactions.
  • Both concepts are crucial for shaping customer relationships, and businesses should continuously monitor and enhance them to drive growth.

cx vs customer journey

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In the ever-evolving business landscape, understanding the factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions is crucial to success. This article will focus on two such factors - Customer Journey and Customer Experience (CX). These terms, while sometimes used interchangeably, have distinct meanings and implications for businesses. Our aim is to unpack these concepts, highlighting their differences and how they can be leveraged for effective customer engagement strategies.

Why is this important? Consider this: a recent survey revealed that 73% of consumers consider experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, ranking just behind price and product quality. This statistic underscores the critical role that both Customer Journey and CX play in shaping consumer behavior and driving business success. Join us as we delve deeper into these intriguing concepts, offering insights that could revolutionize your approach to customer engagement.

Before we begin, a little aside: We won't be covering customer experience and its benefits, customer journeys, or customer journey maps in this article, but you can find more information about these topics by reading these posts:

  • What Is Customer Experience?
  • Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey vs customer experience: the similarities

While they each represent different aspects of the customer's interaction with a brand, they share several commonalities. The customer journey maps the various touchpoints a customer encounters with a company or brand, while customer experience delves into the emotional and psychological experiences during these interactions. Despite their unique focuses, there is a significant overlap between these two concepts, underscoring their shared objective of enhancing the customer's relationship with a brand.

  • Customer Focus : Both the customer journey and customer experience revolve around the customer. They emphasize understanding the customer's needs, desires, and behaviors to enhance their interaction with a brand or product.
  • Holistic Approach : Both concepts take into account the entire spectrum of a customer's interaction with a company, from the initial point of contact through the process of engagement to long-term relationships. They don't focus on isolated incidents but rather the complete experience. With 1 in 3 customers stating that they will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, the importance of a comprehensive approach to customer engagement cannot be overstated.
  • Continuous Improvement : Your customer journey and customer experience require continuous monitoring and improvement. Companies need to consistently evaluate how customers are interacting with their brand and make necessary changes to improve these interactions.
  • Emotional Connection : Both concepts recognize the importance of emotions in shaping customer behavior. They understand that a positive emotional connection can lead to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.
  • Value Creation : Customer journey and customer experience both aim to create value for the customer. Whether it's by solving a problem, providing entertainment, or fulfilling a need, the ultimate goal is to provide something of value that enhances the customer's life.
  • Data-Driven : Both concepts rely heavily on data to understand customer behavior and preferences. This data is then used to make informed decisions to enhance the customer's experience or journey.

Customer journey vs customer experience: the differences

Now that we've covered the key similarities between customer journey and customer experience let's delve into the differences that set these two concepts apart.

  • Focus: Your customer journey refers to the series of steps a customer goes through when interacting with your company, from initial awareness through to purchase and beyond. It focuses on the functional aspects of this process. On the other hand, customer experience is about how a customer feels during these interactions. It delves into the emotional and psychological experiences that can shape a customer's perception of a brand.
  • Scope: A customer journey is typically linear, mapping out a specific path that customers take when engaging with a brand. It might include touchpoints like seeing an ad, visiting a website, or making a purchase. In contrast, customer experience is more holistic and takes into account every interaction a customer has with a brand across all channels and touchpoints over time.
  • Measurement: Customer journey is often evaluated using metrics like conversion rates or click-through rates at different stages of the journey. In contrast, customer experience is usually measured through qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics such as customer satisfaction score or Net Promoter Score ( NPS )
  • Outcome: The goal of analyzing your customer journey is often to identify bottlenecks or pain points that can be addressed to improve conversions or sales. The aim of understanding customer experience, on the other hand, is to enhance overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can lead to long-term business growth.

Customer journey vs customer experience: examples

So, what does all of this mean in practice? Let's take a look at some examples illustrating the difference between customer experience and customer journey.

Customer Journey Examples:

  • A customer sees an ad for a product on Instagram, clicks on it, visits the company's website, reads reviews, adds the product to their cart, and completes the purchase. This entire process represents the customer journey.
  • A potential client hears about a consulting firm from a colleague, visits the firm's website, downloads a whitepaper, schedules a consultation, and eventually signs a contract. Each of these steps is part of the customer's journey with the firm.

Customer Experience Examples:

  • A customer walks into a store and is greeted by friendly staff, finds the store layout easy to navigate, gets helpful advice from a salesperson, and leaves feeling satisfied with their purchase. This positive experience can lead to repeat visits and word-of-mouth referrals.
  • A user downloads an app, finds the interface intuitive, enjoys its features, encounters no bugs or crashes, and receives prompt customer support when needed. This overall user experience can influence the user's ongoing engagement with the app and their willingness to recommend it to others.

While the customer journey focuses on the path customers take, the customer experience centers on their feelings at each step of that journey. Both play crucial roles in shaping the customer's relationship with a brand.

Your company’s customer journey and customer experience are two sides of the same coin, with each concept complementing the other. By understanding the key differences between these concepts, companies can take a more comprehensive approach to improving their interactions with customers and creating long-term value for their brands. By continuously monitoring and enhancing both the customer journey and customer experience, businesses can build strong relationships with their customers and drive business growth.

Sources used:

  • Future of customer experience
  • Customer experience statistics

Sources Last Checked: October 27th, 2023

cx vs customer journey

Shifa Rahaman

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cx vs customer journey

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cx vs customer journey

In many organizations, but not all, customer service is treated as part of the customer experience. Both are interested in driving customer satisfaction, but they focus on different parts of the customer journey to achieve it. So what are the key differences in customer service vs. customer experience? And why do both matter for your business?

Customer experience , or CX, is a holistic accounting of customers’ perceptions resulting from all their interactions with a business or brand, whether online or in-store. Customer experience involves customer experience management (CXM), which refers to strategies, technologies and practices for improving business results by creating an ideal experience for anyone interacting with a company. The overall customer experience focuses on meeting customer expectations and influencing the customer’s overall perception of products and solutions wherever they take place on the customer journey .

Alternatively, customer service refers to the actions that an organization takes to ensure that customers are satisfied with their products post-purchase. Customer service, which can also be called customer support or customer care , is much more customer-facing than many parts of customer experience. Providing great customer service involves making important decisions about pricing, branding, positioning, and use cases.

Customer-centric organizations should aim to excel at both customer experience and customer service. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to explore more deeply where the two are similar and where they differ.

Customer service vs. customer experience across the customer journey

The simplest key difference between CX and customer service is that CX is concerned with meeting customer needs during the entire customer journey. Customer service is focused on post-purchase. As such, CS is considered a subset of CX.

CX teams are concerned with both short-term tactics and long-term strategy . They are thinking about the holistic picture of the entire customer journey from awareness to consideration to purchase and post-purchase.

Customer journey mapping involves defining the touchpoints throughout the lifecycle of engagements with prospects and customers. A customer journey involves many touchpoints over the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. The assumptions behind customer journey mapping are that prospects or customers are being purposeful at each touchpoint—trying to solve a problem, answer a question, compare options, or cross something off a to-do list.

One way to think about the intersection of customer experience and customer service is to map out the marketing funnel. Doing so demonstrates how CX oversees the entire process, whereas customer service is activated for specific functions.

  • Awareness : This starts with the customer learning about the organization and its solutions, and potentially exploring competitors’ solutions. They might sign up for email messages or follow the organizations on social media .
  • Consideration : After they understand the value propositions, they may ask questions or do further research.
  • Purchase : When a customer is ready to make a purchase, customer service activates. The function helps customers with any questions when they are finalizing purchases and can facilitate the purchase if a customer cannot buy online or in-store.
  • Loyalty : The moments immediately after a purchase are incredibly important for generating customer loyalty. The customer service function helps ensure that customers know how to use the product they purchased. CS is also available to answer further questions or solve problems afterward. Companies often create customer success teams, which can be a part of customer service or the sales team, to provide tutorials and best practices on maximizing the use of a product. The goal is to help those customers use the product as quickly, simply and satisfactorily as possible.
  • Advocacy : Creating loyal customers unlocks the possibility that some of them tell people in their network about an organization’s products or even potentially laud the value of the customer experience it provides. Creating customer advocates helps the customer experience function perform better. That is because new prospects come into the funnel already ‘warmed’ by the positive sentiment from previous customers.

CX and CS tools

Both customer experience and customer service disciplines rely on valuable tools to maximize their value.

Key customer experience tools:

CX teams use tools that help them see and take strategic actions across the entire customer journey.

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) tools enable organizations to collect, track, and analyze data resulting from customer interactions across channels .
  • A/B test software , which can provide different messaging to website visitors to identify which resonates the most. CX teams, working directly with UX teams, can use software to create variations of a message and track which one leads to the most purchases or time that is spent on the site.
  • Dynamic recommendations for other products or accessories based on previous product purchases.

Key customer service tools:

While customer service teams will likely use the previously mentioned tools, some others are much more aligned with CS team roles and responsibilities.

  • Self-service chatbots that interact with customers to provide answers to their questions. Customer service interactions are increasingly powered by automation and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Web-based knowledge bases where users can find articles, FAQs and videos to walk them through how to solve issues and use their products or services correctly.
  • A webpage that provides customers with multiple ways to reach the organization to talk to customer support representatives.
  • Proactive email or text messages to customers who inquire how the product is performing and provide instructions and tips on how to use it.

CX and CS metrics are different

Both customer experience and customer service involve measurement of their activities to ensure that they are successful in meeting customer needs. Many revolve around capturing customer feedback and measuring real-time responses. And while some common KPIs relate to both disciplines, others are more closely aligned with one than another.

Key customer experience metrics:

  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) : CSAT is the percentage of respondents who claim to be satisfied (4) or very satisfied (5) in surveys that are offered after a touchpoint experience.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) : NPS gauges how likely a person is to recommend a company or its products to others. People are asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they would recommend it to others. Scores 6 or less are subtracted from the number of 9s and 10s to create a percentage. It is best considered a customer experience metric because it can occur during any part of the customer journey.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) : After a touch, the customer is asked how easy or difficult it was to accomplish their goal, rating the difficulty from 1 (easy) to 5 or 7 (difficult).
  • Customer retention rate : Maintaining high customer retention rates demonstrates a successful customer experience function and enhances the bottom line by increasing customer lifetime value. Increasing customer loyalty and limiting churn means that customers are either satisfied with the product or solution or have yet to find a good replacement.

Key customer service metrics:

  • First Response Time (FRT) : How long it takes for customer support teams to respond to a customer problem or request. It is a sign of good customer service for an organization to be able to respond immediately to a customer issue, whether on social media, email, chat room, or phone call.
  • Average Resolution Time (ART) : This involves how long it takes from the beginning of a customer service interaction until the issue is resolved.
  • Issue resolution rate : This relates to how many customer service issues are successfully addressed and resolved. While a customer service team cannot expect to resolve every issue, failure to solve almost all issues is a sign of an issue.

CS and CX together ensure that organizations are caring for customers

Today’s consumers are more discerning and have more options than ever. To delight your customers and remain competitive, you should personalize every touchpoint across the entire customer experience (CX). True personalization at scale involves all aspects of your business, from marketing and messaging to supply chain, sales, and service.

IBM puts customer experience strategy at the center of your business. Our deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, and data and AI consulting can help you harness best-in-class technologies to drive transformation across the customer experience.

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What is CX? Customer experience management 101

cx vs customer journey

If you don't know what customer experience management is, that's ok—I've been placed on enough unreasonably long holds to know that lots of major companies don't know very much about their CX, either. 

Every interaction a person has with a brand is part of the larger customer experience, or CX. It's the CX manager's job to strategically plan these interactions to not only give the customer what they need in the moment, but also to make a positive enough impression to move them in the direction of making or renewing a purchase.

Table of contents: 

What is customer experience (CX)?

Why is cx important, customer experience vs. customer service, the 5 stages of the cx lifecycle, examples of good cx, how to improve customer experience, cx metrics and kpis, how automation enhances the cx process.

Think of CX as a long, winding conversation between your brand and your customers. It's every interaction they have with you, from that first curious click to...well, it never really ends, does it? The conversation goes on as long as they're a customer—and sometimes even after that.

But it's not just about the sale—it's about making the whole boogie worthwhile. That means whatever advertising a customer sees, the interactions they have with your team, how your website or app functions, and even the emails you send all have an impact on their experience.

What is customer experience management?

Every dip and twirl a customer has with a company , from the first time they learn about the brand to the day they become a full-fledged brand loyalist , counts as part of the larger CX journey.

Within that journey, there are a number of sub-experiences with names and abbreviations that can feel confusingly similar to CX. Here's a quick rundown to help you keep these different concepts separate as you venture further into the CX management process:

Customer service is one example of a customer experience that takes place in the later phases of the customer journey—but not all CX interactions have to do with customer service.

User experience (UX) is another subset of the CX lifecycle that describes the customer's experience of using the product or service itself. Typically, UX takes place during the retention and loyalty-building phases of the CX journey.

Customer relationship management (CRM) deals primarily with the collection and organization of information about customers . Often, CX decisions are made based on an understanding of the customer that's drawn from the data collected as part of a company's CRM . Although the differences between CX and CRM are nuanced, they are two distinct processes.

Note that it's not just human-to-human interactions that count as part of the customer experience. A customer service call is an obvious example of a CX interaction, but non-human brand interactions—like reading an ad, scanning a website, or downloading an app—are just as much a part of CX as any human conversation.

For example: have you ever come across a new app feature that left you asking, "Why would they think I needed that?" Many brands (especially in tech) make the mistake of planning decisions around what the product can do, rather than what the customer needs the product to do. Their scientists are so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they don't stop to think if they should . 

On the other side of the spectrum, have you ever had an app do something you needed before you even had a chance to realize you needed it? I'm looking at you, whoever made my phone start automatically importing verification codes from my texts—genius.

Both of these examples are parts of the customer experience, even though they don't include any direct human interactions.

If I haven't made it clear yet, CX matters—a lot. And it's not just about making your customers smile (though that's nice). It goes deeper, impacting your bottom line and your company's future. 

Here's how:

Increases sales and revenue: When customers have great experiences, they come back for more. This isn't rocket science; people like to buy from places that make them feel good.

Aids brand reputation: News travels fast. If a customer has a fantastic experience, they're likely to tell their friends. Those friends tell their friends, and before you know it, your brand is the talk of the town.

Boosts customer lifetime value: When customers stick around longer and keep buying, their value increases over time. It's simple math.

Reduces customer support costs: If you're doing CX right, you've answered your customers' most pressing questions before they even have them. That means you spend less time and money solving problems.

Remember the classic documentary Monsters, Inc. ? Good CX means you're capturing customer happiness, not their screams of terror. It turns every interaction into a powerhouse of goodwill and trust, attracting more customers and boosting your bottom line rather than sending them running for the hills. 

Let's clear up a common misconception: when talking about customer experience and customer service, you're really comparing an overarching strategy (CX) to one of its key elements (customer service).

Customer service is your "fixer." It's reactive. It deals with issues as they arise and does its best to put things right. In short, it's a crucial part of your interaction with your customers, but it's not the only interaction a customer has with your brand. 

Customer experience, on the other hand, is the whole shebang. CX encompasses every single interaction a customer has with your brand—from the first ad they see to the service they get after making a purchase. It's proactive, ensuring every touchpoint is positive, even before issues occur.

So, while customer service is part of a customer's experience, it's just a cog in the grand machine that is CX. 

We'd all like to believe that our experiences in life are unique, but when it comes to the CX lifecycle, we're all disappointingly unoriginal in how we move through the customer journey. Though different purchasing processes will feel different to us when we're the customer, all of our behaviors and interactions will still ultimately map to the same five-stage cycle—which, when you find yourself on the CX management side of things, makes life a lot easier.

The CX lifecycle: attract/reach, acquire, convert, retain, and build loyalty.

The five stages are named for the primary focus that a CX manager should have when interacting with customers in that phase.

Attract/reach: In the earliest stage of the CX journey, the brand's goal is simply to make prospective customers aware of their existence and the products and services they offer. 

Acquire: Once people are aware of a product, the goal is to acquire their dedicated interest. The objective here shouldn't be to actually make a sale, but to create a desire to learn more about the product.

Convert: After a period of general interest, it's time to strike with the hard sell to convert prospects into actual customers by pushing them toward making a purchase.

Retain: Customer service and user experience come into play during the retention phase, during which the company's job is to deliver on the customer's expectations in order to keep them from switching to competitors and to encourage recurring purchases, longer subscriptions, and upgrades.

Build loyalty: Lastly, CX managers have the opportunity to convert repeat customers into brand advocates by generating true enthusiasm and loyalty for their product.

You know that feeling you get when you think about a brand, and only positive memories come to mind? That's the hallmark of good CX. It's the seamless blend of your needs being anticipated and met, often before you know you have them. Here are some examples of brands that do just that.

Spotify Wrapped

Remember when Spotify introduced its annual Wrapped feature? Even though you may have been slightly embarrassed that you listened to the same Taylor Swift song 758 times (in one month), it was still a deeply personal gesture. That's CX in action. It made users feel understood and appreciated, and it got people talking about the brand.

Disney Parks

There's a reason Disney is called "The Happiest Place on Earth." Disney Parks are renowned for their customer experience , and it's not hard to see why. The staff, or "cast members," are fully committed to making your visit magical. Every detail—from whatever addictive aromas they're pumping into the air to the enthusiasm of the characters—is designed to create a memorable and happy experience. This even extends to their app, which helps you plan your day, skip lines, and order food. The result? Guests who leave with happy memories and a strong desire to return.

BarkBox , a subscription service delivering uniquely curated treats, toys, and gifts for dogs, is an example of a brand taking CX to heart. Their designated "Happy Team" is a clear demonstration of this commitment. The Happy Team focuses exclusively on ensuring that each interaction with the company is positive, memorable, and effortless for the customer.

The basic steps to building a customer experience strategy are simple:

Understand your customer

Identify your customer's needs

Create a plan to satisfy those needs

Listen to your customer

Ensure alignment across all channels

Unfortunately, "understand your customer" is about as specific and helpful as telling someone to fold in the cheese . We need more info: how do we go about understanding the customer and their needs? How does one fold in the cheese?

1. Build a customer profile

A solid first step for most customer-facing processes—not just CX—is to profile your prospective customers. Marketers, product managers, and user experience designers all frequently begin their process with some type of ideal customer profile , or ICP.

An ICP gathers key demographic data and characteristics about your customer in one place, where it can be used to help teams better understand who their target customers are. An ICP for any team typically includes:

A basic background

Demographics (age, gender, income, job title, location, education, family, etc.)

Common challenges or pain points

Objectives or goals

For example, if you invented a real-life Rosey the Robot , your ideal customer profile might be George Jetson, a middle-class working father who doesn't have the time to keep up with his house chores while also working overtime to fund his wife's inconvenient wallet-snatching habit. This is the information you would use to create the basic structure of your ICP. 

Beyond these basics, ICPs for different processes and different product types may include different pieces of information. For example, the CX team will want to add lifestyle information, like the length of George's commute and the fact that his car folds up into a briefcase. The user experience team, on the other hand, won't care very much about what George is up to outside of his direct interactions with Rosey.

2. Get in your customer's head with an empathy map

If an ICP is your customer's resume, an empathy map is their personal statement. The customer profile helps you understand who your customer is, but the empathy map helps you step into their shoes and dig into what they say, think, do, and feel.

The example empathy map below captures a potential to-do list app customer named Andrea, who struggles to keep up with all of her tasks in her personal and professional life.

An example of an empathy map, with sectors dedicated to what the target customer says, thinks, does, and feels.

We can pretty safely assume that Andrea feels overwhelmed by the number of tasks she has to juggle and frustrated with her current management system. But as we fill in her empathy map, we start to tap into her experiences with a little more nuance—not only is Andrea overwhelmed, but she also thinks that no one else struggles in the same way she does. In highlighting this, we've uncovered an opportunity to connect with her more strongly with messaging that acknowledges her self-consciousness and reassures her that she's by no means alone in her struggle. 

As a CX manager, creating an empathy map to be used by all customer-facing departments can also help you sync your team's messaging to provide a frictionless, unified customer experience through every stage of the customer's journey.

3. Create a customer journey map

A customer's journey is everything that happens between "Oh, that's kinda cool" and "Hey, you should try this." Every ad they see, every Instagram story, blog post, newsletter mail-out, website visit, and customer service call. And your customer journey map is a visual guide that shows all the stops and interactions along the way.

While an empathy map gives you insights into what might be going on in a customer's head at any given point in time, the customer journey map plots a specific trail of breadcrumbs a customer might follow through their interactions with your business. 

Let's take Tesla, for example. Here's how their customer journey map might look:

Awareness: A potential customer sees an ad or an article online that sparks their interest in Tesla.

Consideration: That customer does some research, is impressed by Tesla's environmental record, and decides to take a test drive. 

Conversion: After a great test drive, the customer hops online, and within a few clicks, they're able to order a brand-new Tesla. 

Retention: Proud of their new car, the customer then joins an online community with other owners to stay on top of new developments and software updates. 

Brand loyalty: Happy with their car, its growing list of features, and the community, that customer not only pre-orders a new model but also shares their excitement with friends and family. 

There are a number of different formats and approaches to creating a customer journey map , so once you're ready to create one, take some time to dig into the specifics.

4. Implement customer feedback

There's no one better suited to tell you how you're doing than your customers. Their feedback, whether it's positive or negative, is a gold mine of information that can help you shape your CX strategy. 

Open lines of communication with your customers and provide multiple channels where they can voice their opinions and experiences. But just listening isn't enough. You gotta do something about it. 

By adjusting your services or products or even just changing how you post on social media, you're telling your customers that you value what they have to say. Not only will this help you build better relationships with them, but it'll also make your brand stand out as a business that actually cares. 

5. Ensure a unified experience

It doesn't matter if your customers are scrolling through social media, reading a blog post, stepping into your store, or dialing your number. They need to get the same vibe, the same message, the same level of service—always. 

Every interaction a customer has with your brand should be like catching up with an old friend—familiar and comfortable.

This consistent, unified experience across all channels is what we call an omnichannel approach . The goal is to make the customer journey easy (like Sunday morning). It reduces confusion, builds trust, and creates a genuine connection between your brand and your customers. 

Much to any automation enthusiast's chagrin, a CX management strategy isn't something you can "set and forget." Customer experience managers need to select and measure key performance indicators that quantify how successful different features, products, and experiences have been. 

If you're lucky enough to have customers who are so clearly satisfied that you can see it without tracking metrics, that's great—it means that you're doing something so well that it's left an obvious positive impression on your customers. I hate to be the one to tell you this, though: you still need to collect and track metrics. When you're introducing several different updates, new customer support features, existing customer discounts, and other CX-improving factors, there's no way to determine which of these things has contributed to your success (or to reliably build on it) unless you're quantifying your progress with key performance indicators (KPIs). 

There are four main KPIs that managers use to measure CX :

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Net promoter score (nps), customer lifetime value (clv).

You've seen customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys a million times—at the end of product purchases, subscription cancellations, and even sometimes at the end of a restaurant meal. After you've finished paying and you're just about ready to move on to your next task, you get the question: how satisfied were you with your experience today?

By asking customers to boil their overall satisfaction down to a single number, you make it possible to understand what your average customer satisfaction is, how many customers fall into each satisfaction range, and more. CSAT surveys frequently address the overall customer experience, but you can also send them out to get customer perspectives on individual features and interactions to see what's working and what's not.

If you also collect demographic data for your survey respondents, you can take this one step further to determine that, say, your average customer satisfaction rating is a 6, but that women ages 35-44 consistently give it a 10. You can hone future marketing, customer service, and sales decisions using feedback from real customers.

CSAT data is also used to calculate another commonly used metric called the Net Promoter Score , or NPS. After you've collected your CSAT responses, label customers with 1-6 satisfaction "detractors," those with 9-10 satisfaction "promoters," and those in between "passives" or "neutrals." Determine what percentage of your total survey population is made up of each group, then subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters—the resulting figure is your Net Promoter Score.

How to calculate Net Promoter Score: subtract negative reviewers from positive reviewers to find NPS.

If you run a coffee shop, the intern who comes in every morning to place their six-person team's daily order is going to be a lot more valuable to you than customers who drop in to order their own coffee every once in a while. The intern has a higher customer lifetime value (CLV, or customer LTV) than an average customer because their orders are more expensive and they place them more frequently.

Customer lifetime value measures the total worth of a customer's business over the course of their entire relationship with a company. Calculate CLV by multiplying the average cost of the customer's regular order or recurring subscription by the number of purchases they make in a year. Multiply this number by the number of years you can reasonably expect the customer to continue to patronize your business to find the total lifetime value of that customer.

As an equation, that will look like this:

(C x O) x Y = CLV

C = cost of the order

O = number of orders in a year

Y = number of years you expect the person to remain a customer

CLV is intended to be a rough estimate, not a very specific or accurate number, so don't get too bogged down in the mathematical details.

The last CX metric on our list is also often the most stressful: customer churn rate, or the rate at which you're losing customers.

To calculate churn, divide the number of customers lost in a particular time period (e.g., a fiscal quarter) by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that same time period. Multiply your result by 100 to get a percentage value—this is your churn rate for that quarter.

How to calculate churn rate: customers lost divided by total number customers at the beginning of the time period.

Churn rate isn't as applicable for regular consumer purchases, so the coffee shop owner in our CLV example likely wouldn't use it to track their CX strategy. Typically, churn rate is more important for companies that work with clients long-term, since the loss of a long-term contract will have a larger impact than the loss of an individual customer.

Automation doesn't enhance the CX process so much as a lack of automation makes the CX process virtually impossible. 

Think about how little else you would be able to accomplish if you had to collect all of the data necessary to calculate the metrics above, personally field customer phone calls and emails, and run the company's support chat. You'd burn out completely before you even got your CX strategy off the ground.

Automation makes it possible to perform customer experience functions like:

Capturing and nurturing potential leads

Tracking customer interactions

Collecting customer feedback

Handling simple customer service tasks

Organizing customer feedback records in a central location

The more you automate, the more time you have to focus on your customers. The more time and attention you give your customers, the happier they'll be.

But you don't have to take my word for it —check out the many ways brands like BarkBox , JustReachOut , and Orchard automate their customer experience processes, and see if you can find some inspiration for automations you can add to your own workflow.

Related articles:

Customer journey mapping 101 (with free templates)

Why the product experience should be front and center in eCommerce

Why everyone should spend time in customer service

How to build an effective customer support knowledge base

This article was originally published in May 2022 and has since been updated with contributions from Michael Kern. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

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What Is Customer Experience? Definition, Examples, & Tools

Discover why investing in customer experience increases customer loyalty and retention.

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Customer experience is how your users or potential users receive and interact with every touchpoint of your business . This goes beyond their interactions with your contact center or support team. The overall customer experience includes their perception of your brand, their experiences interacting with your digital touchpoints, and their whole journey throughout the customer lifecycle.

Investing in providing a great customer experience is a surefire way to improve brand loyalty, increase your bottom line and even cut extra business running costs. Collect valuable customer data in order to optimize your customers’ journeys, leading to positive customer experiences.

  • Investing in your customer experience leads to increased customer loyalty and retention.
  • There are four key components of customer experience—a customer-centric culture, well-designed touchpoints, consistent quality, and customer satisfaction.
  • Providing a quality customer experience means listening to your customers. Develop a system to collect, analyze and utilize customer feedback. This will help you find ways to reduce friction throughout your customer journey.

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience , or CX for short, is a term used to describe the customer interactions with your business across multiple levels. The experience they have with your customer support team is part of CX, but it isn’t everything. Customer experience could be anything from navigating your mobile app or website to consuming your marketing campaigns or directly using your product or service.

In other words, it’s the way a customer perceives the experiences they’ve had with your business and their overall impression of your brand. Positive client experiences and an affinity toward your brand make it more likely that people will keep coming back to you.

There are two types of customer experience— direct and indirect contact :

  • Direct customer experience refers to any interaction initiated by the customer. This includes the purchasing lifecycle, the experience of using the product or service, and any interaction they have with your team.
  • Indirect customer experience refers to the passive encounters with your company. This can mean your marketing efforts and also external advocacy or opposition, such as reviews, word-of-mouth communication, and external media coverage.

Customer experience (CX) vs. customer service (CS)

Customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably. This can be problematic, as customer service is only one part of the customer experience.

Customer service refers to the direct interactions between you and the customer. This happens when a customer requires assistance or help through any of the different communication channels you might offer. This could include:

  • Face-to-face interactions at a shop or office space
  • Over the phone
  • On social media
  • Through chatbots
  • On website support pages

Good CS is vital to harnessing a good customer experience, and it is only one part of a bigger concept. CX goes beyond customer service to practically every aspect of your organization. It’s more than how long it takes your team to follow up on a query or whether or not they manage to successfully address a complaint. It’s also about the design of your product, the music you play in your store, the reviews written about you on Yelp, and so much more.

Why CX is important for your business

Many companies see positive CX as a competitive differentiator. According to a report by Dimension Data , businesses that prioritize offering great customer experiences reported a 92% increase in loyal customers, an 84% increase in revenue, and cost savings of 79%.

Improving CX will reap many benefits for your business:

  • It helps you better understand your customers. To improve consumer experience, you first need to understand your customers and how they’re interacting with you. This means learning more about your users and their behaviors. With this information, you can offer more personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints to increase your value proposition.
  • It increases customer loyalty and retention. Customer experience is the single largest determinant of your retention rate . A good experience harnesses loyalty, which drives your retention rate. The higher your retention rate, the more your business grows. According to this Zendesk report , 61% of customers will end their engagement with a company after having a bad experience.
  • It improves your brand value. Positive perceptions of your company’s brand increase its value. The better your reputation as a brand, the more it’s worth. Understanding how your customers feel about your brand can help you take the steps needed to shift perceptions in a positive direction.
  • It attracts new customers. Customers are more likely to promote your brand after having good experiences. Satisfied customers are your best ambassadors and are likely to bring in new customers through word-of-mouth, posting good reviews, and leaving glowing recommendations. High-quality customer experience is a great way to increase your net promoter score (NPS).
  • It limits your costs. Gaining CX insight sheds light on what’s currently working and what isn’t. By understanding what isn’t working, you can stop spending money on the elements of your business that aren’t meeting customers expectations. Instead, you can spend on things that are addressing customer needs and pain points, and will ultimately drive revenue for your business.
  • It reduces customer complaints. Happy customers are less likely to complain, and fewer complaints mean less customer churn . It also means your contact center is spending less time putting out fires and more time nurturing quality relationships with your users.

What is CX? 4 key components

These four components give you a clearer picture of the quality of your customer interactions and how to improve them.

  • A customer-centric culture: Customer service should be a priority for every member of your team, not just your customer service center. You need to create a sense of ownership and shared responsibility toward creating positive customer experiences. This starts with creating positive employee experiences. Team members who feel valued and who understand the organization’s goals are more likely to embody them when interacting with the customer.
  • Well-designed touchpoints: What does your customer journey map look like? What are the likely customer perceptions at each touchpoint? Quality CX comes from ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized to satisfy customer needs. This includes things like intuitive web design, friendly customer service, and a well-designed product. Understanding your user journey is an ongoing process and by doing so, you’re more likely to ensure customer retention.
  • Consistent quality: Your company’s goal of delivering quality CX should always be front-of-mind for your team. A bad experience can have negative effects on your organization. Delivering good CX is an ongoing effort and must be delivered consistently if you’re going to retain customers and maintain your brand reputation.
  • Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is a good indicator of overall CX. It’s also one that can be measured quickly and easily at every touchpoint and interaction. It’s a great way to gauge the type of experience a customer has with you in real-time. The method used for measuring customer satisfaction should be accurate and provide you with the insights needed to constantly improve.

Traits of a quality customer experience

Offering quality customer experience involves understanding your customer needs and expectations and trying to satisfy them across all points in their journey with your business. To uncover some of the most tried and tested ways of doing this, Hotjar surveyed 2,000 CX professionals across different industries. According to the findings, quality customer experiences are characterized by:

  • Prioritizing listening to your customers: It’s impossible to provide quality CX without knowing what that means to your customers. To do this, you must start by listening to and learning about your customers’ encounters at each step of their journey.
  • Using feedback to learn more about your customers: By obtaining feedback from your customers, you learn more about who they are, what they need, and how they perceive your organization. Understanding this helps you provide a better experience and ultimately harness greater customer value.
  • Implementing systems for collecting, analyzing, and utilizing customer feedback: These systems should be designed in a way to make them easily replicated on a regular basis. This way, you ensure the information you’re receiving about your customers is consistent and accurate.
  • Finding ways to reduce friction throughout the customer journey: Understanding your buyer personas and their experiences helps you identify the points where they’re likely to abandon their journey. With this in mind, you’re able to take the right steps and implement initiatives to avoid these points of friction.

Examples of great customer experience

Companies like Burger King and Walmart provide us with great customer experience examples. With the help of Amplitude, they have used data to optimize the consumer experience.

How Burger King uses data to enrich CX

Burger King, one of the largest fast-food hamburger chains in the world, started working with Amplitude to harness the power of behavioral data to better understand their user experiences. One of the first things they noticed is how much customer expectations have changed—particularly, how important it is for customers to be able to order through their mobile phones.

With the data they collected, they noticed major pain points that they needed to address. They found many customers were dropping off the app when using the store locator function to find nearby outlets. This was due to slow loading times, which were off-putting for customers. Within a month, Burger King fixed the loading time and offered a better digital experience.

How Walmart enhanced their omnichannel customer experience

The multinational retail giant, Walmart, relied on customer data to foster great customer experience across the different channels available to their customers. The data they could access via Amplitude was crucial when they opted to consolidate their grocery and general merchandise apps in 2020.

They understood and monitored the different cohorts of both apps and their behaviors. They monitored this prior, during, and after app installation. They used information such as customer context, user cadence, key events, and the timing of those events to increase engagement and reduce churn.

The issues that define a bad customer experience

Just like good CX helps your business, negative experiences can hurt your business. It’s important to identify where things are going wrong and how you can avoid these obstacles.

According to Hotjar’s customer experience stats , the most common causes of frustration for customers are:

  • Long wait or response times
  • Employees not understanding their needs
  • Issues or queries that remain unresolved
  • Too much automation in the company’s processes
  • When the service customers receive is impersonal
  • Rude or angry employees

Interestingly, 12% of Hotjar’s survey respondents believed their customers experience no frustrations whatsoever with their company. While this would be a great reality to work toward, it’s immensely unlikely. This means that 12% of respondents are entirely unaware of the CX issues their company is facing. If such problems are left unchecked, they’re likely to get worse.

When customers interact with the digital touchpoints of your business, there are a number of other issues that can negatively affect customer experience if they aren’t addressed:

  • Slow loading times
  • Inconsistent messaging across social channels
  • Unresponsive mobile app design
  • Too many emails or notifications
  • Impersonal emails or notifications
  • Over-automation

What stops companies from tackling bad CX

Not all companies give the same level of importance to avoiding a bad customer experience. Very often, the problem is not denial, but the approach being taken to solve it. This inertia is normally caused by:

  • Expecting the CRM to do all the work. Many companies invest a lot of time, energy, and money into customer relationship management (CRM) software, assuming this will solve all of their CX problems. CRMs can provide you with great information about your customers (such as their history with customer service and product returns), but they don’t capture experience-specific information. This is where customer experience management comes in. CEM is focused on providing a more holistic view of customer experience. It also provides you with this information in real-time.
  • Fear of the data. Some business leaders are likely to avoid collecting data on customer experience because they don’t feel data-savvy enough. While the thought of carrying out data collection and analysis might feel daunting, avoiding it altogether can lead to bigger consequences further down the line.
  • Not having the right tools to understand and optimize your CX. When it comes to CX, data is your secret weapon. That’s why it’s important to invest in easy-to-use, self-service data analysis tools that will help you obtain the most accurate data and know what to do with it.

Tools to help create better user experiences

There are a number of different solutions available to help you enhance your CX.

With Amplitude Analytics you can utilize tools like behavioral analysis , persona identification, and engagement tracking to create unrivaled CX. Amplitude helps you map the entire user journey in a way that easily helps you locate friction points and analyze trends. With this information, you can build a more comprehensive customer experience strategy to set you up for growth.

Other CX tools

Other tools you can use to elevate customer experience include:

  • SurveyMonkey

Learn more about each of these tools on a review site like G2 .

  • Harvard Business Review. Understanding Customer Experience
  • Dimension Data. 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report
  • Zendesk. CX Trends 2022
  • Hotjar. Understanding customer experience
  • Hotjar. CX Stats and Trends
  • Zendesk. Our people are your people
  • Hotjar. Homepage

To learn more about how to improve customer experience and drive retention across your organization, check out our Mastering Retention playbook.

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More best practices.

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How the operating model can unlock the full power of customer experience

Key takeaways.

  • An effective redesign of the customer experience (CX) organization and operating model is a crucial success factor for every CX transformation.
  • Such a redesign requires seamless cross-functional collaboration, new ways of working, clear design principles, processes, and target setting in line with defined CX ambitions.
  • The right CX organizational structure and operating model setup will vary by industry and company, but there is a set of applicable archetypes.

Transforming the customer experience (CX) isn’t about playing hard and fast. To succeed in the long game, companies need to manage it systematically. Doing it well is a game changer, which is why more than 70 percent of senior executives rank CX as a top priority for the coming years. Indeed, companies that effectively organize and manage customer experience can realize a 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction, a 15 percent increase in sales conversion, a 30 percent lower cost-to-serve, and a 30 percent increase in employee engagement.

In working with hundreds of clients across industries and geographies, we have found that companies that lead successful CX transformations take action in three areas : building aspiration and purpose, transforming the business, and enabling the transformation. One of the most crucial enablers for an effective CX transformation—and one of the biggest roadblocks to greater CX impact if not addressed properly—is integrating customer experience into the organization and operating model.

Of course, organizing the business and operating model around customer experience is easier said than done, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to go about it. But by establishing clear design principles for a customer-centric organization, creating a CX-organization blueprint, and redefining the operating model with customer journeys at its core, companies can get on track to unlock the full value potential of superior customer experience.

Common pitfalls to avoid

On the journey toward CX excellence, there are pitfalls that prevent many customer-centric organizational transformations from succeeding as planned. Here’s how to avoid the most common:

  • Define your ambition clearly: Structure follows strategy. CX leaders must first clearly define their North Star, link it to actionable initiatives and targets, align all stakeholders behind it, and then translate it into implications for the organization and its operating model. Failure to create a strategy without clearly defined goals could make it difficult or even impossible to seamlessly tackle customer experience improvements across functions and journeys.
  • Focus on new ways of working, not on ‘boxes and lines’: A customer-centric organization has agile cross-functional collaboration in its DNA. Designing these cross-functional processes, and training people for new ways of working, is more important than reshaping formal reporting lines.
  • Establish decision-making criteria: Reshaping the CX organization and its operating model to be customer centric involves making trade-offs and choosing among countless potential courses of action. CX leaders need to decide on clear principles for the organizational redesign, based on criteria that are in line with their customer experience ambitions.
  • Take a holistic approach: Trying to solve only selective organizational issues, such as who owns the website or redesigns journeys, can result in only incremental improvements instead of a comprehensive redesign of the organization for greater customer-centricity. Due to its broad implications, CX is by nature a top-management task, and it requires an operating model that defines CX roles and responsibilities up to the board level.
  • Minimize functional silos: Customer experience is inherently cross-functional and top down. Keeping functional silos as dominant decision-making units may lead to the optimization of individual processes and customer touchpoints but not of the end-to-end customer journey. The risk is making ineffective improvements that don’t fully solve underlying customer pain points.

Would you like to learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice ?

Aspire, architect, act: three steps to making cx core to the organization and its operating model.

This three-step plan can help companies effectively integrate customer experience in the commercial organization and operating model: by formulating clear design principles and capabilities in line with CX ambitions (aspire), translating these design principles into an actionable CX blueprint (architect), and bringing the redesigned organization to life through systematic change management and an effective day-to-day operating model (act).

Aspire: establish clear design principles

Sample systematic assessment questions.

To determine their organization’s current CX maturity, leaders should ask themselves a number of key questions:

  • How do we make cross-functional decisions around CX today?
  • Are responsibilities for CX and customer-journey improvement clearly assigned, and are the respective journey owners equipped with decision authority and resources?
  • Are defined CX priorities consequently driven toward implementation?
  • How are crucial CX capabilities, such as customer-journey design, journey analytics, and CX measurement, represented in the organization’s current CX framework?

Let’s assume a company has successfully formulated a concise CX vision and ambition—for example, to be an industry leader across customer satisfaction, reliability, and convenience. Translating this foundation into implications for the organization and operating model starts with a systematic assessment of the current CX maturity (see sidebar, “Sample systematic assessment questions”).

Based on the assessment, leaders can establish a set of clear, actionable design principles that facilitate the following:

  • integration of CX with the business: This means embedding customer-centricity in the daily decision making of those who have profit-and-loss (P&L) accountability, as opposed to outsourcing it to a standalone function. This principle also has implications for whether a company needs a chief customer-experience officer; the answer is, only if this role has P&L authority, budgets, and accountability for outcomes.
  • cross-functional and agile decision making: While the line organization may continue as the disciplinary home for functional experts, this principle ensures key business decisions are made in cross-functional teams and decision circles, ideally designed around customer journeys and supported by targets and incentives that promote cross-functional collaboration.
  • fact-based and data-driven decision making: This enables an end-to-end CX measurement system that continuously tracks all relevant customer signals around customer journeys, from solicited customer feedback to operational process KPIs.

Architect: translate the design principles into the organization’s CX blueprint

Once a clear CX ambition and actionable design principles are in place, leaders are equipped to design the CX target organization and operating model in a way that will allow the company to achieve its unique goals. This design effort can be structured around two considerations: the nature of the dedicated CX function the organization needs, and how to set up the broader organization for customer-centricity. The answers to these questions are company specific and depend on the company’s current CX maturity, complexity, and business archetype (interactive).

Six customer experience pitfalls to avoid

Six customer experience pitfalls to avoid

Creating a dedicated cx function.

For most companies that want to make a step-change in customer-centricity, a dedicated customer experience function is likely to be at least temporarily beneficial. Complex organizations with multiple business units and markets may want one team overseeing the CX effort across groups to ensure everyone adheres to best practices in such areas as CX journey design and CX measurement. A dedicated team will also have an integrated view of which customer experience initiatives to prioritize based on their impact across the organization. Furthermore, world-class customer experience requires distinctive capabilities in design, digital, and analytics that are in great demand. Leaders may also want to pool scarce CX talent instead of dispersing it across units, particularly if customer experience is a new endeavor for their organization.

Finally, a centralized function could be the right fit for organizations that want to create real change in a short amount of time. In the long run, customer-centricity requires continuous improvement; it’s not just a box to check off when it’s done. But companies that want to make significant progress over 12 to 18 months—in launching the transformation effort, tackling redesign, and fielding a handful of high-impact CX initiatives, for example—may need a dedicated team to lead the effort.

Two common archetypes of dedicated global customer experience functions are a CX center of excellence (CoE) and a CX factory. The main distinction between these approaches is the role the CX function plays.

  • CX center of excellence: The CoE typically focuses on owning key CX methodologies, such as customer-journey definitions, owning the CX measurement approach across journeys, building CX capabilities across the organization, and broadly, managing the CX program including key global change initiatives. The CX CoE typically serves as a support function under the chief marketing officer, chief operating officer, or chief customer officer and should ideally report to a board member to ensure sufficient authority from the top. The size of the CoE can range from around ten to 50 full-time team members, depending on the complexity of the organization’s network of business units and its geographic reach.
  • CX factory: The factory brings together representatives from different countries and business units who, with the help of a standing team of customer- and user-experience (UX) designers, redesign journeys and work to optimize customer experience approaches at scale across the organization. This approach can consolidate customer insights and translate customer pain points into tangible blueprints and prototypes for the optimal customer journey, which is typically cocreated with the local representatives to ensure that solutions fit a variety of market needs and are adopted and embraced at the local level.

One European insurance company used a CX factory as part of its overall transformation strategy. To enable customer-centricity, it conducted in-depth customer research and redesigned a critical customer journey. Based on these inputs, the CX team piloted more than 30 ideas and created and tested minimum viable products for 11. The company developed intensive capabilities in customer experience, agile, and management and institutionalized the factory with full-time employees. As a result, the insurer increased customer satisfaction and helped board members and employees across departments adopt a customer-centric mindset.

Enabling customer-centricity

In addition to effectively designing a dedicated CX function, companies also need to set up the broader organization and its operating model for customer-centricity. The ideal approach will depend on a company’s business archetype:

  • contract-based B2C and B2B businesses: A customer journey-based organization has proven to be an effective setup for companies that regularly interact with clearly identified customers in a contractual relationship—an arrangement that creates substantial opportunities to harness analytics to optimize the journey. In this approach, the entire commercial organization is built around the customer journey lifecycle, from sales and activation (joining) to operations excellence (paying, using) to retention (leaving). It is supported by a CX CoE and cross-cutting IT and data and resources. Dedicated journey owners take end-to-end responsibility for their respective journeys and manage cross-functional teams to continuously ensure CX excellence and improvements. Journey-based organization is particularly common in the telco industry. Other contract-based industries, such as energy and insurance, are catching on.
  • transaction-based B2C and B2B2C businesses: For companies that don’t have a contractual relationship with their customers but rather individual transactions with often unidentified customers (for example, a typical retailer), a focus on omnichannel may be the most fitting. Channel managers ensure customer excellence in their respective online and offline channels and are united by a clear omnichannel governance that promotes seamless linkages between channels in line with today’s customer expectations. A CX CoE or CX factory can also play a key role in this setup to support omnichannel collaboration and customer-centric decision making across individual channels.
  • B2B enterprises: For a B2B company, losing a customer tends to be more costly than it is for a B2C. Given this reality, CX excellence in B2B requires bringing classical sales, CRM, and account management to the next level with journey thinking and data and analytics to drive tailored decision making along the B2B customer journey.

Act: bring the CX organization to life through the operating model

Once the guardrails for a customer-centric organization are set, companies can bring the CX transformation to life through systematic change management and an effective day-to-day operating model. To define their target operating model, leaders will need to align on objectives and decide on a rhythm for day-to-day work. With these key building blocks defined, they can manage the change to ensure the entire organization is on board.

Align on objectives

Key stakeholders and owners should consider holding quarterly meetings to align on qualitative CX targets, KPIs, and end products. These targets should align with the strategy and economic plan—for example, prioritizing an uptick in P&L, customer retention, reduction of churn—and provide the basis for determining daily operations.

Some companies have found success by specifying and prioritizing concrete, measurable CX end products on a quarterly basis across the board, N-1 and N-2 levels, and top executives directly feeding into the value levers. They can measure progress toward strategic goals by tracking a clearly defined set of CX KPIs, ranging from financial performance to customer and employee satisfaction.

Establish ground rules

The ground rules relate to the physical or digital work environment, standard work and meeting rhythms, and the overall culture. What does the office space look like? Will the team operate out of a central location? Is there a dedicated workspace for cross-functional work? Leaders will want to embed regular meetings and establish a daily, weekly, and monthly cadence for various tasks and check-ins.

Manage the transition

Almost equally important as defining the new operating model is managing the transition to it. How should the company manage the change and communicate with teams? How should leaders support the redesigned organization? Capability building will not only help develop skill sets, it will help to create and sustain a customer-centric culture. Leaders will likely want to empower the CX team to monitor progress against targeted milestones and metrics, manage talent attraction and retention, ensure business continuity, and make sure employees feel supported and that their concerns are being addressed. Companies that focus on building a customer-centric organization and adopt new ways of working could unlock stacked wins.

Reshaping the commercial organization and operating model with a customer focus is no easy task, but those that do it well stand to reap the rewards. By embedding CX within the entire organization and creating a clear operating model for bringing the vision to life, leaders can get on track to provide superior customer experience and realize tangible CX business impact.

Oliver Ehrlich is a partner in McKinsey’s Düsseldorf office, Harald Fanderl is a senior partner in the Munich office, David Malfara is an associate partner in the Miami office and Divya Mittagunta is a manager of capabilities in the Gurgaon office.

The authors would like to thank Kevin Neher for his contributions to this article.

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What Is CX? How to Deliver the Best Customer Experiences

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

Alana Chinn

Published: June 16, 2023

For the sake of the chicken and egg debate, user experience is the “egg” in this story, and CX expands on UX by going beyond the product experience alone.

cx vs ux

Despite their key differences, they’re often used interchangeably in business today. In this post, we’ll cover why it’s important to understand the difference and how each applies to your business operations.

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Table of Contents

Customer Experience vs. User Experience

What’s the difference between cx and ux, why the difference matters, how cx and ux work together, cx and ux examples.

Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand based on all of the interactions they’ve had with your business. User experience is specific to how people use and perceive your products.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience combines the perceptions, feelings, and beliefs that your brand has created for customers throughout the entire buyer’s journey. Think about CX as the overall impression you’ve left on your customers.

Take this example: Your customer is experiencing technical difficulties with your product or service. They submitted a ticket through your help desk portal and spoke with someone on your team to resolve the issue. Here are some CX questions your customer may consider:

  • Did this process feel seamless from beginning to end?
  • Was the customer service representative friendly and responsive?
  • Would I use this company again or recommend it to a friend?

CX is all about how your customers view your brand based on the quality of your products and the people they interact with along the way. And, our recent State of Customer Service Report highlights that 93% of service teams agree that customers today have higher expectations than ever before.

Remember, it’s the little things that make people shout about your company from the rooftops — both the positive and the negative.

What is user experience?

User experience focuses on all of the end user’s interactions with your product or service. Good UX keeps customers happy before, during, and after the product experience.

Using the same example from above, your customer may have asked themselves the following UX questions while using your help desk portal:

  • Is this website visually appealing?
  • Is the information accessible and easy to navigate?
  • Can I use this website on either my desktop or phone?

Check out the video below to watch Don Norman explain the term UX in more detail.

Elements of UX, like intuitive design and minimal product friction, ultimately fit into the greater CX picture. That means creating the best holistic experience possible for your customer —from sales support to, you guessed it, customer service.

While CX and UX are complementary by nature, they don’t always solve for the same things. That’s why it’s still important to understand the differences between the two.

Let’s tackle that next.

CX goals are centered around delighting customers at every stage of the brand experience. You can use loyalty and satisfaction metrics to measure CX success. UX objectives focus on improving product design and usability from beginning to end. Successful UX can be measured using task-based metrics.

Target Audience

The audiences that CX and UX processes and tasks focus on are different.

CX target audience:

CX people focus on their customers' entire experience with their business, from the person researching the business to the person who clicks purchase. Sometimes this can be one individual, or it can be multiple people in different departments.

UX target audience:

UX people focus on the actual user of a product or service, regardless of whether they purchased it.

Goals and Objectives

Both CX and UX professionals work toward making (and keeping) customers happy through every business interaction. But, CX and UX strategists have their own unique set of goals and objectives to get there.CX people focus on the entire customer experience, while UX people focus solely on the experience with the offered product or service.

Common CX goals and objectives may include:

  • Creating a brand experience that attracts, engages, and delights customers
  • Promoting customer satisfaction at every stage of the buyer’s journey
  • Generating a steady feedback loop where customers can voice their needs

Common UX goals and objectives may include:

  • Designing a seamless product experience with minimal friction
  • Developing products that are interactive, fun, and easy to use
  • Ensuring products solve the most important problems customers face

In sum, CX professionals work to cultivate positive experiences with your brand. UX professionals focus on improving product interactions to help create those positive experiences.

Metrics and Measurement

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to measuring the customer experience. But, CX boils down to how satisfied your customers are and how likely they are to recommend you to a friend.

Here are some metrics you can use to measure CX:

  • Customer satisfaction — the degree to which a customer is satisfied with your brand based on interactions with your business
  • Net Promoter Score® or NPS — a measurement of customer loyalty and how likely a person is to spread the word about your business
  • Churn rate and reasons for churn — the number of customers your business is losing in a given period (and why)

A big part of measuring UX requires you to look at the usability of your products. User testing is a great way to find answers to common usability problems.

Here are some metrics you can use to measure UX:

  • Website or page load speed — the amount of time it takes for your website to display content
  • Time on task — how long it takes your customers to accomplish a goal (e.g., find the help desk portal on your website)
  • Adoption rate — the ratio between new users and all users for a product or service

So, why does the difference between CX and UX matter anyway? Well, for one, distinguishing between internal roles and responsibilities is a must. Your UX team needs to focus on enhancing product usability.

While usability is important on the CX side, a positive brand experience is the true measure of CX success. That said, it’s important for your business to have separate but integrated strategies for each.

customer experience vs user experience

The result: happy customers.

Now, let’s talk more about CX and UX across the customer journey.

User experience is a subset of customer experience. Without good UX, you likely won’t be able to develop a positive customer experience.

UX is all about products . CX is all about people and products . UX has a direct impact on CX based on how the end user feels about the product or service you offer.

Both concepts work together to create a customer journey with no friction. If you’re unsure about what that journey might look like, try mapping it out. Customer journey maps are a great way to visualize a person’s experience with your company — from start to finish.

And, get this — journey maps can also help you assess the quality of UX and CX at each touchpoint. For example:

  • Are there any pain points? Maybe your app is taking forever to load, and people are getting stuck before reaching a goal. That’s UX.
  • How are your customers feeling? Maybe they feel supported any time they have an issue and can’t wait to tell their friends about your brand. That’s CX.

The culmination of UX and CX interactions across the customer journey help define how customers feel about you and your products.

CX in Practice

As mentioned, CX tasks are broader and focus on the customer journey. Here are some tasks that a CX team may complete:

  • Conduct a customer satisfaction survey to gain insights into people’s experiences with your brand
  • Review customer service tickets to identify and address recurring customer issues
  • Check brand sentiment on social media to understand how customers feel about the brand
  • Analyze churn rates and develop strategies to better retain customers

UX in Practice

UX tasks are focused on a product or service and target the end users who have interactions with/use a product or service. Here are some tasks that a UX team may complete:

  • Brainstorm ways to make an app more interactive and fun to work with based on feedback from users
  • Run a usability test for a website to identify obstacles that users are facing when trying to use a product or service
  • Refresh the visual look and feel of a product or service landing page based on heat maps and usability tests
  • Update the information architecture within a user interface so it’s more intuitive for people to navigate

So, in the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter whether CX or UX came first (still Team Egg , here).

Bottom line: The best thing you can do as a business is create the optimal experience for your customers.

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Customer Experience Explained: Strategy, Tips & Metrics

customer experience

Adopting a consumer-centric approach is paramount to the success of your business. It leads to happier customers, who, in turn, become more loyal to your brand, delivering increased revenue. Plus, customers who are happy with your business may promote it through word of mouth, including positive online reviews, one of the most powerful forms of marketing.

All of which demonstrates why carefully crafting an excellent customer experience and constantly improving it should be a priority in any organization.

What Is Customer Experience (CX)?

Also referred to as CX, customer experience is your customers’ perception or opinion about their interactions with your business. Their view of your brand can be shaped throughout the buyer’s journey, from their first interaction to post-sale support, and has a lasting impact on your company, including your bottom line.

The Customer Experience Explained

Any and all interactions a customer has with your business impacts the customer experience, whether it’s browsing through your website for the first time or contacting a customer service representative after purchasing your product or service. Whether a customer decides to continue to progress through the buyer’s journey and, ideally, become a repeat customer depends on how these interactions go.

The Importance of the Customer Experience

Providing a positive and memorable customer experience is important to sustaining the success and growth of your business. The more positive a customer’s experience, the more likely they are to make a purchase, become loyal to your brand and potentially turn into a brand advocate.

Customers usually have multiple options when selecting a product or service, and there are countless resources to help inform their decision. In fact, a potential customer may not need to interact with any of your employees directly before making their choice. That’s why it is essential to ensure all aspects of your CX, from beginning to end, leave a positive impression and help to convert prospects into customers.

What Is a Good Customer Experience?

A good customer experience should be painless and convenient before, during and after the purchase experience. The actions your business takes to keep customers satisfied, drive repeat sales and encourage them to share their experience with your brand with others can all impact that experience. Specific actions and systems vary according to business or industry, but there are a few best practices organizations can follow to build a better customer experience.

To create a good customer experience, companies need to frequently collect feedback from customers at each stage in the buyer’s journey, focus on listening and responding to the feedback they receive and use that information to build a more thorough understanding of their customers. Ultimately, a great customer experience is only possible when a business gives employees the authority and resources to deliver the best experience possible.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer service and the customer experience are sometimes confused. Customer experience is a consumer’s overall impression of your business, whereas customer service is only one component of how someone interacts with your brand. Customer service on the other hand, is a specific touchpoint within the customer experience—it begins when a customer contacts your business and requests assistance. They may call a hotline to ask questions about an application form or send a message on social media asking for a refund.

What Are the Ways a Customer Can Interact With a Business?

Customer experiences come from many different interactions. Each type of touchpoint can impact the experience, and those interactions vary depending on your industry and business model. Here are several examples and some suggestions on how to improve that experience:

  • Brick-and-mortar store visits: To ensure a positive in-store customer experience, consider simple things like greeting customers at the door, helping them find items they’re looking for and providing fast checkout times.
  • Mobile apps: Customers tend to look for fast loading times, whether your app is secure and if there’s a way to contact someone with a question or issue. The app should also be easy to use.
  • Social media: Interactions on social media could include acknowledging a shoutout of your brand from a customer and answering queries and feedback from clients and prospects promptly. While some businesses offer customer support through social channels, best practices encourage routing customers to other support channels like email, chat or telephone.
  • Web/SMS chat support: Customers are looking for fast response times and comprehensive answers when they turn to online or SMS chat. Make sure you have the right people answering questions with the necessary knowledge and experience.
  • Support forums: These are typically housed on your website, perhaps under a FAQ section, but they could also be groups of people on third-party blogs or forums who use your product or service.
  • Marketing: Marketing touchpoints can include print media, email marketing, social media ads, digital display ads and other channels.
  • Connected devices: As the Internet of Things (IoT) allows businesses to connect devices to one another, support or reordering points, evaluating how that can affect the customer experience is vital. Connections should be easy, while also providing control and protecting privacy for the customer.

What Does the Customer Experience Include?

Customer experience is a broad term and can cover a lot of things, so let’s break it down into some components that are relevant to businesses across all industries.

  • Strategy and culture: Executive leadership typically lead efforts to improve the customer experience. These leaders need to ensure the business focuses on the customer throughout the entire customer life cycle by providing advice and resources. This includes ensuring that the organization’s culture is one where everyone works together to develop strategies and processes that will enhance the customer experience.
  • Products and/or services: All products and services you offer need to meet customers’ demands and ideally exceed their expectations. When possible, these offerings should anticipate the common needs of consumers before they reach out for assistance.
  • Human interaction : This can involve vendors, partners and customer service representatives, who each need to deliver a consistent experience for individual customers. That means they need to understand your business’s strategy and know about available resources that will help them provide the desired experience.
  • Touchpoints : Every conceivable way a customer can interact with your company is considered a touchpoint. This includes your website, stores (including third-party sellers), online chat, text messages, emails, social media and phone calls.
  • Technology: No business should overlook technology’s role in delivering excellent customer experience. Consider customer relationship management (CRM) software or other communication tools like marketing automation or customer feedback.

6 Customer Experience Metrics

Although customer experience seems difficult to measure, there are a few metrics you can use to understand how your business is doing. Using these metrics will help you track how your CX has improved or worsened over time and help you adjust as needed.

  • Net Promoter Score®: This score allows you to measure customer loyalty by having customers answer a simple question. The question usually asks a customer to rate how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • Marketing campaign engagement: Simple metrics like open rate and click-through rate on marketing emails are important and give you insights into which parts of the customer experience may require a closer look. Broader numbers like conversion rate and average sales cycle length are also valuable.
  • Customer surveys: Surveys can measure how easy it is for a customer to complete certain actions, such as contacting customer service or completing returns. These insights can be found by sending simple, brief surveys with yes/no questions or rating scales.
  • Customer churn/attrition rate: Tracking customer retention can shed light on whether customers are having positive brand experiences. The churn rate calculates what percentage of customers stopped using your product or service during a certain period, and the higher that number, the more likely something is awry with your customer experience .
  • Customer support ticket trends: Metrics like time to resolution (TTR) measure the average amount of time it takes your customer service representatives to resolve an issue after a customer reaches out. You can measure it in business hours or days, and you’ll want to make sure this number isn’t getting higher. Leaders should also pay attention to the source of the tickets—are most customers reaching out about the same problem or two?
  • Customer satisfaction scores: Also referred to as CSAT, this calculates customer satisfaction with your company’s product or service. It’s typically measured through survey responses on a five- or seven-point scale, focusing on specific aspects of their experience or their overall thoughts on your business.

6 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience

Improving your customer service starts with creating a customer journey map and having a clear understanding of buyer personas. It also includes working hard to establish a connection with customers, so they enjoy a positive experience, build a community, participate in an effective feedback loop and create helpful and educational content.

Here are some of these tactics explained in more detail.

  • Feedback loops: Receiving feedback straight from customers is the best way to understand how others interact with your brand. It will also give you a chance to see what’s working and where customers are dropping off. You want to create as many opportunities as possible for customers to offer feedback. Don’t forget to acknowledge that feedback and do your best to actually encourage changes based on what was said.
  • Consistent brand engagements: Ensuring that all communication is consistent from one channel to another is important in facilitating a positive experience. For example, if a customer starts by getting their request resolved via chat and later calls, the customer service rep should know what the customer has already asked and what the business has done, even though it was through a different channel.
  • Personalization: The more you can personalize the customer experience to individual preferences, the more likely someone is to engage and stick around. This can include product recommendations, remembering their preferred contact method or only sending them marketing emails for items they’re interested in.
  • Enable self-service: Customers who like to do their own research or solve issues on their own are an increasingly large group— 85% complete research online (opens in new tab) before buying something online. That audience will appreciate your business having a robust Help (or FAQs) section, informative articles and/or a chatbot to point them in the right direction on your site.
  • Analyzing data: Hold on to those surveys or other types of data you collect over time. These are a treasure trove of information to help you understand your customers better, and keeping historical data allows you to make valuable month-over-month and year-over-year comparisons.
  • Be proactive: Anticipating customer needs is far better than being fast to respond to them later. Doing so can help your business distinguish itself in the marketplace and prevent issues from escalating, which in turn reduces the number of buyers who share their negative experience with others.

What Is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management (CEM) is designing systems or processes to support customer interactions that meet or exceed expectations. You’re looking at factors that drive the customer experience, then identifying and implementing approaches to improve upon each touchpoint. A holistic approach works best since it considers how each factor can influence other aspects of the customer journey.

Industry leaders spend a lot of time on customer experience management because they recognize its importance to the overall success of their business. A better customer experience can lead to not only more clients, but happier ones.

CEM vs. CRM

CRM, or customer relationship management, looks at what a business knows about a customer after some record of interaction, whereas CEM looks at all points of customer interaction. Each differs in terms of their subject matter, purpose, audience, timing and more.

Customer Journey Mapping

Mapping the customer journey can be an extremely valuable activity for organizations because it allows them to step into the shoes of a prospective or current customer. For each stage of the buying cycle, it looks at their objectives and emotions, what action the person would complete and the tools or resources available to them (touchpoints are part of this). Businesses may do this for each buyer persona in their target audience, as their challenges and what they’re looking for at each stage may be different.

By breaking down each step in such detail, it’s often easier to spot potential problems that create friction and keep prospects from converting. And since you know the specific source of the problem, you can develop a targeted solution that will eliminate any barriers.

Free Customer Journey Template

Download our customer journey map (opens in new tab) to create new ideas and identify steps to enhance your business’s customer experience. It’s a great starting point to get a high-level overview of your customer journey, with phases and touchpoints that could give you the ideas to improve your CX.

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How ERP Can Enhance the Customer Experience

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system helps businesses improve productivity and enhance inventory control to deliver products and services faster to customers, which leads to a better experience. As a central source of data for the entire company, an ERP system can also reveal various trends and track KPIs tied to the customer experience, like churn rate or time to resolution. This helps business leaders see what might be negatively or positively affecting the buyer’s experience and address it when necessary. An ERP system can make it easier for companies to find and view survey data and other key information collected from customers.

While it is often sold as a standalone system, CRM is also a popular ERP module that can track sales, service and marketing data down to the individual customer. Companies with a CRM system that is built on the same platform as their ERP system avoid the challenges of building and maintaining integrations across the two systems. That means sales reps and customer service reps have real-time access to financial data like orders or outstanding invoices. Similarly, accounting and executive leadership have better access to sales data to help make strategic decisions. With comprehensive data about the customer, a business can track leads and sales opportunities as prospective buyers move through the journey, identifying poor customer experiences across every step. CRM software also helps companies measure the effectiveness of strategic changes meant to cover gaps in the customer journey.

Whatever strategies and tactics you use to improve your bottom line, make sure that you take your customer’s interests and feedback seriously. Doing so means you can improve operations in a way that delights customers so they will not only come back again, but spread the word with friends, family and colleagues.

customer retention

What Is Customer Retention? Importance, Metrics & Strategies

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What Exactly Is Customer Experience (CX)?

You’ve heard of UX —but what about CX ? What exactly is it, and why is it so important?

The world of consumerism is changing. When trying to stand out from competitors, most companies have looked to their prices or the quality of their products for aspects that can be improved.

However, the digital age has created a fast-paced and highly saturated market that has empowered customers to demand more than just an economical, high-quality product.

In order to win their loyalty, consumers need to have an enjoyable experience with a brand or organization as a whole—not just with their product. This is where customer experience (CX), and customer experience design, comes into play.

In this guide, we’ll explain exactly what customer experience (CX) is and all that it has to offer. Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • What is customer experience (CX)?
  • What does a CX designer do?
  • Who can benefit from CX design?
  • Key takeaways

Ready to learn all about CX? Let’s get started.

1. What is CX (Customer Experience)?

Customer experience, or CX, encompasses every single interaction a user has with a particular brand.

The relationship between a customer and an organization is based on various types of interactions throughout many different points of contact. A customer’s experience doesn’t always start with the first use of a company’s product.

There are often many touchpoints between the customer and the brand both before, after, and even during the consumer’s use of the product. A “good” customer experience usually means seamless and enjoyable exchanges from beginning to end.

Let’s use purchasing an iPhone as an example.

As an Apple customer, the quality of your customer experience is not just determined by how pleasant it is to use an iPhone, but also what it was like to purchase it, how easy it is to contact support and access repairs, and even how captivating, entertaining, or effective their marketing campaign was.

This is one area in which CX differs from UX; you can learn more about the differences between UX and CX in this guide .

CX design is the practice of creating smooth and efficient interchanges between a company and its customers. Customer experience can be broken down into three different parts: the single-interaction, the customer journey, and the lifetime relationship. Let’s take a look at those now.

Single-interaction

The single-interaction experience is referring to the user’s experience when completing a single, select task. This level of CX describes the user’s short-term interaction with a specific product or service within a company. This aspect of CX is what most people would associate with UX or UI design .

Some examples of single-interaction experiences are ordering groceries using a store’s online app, cashing a check at an ATM, or signing up for a newsletter online.

While single-interaction tasks may be dealing with the main service or product a company provides, these touchpoints are usually isolated events that make up a small part of the overall customer experience.

Customer journey

Customer journeys have a slightly broader scope than single-interaction experiences as they deal with the series of exchanges that take place to accomplish a goal over time. A customer journey often utilizes multiple modes of interaction across varying devices. Let’s use ordering a new credit card as an example.

Your journey may go something like this: You log on to your bank’s mobile app for assistance in requesting a new card. Next, you are connected with a customer service representative via telephone in order to complete the request. A few days later you receive the card in an envelope and need to use the ATM to activate it.

Although you’ve only accomplished one goal, you have interacted with the company across multiple modalities.

That is the essence of the customer journey.

Lifetime relationship

This aspect of CX has the broadest scope and takes into account every single interaction and touchpoint between the company and the consumer throughout their relationship.

Unlike the customer journey and the single-interaction, the lifetime relationship doesn’t focus on one specific goal. Instead, it focuses on all of the exchanges that take place between the customer and the organization.

The quality of all of these exchanges determines what that person’s perception and opinion of the brand are in total.

The lifetime relationship between both parties can include any advertising the consumer may have seen, their experience researching, buying, and using the brand’s products, what it was like to contact support services or obtain repairs, receiving messages or notifications from the company, or even what it was like to terminate a subscription or service.

2. What does a CX designer do?

Now we know what CX is, let’s consider who is responsible for these customer experiences: The CX designer .

The work of a customer experience designer is mainly focused on enhancing a customer’s experience throughout all types of interaction with an organization. They solve a range of problems and must be able to analyze and understand the consumer’s behavior and decision-making tactics.

In a sense, CX designers are the consumer’s biggest advocate. They work to identify customer grievances and organize teams and projects to alleviate them.

Unlike UX/UI design, CX designers address any and all issues that the customer may have when interacting with a company, not just problems that arise when using a single product or service.

Due to the wide range of problem-solving skills required, CX designers often have backgrounds in marketing, advertising, management, psychology, tech, sales, and communications. CX designers measure their success by using key metrics like customer engagement and conversion rates. Data collection, user testing, research, and presentation capability are also highly utilized skills in this field.

On a day-to-day basis, you may find CX designers creating storyboards, workflows, journey and empathy maps , personas, and thinking up different customer scenarios.

Some other popular job titles within the CX field are customer experience manager and CX consultant. You may even come across roles such as CX researcher, CX writer, and CX strategist. For a deeper understanding of what a role in CX might entail, check out CX job descriptions on sites like Indeed and LinkedIn .

3. Who can benefit from CX design?

Creating satisfying customer experiences is something all brands can and should focus on to help set them apart from other organizations in their field. Consumers often make purchasing decisions based on how a company makes them feel.

A brand that makes a customer feel valued and takes the time to invest in their overall experience is more likely to have higher conversion rates, better word-of-mouth marketing, and a greater number of returning customers.

Whether a B2B (brand-to-brand) or B2C (brand-to-consumer) company, designing ways to put the needs of the customer first is a great way to gain loyal patrons, increase a company’s bottom line, and set a foundation for future growth.

Because CX design takes every touchpoint between consumer and company into account, brands across all fields, not just the tech industry, can benefit from having a CX designer on their team.

From retail companies to non-profit organizations, CX design can have a huge impact on the overall success of a brand and its public appearance.

Do you need to learn CX as a UX designer?  UX design operates within the world of CX, so chances are you’ll need some CX know-how in order to do your job well. This is especially true if you’re a UX designer in a startup , where it’s likely that your role will overlap a bit more with other roles.

4. Key takeaways

The age of information has given most purchasers the ability to interact with hundreds, if not thousands, of brands. Smartphones and mobile devices have made it easy for consumers to spend more time researching and interacting with various competing organizations and products.

The quality of a person’s experience as a customer with a specific company is what directs their actions moving forward. People want more than just a good product. They want effective help and support, engaging marketing and advertisements, and quality customer service.

Furthermore, they want to feel like their voices are being listened to with concern. Customer experience (CX) design is the practice of paying close attention to customer feedback and designing an experience that is in line with what the consumer expects and enjoys.

Customer experience designers help ensure every interaction a consumer has with a company is productive, and pleasant, and keeps them coming back for more.

You can learn more about creating awesome customer and user experiences in the following guides:

  • User persona spectrums: What are they and how to use them
  • How to create a user flow: A step-by-step guide
  • What is service design?
  • What is UX strategy?

1. What does CX mean? CX stands for “customer experience”, which refers to the overall experience that a customer has with a company, product, or service.

2. What does CX team stand for? CX team stands for “customer experience team”, which is a team of professionals responsible for designing and implementing strategies to improve the customer experience and satisfaction.

3. What is CX on social media? CX on social media refers to the customer experience that users have when interacting with a brand or business on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

4. What is the difference between CX and UX? CX and UX are related but distinct concepts. CX (customer experience) refers to the overall experience that a customer has with a company, product, or service, while UX (user experience) refers specifically to the experience that a user has when interacting with a digital product or service.

CX encompasses all touchpoints a customer has with a business, including but not limited to digital interactions, while UX focuses on the usability and user-friendliness of a digital product.

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The 9 key steps of customer experience (CX) journey mapping

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A customer experience (CX) journey map can be created by predicting the respective behaviours of different personas, based on data collected by research, and it’s one of the most effective tools in UX design. In this post, we’ll take a look at the CX journey mapping process in 9 steps by using basic concepts.

While mapping customers’ relationships with a brand or its products and services, it is necessary to define the milestones of a CX journey – that is, to identify some specific constants. These touchpoints can be scaled up to accommodate various needs, but any and every customer experience journey map must include the five assessment criteria shown below as a base.

cx vs customer journey

Example of a customer experience journey map

What is the difference between customer experience (CX) and customer journey?

Customer experience (CX) can be either pointing out the whole lifecycle of the user or in regards to just one touchpoint with a product/service. However, the customer journey is a presentment of the touchpoints a customer engage with a brand. Then, what are the five steps to map the customer journey?

Nielsen Norman Group: Customer journey mapping

  • Timeline: Important turning points that map the changes in customer relations with the brand over time.
  • Personas: Half-imaginary characters, typifying basic personal features of a wider customer group, based on data collected from user research, combined with web analytics.
  • Emotion: Symbolic representation on the mood line of a customer’s emotional landscape at the moment of interaction.
  • Channels: Entire vehicles of customer interaction and touchpoints with the brand.
  • Touchpoints : Any and every moment of customer actions and interactions with the organisation or its products.

After defining the basics, it’s time to observe the customer experience flow and illustrate it as a roadmap. Megan​ Grocki​, Experience Strategy Director at ​Mad*Pow,​ explains the nine key steps of designing a CX journey map in a video she prepared for UX Mastery​​.

How to create a customer journey map

In summary, here’s how we can repeat these nine steps, which visually form the crest of a wave.

So, how to create a customer journey map?

1. Review the goals

Consider the goals of the CX journey mapping process, as well as the goals of the organisation and its product or service.

2. Gather research

Conduct research based on relevant resources, including both qualitative and quantitative findings, and gather the results together.

3. Define channels and touchpoints

Work on determining channels and touchpoints where your customer will interact with your organisation, product or service.

4. Create an empathy map

To understand your customer’s emotional landscape, focus on what s/he is thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, saying and doing.

5. Look at it from different perspectives

Practise generating ideas quickly by looking at problems and scenarios from different perspectives.

6. Create an affinity diagram

Organise your ideas visually, and classify and categorise them cohesively.

7. Sketch the customer journey

Draw a sketch of the CX journey map to make it comprehensible for your team.

8. Refine and digitalise

Create a digital map to help clarify any confusing details from the sketch.

9. Share and put in use

Now you are ready to take a journey through the eyes of your customer.

Lastly, it would help if you remember that customer journey maps need to be updated as conditions change since they are based on existing data and personal experiences. For this very reason, no CX journey map can be accurate forever and applied in different instances in different stages of a project. In other words, each CX journey map is as unique as each customer of an organization. Therefore, you should –not only today but always– keep your data and data processing up-to-date to know your customers better.

Customer journey maps examples

An example of a B2C customer journey map.

cx vs customer journey

Customer journey map example (Source: Iris Tong Wu)

An example of a retail customer journey map.

cx vs customer journey

Customer journey map example (Source: UXPressia)

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Blog Customer Experience

Customer Journey vs Customer Experience: A Comparison

Kate williams.

25 September 2023

Table Of Contents

  • Customer Journey vs Customer Experience
  • Customer Journey
  • Customer Journey Stages
  • Customer Experience Map
  • CX Map vs CJ Map
  • How to Track

Studies show that average customer forms an impression about your brand within seven seconds of their first encounter ! Isn’t that intriguing? It means that those seven seconds can make or break your business. So, how do we ensure that right decisions are made in such a short span of time? Well, this is where the fascinating interplay of customer journey vs customer experience comes into play.

Hey, we have also prepared a table of comparison for your convenience. Check it out if you’re in a hurry!

Let’s dive right in now and find out how customer journey and customer experience can be the key to your business’s success.

What is Customer Journey?

In the simplest terms, a customer journey is the path a customer takes when interacting with your business. Think of it as the steps they follow from the first moment they hear about your brand to the point where they become a loyal customer.

For instance, imagine that your customers are authors, and they’re creating their unique stories. These stories unfold as they go from learning about your products or services to thinking about what they want, making a purchase, and maybe even staying connected with your brand after buying something.

Every part of this journey is important because it’s a chance to make your customers happy. Plus, you get to build a strong connection with them. From the very first time they meet your brand to the support you offer after they’ve made a purchase, understanding and making each step better is really important if you want your customers to be happy and keep coming back.

Stages of Customer Journey

Imagine you’re planning a road trip. You have a starting point, various stops along the way, and a destination in mind. The same concept applies to the customer journey, which consists of distinct stages:

Awareness : This is the very beginning, where customers first learn about your brand’s existence. It could be through an online ad, a social media post, or word-of-mouth.

Consideration: Once aware, customers begin evaluating your products or services. They might compare them with alternatives, read reviews, or seek recommendations.

Purchase: When a customer decides to buy from you, they’ve reached the purchase stage. This is the ultimate goal of many businesses.

Post-purchase: The journey doesn’t end with a purchase. What happens after is equally important. Customers may need support, have questions, or provide feedback.

From the initial touchpoint to post-purchase engagement, each step provides an opportunity to create positive experiences and build lasting relationships. If you’re looking for a seamless way to collect customer feedback and further enhance these stages, consider SurveySparrow . The platform offers powerful survey solutions to gather valuable insights at every customer touchpoint, helping you refine your strategies and foster customer satisfaction and loyalty.

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What is a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is like a visual storytelling tool that businesses use to understand and improve the entire customer experience. It’s a detailed, step-by-step illustration of the customer’s interactions with a brand, from the initial contact to post-purchase engagement.

A customer journey map visually outlines each step of this adventure, allowing businesses to identify where customers might face challenges, where they have positive experiences, and where improvements can be made. It’s a valuable tool for aligning your business with your customers’ needs and expectations.

A customer journey map is important because it:

  • Reveals Pain Points: Pinpoints areas where customers may face challenges.
  • Optimizes Touchpoints: Ensures consistent, efficient, and enjoyable interactions.
  • Enhances Communication: Fosters collaboration among teams.
  • Drives Loyalty: Converts one-time buyers into loyal customers and advocates.
  • Promotes Continuous Improvement : Guides ongoing enhancement efforts.
  • Informs Data-Driven Decisions: Provides a data-backed foundation for decision-making.
  • Delivers Competitive Advantage: Sets your brand apart by meeting customer expectations.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience isn’t just about a single event. It’s about how all the interactions you have with a brand add up. These experiences together shape what customers think about the brand and whether they’ll keep coming back.

Each time you talk to your friends, it’s a little piece of your friendship. Over time, all those pieces come together to create a bigger picture of your relationship. In the same way, every time a customer deals with a brand, it’s like a puzzle piece that forms their view of that brand. It tells us whether they’ll stick with the brand or not.

What is a CX Map?

A customer experience map, also known as a CX map, is like a visual representation that outlines the entire journey a customer takes when interacting with a brand. It’s a detailed illustration that charts the customer’s experiences, emotions, and touchpoints from the first encounter with the brand to post-purchase engagement.

For this, you can think of the map as a storyboard that captures the highs and lows of the customer’s interactions. What does it do? It helps businesses understand how customers perceive their brand and where improvements can be made to enhance the overall experience.

Customer Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map

A CX map primarily focuses on the emotional and qualitative aspects of the customer’s interactions with a brand. It delves deep into how customers feel at various touchpoints and stages of their journey. Key elements of a CX map include:

  • Emotions: It highlights the emotional highs and lows experienced by customers, providing insights into their feelings during each interaction.
  • Moments of Delight: CX maps identify moments where customers are exceptionally pleased or impressed by a brand’s actions.
  • Pain Points: They pinpoint areas where customers may become frustrated, dissatisfied, or encounter challenges in their journey.
  • Personas: CX maps often incorporate customer personas to tailor experiences based on different customer segments.
  • Subjective Data: CX maps rely on subjective data, such as customer feedback, surveys, and interviews, to gauge emotional responses.

Customer Journey Map:

A customer journey map , on the other hand, provides a more comprehensive overview of the entire customer experience, including both qualitative and quantitative aspects. It covers the entire journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. Key elements of a customer journey map include:

  • Touchpoints: It outlines all the touch points or interactions customers have with a brand, encompassing both digital and physical channels.
  • Stages: Customer journey maps typically break down the customer journey into distinct stages, such as awareness, consideration, conversion, and post-purchase.
  • Objectivity: They rely on objective data and analytics to track customer behavior, including metrics like website visits, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
  • Process Efficiency: Customer journey maps emphasize the efficiency of processes and how well customers can navigate from one stage to another.
  • Holistic View: They offer a holistic view of the customer’s entire experience, including their interactions with products, services, and support.

Now you have a clear idea, right? Let’s sum it up and see the key differences.

Customer Journey vs. Customer Experience

Let’s look at the key differences:

Customer Journey:

1. definition.

CJ: The customer journey is the detailed roadmap that outlines every step a customer takes when interacting with a brand. It’s like a storybook of their interactions, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement.

CX: The customer experience is about how customers feel during their interactions with a brand. It’s the emotional and qualitative aspect of the customer’s journey.

CJ: The primary focus of the customer journey is on the sequential stages and touchpoints that customers go through as they interact with a brand. It’s about understanding the process and how customers move from one stage to the next.

CX:  It emphasizes the emotional highs and lows of the customer’s journey. They aim to understand the customer’s feelings, whether they are delighted, frustrated, or satisfied.

3. Elements

CJ: It includes elements like awareness, consideration, conversion, and post-purchase engagement. It tracks the customer’s progress and actions as they move through these stages.

CX:  It highlights emotional responses, moments of delight, and pain points. They focus on subjective data, including customer feedback and interviews, to gauge emotions.

4. Objective Data

CJ: It relies on objective data and metrics to analyze customer behavior. It uses quantitative data like website visits, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

CX: It relies on subjective data and qualitative insights to assess customer emotions and perceptions.

5. Visual Representation

CJ: The map often takes the form of a visual diagram or flowchart, making it easy to understand the customer’s path.

CX: Maps can also be visually represented but are more inclined to incorporate customer personas, emotional states, and qualitative feedback.

How to Track Them?

Now, let’s see how to track customer journey and customer experience:

Tracking the Customer Journey:

  • Pinpoint Key Moments: First, figure out the important times when customers connect with your brand, like when they discover it, think about buying, or make a purchase.
  • Numbers Matter: Use tools to collect data that shows what’s happening. Things like how many people visit your website, how many click on stuff, and how many actually buy. These numbers help you understand customer behavior.
  • Ask for Feedback: Don’t forget to talk to your customers! Surveys and questions at different times can tell you what they like, don’t like, and how happy they are.
  • Draw It Out: Create a picture (like a map) that shows the journey. It helps you see where things are going smoothly and where there might be problems.
  • Keep Watching: Don’t stop! Keep an eye on how customers are moving through the journey. When you notice they’re getting stuck or having issues, you can fix them.
  • Use Special Software: If you want to get fancy, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can help track each customer’s journey. It’s like having a super memory of all your customer interactions.

Tracking Customer Experience:

  • Ask for Feelings: Regularly check in with customers and ask how they’re feeling. You can use surveys, forms, and even social media to see if they’re happy or not.
  • Loyalty Meter (NPS): Use something called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It tells you if customers really like you or not so much. Are they fans, just okay, or not fans at all?
  • Happy or Not (CSAT): After they talk to you or use your stuff, ask them if they’re happy with the experience. It’s like a quick report card.
  • Support Check: Keep an eye on things like how quickly you respond to customer questions, how fast you solve their problems, and how many issues you’re dealing with. It shows how well you’re helping customers after they buy.
  • Social Media Ears: Listen to what people say about you on social media. Good or bad, it’s feedback. If someone’s not happy, you can try to make it right.
  • Link Journeys and Feelings: Put together the customer journey map with how people feel at each step. See if the emotions match what you want them to feel.
  • Ask Your Team: Your team members who talk to customers every day have great insights. Ask them what customers are saying and feeling.
  • Compare with Others: Look at what other companies are doing. See if your customer experience is better or worse. It’s a good way to know where you can improve.
  • Blend All the Data: Put all the info together from surveys, feedback, social media, and everywhere else. It gives you a complete view of how customers feel and what they’re experiencing.
  • Never Stop Improving: Use all this info to make things better. Fix issues, create better products, and offer top-notch service. Keep going back to your journey map to keep it updated.

Now that we have come to the end of the battle- Customer Journey vs. Customer Experience- it is very clear that there can’t be an ultimate winner. Both are crucial. The customer journey isn’t just about steps. It’s the roadmap guiding customers to their destination. Meanwhile, customer experience is all about emotions and the lasting impact of each interaction.

Now, let’s take action! Identify touchpoints, gather data, listen to your customers, and never stop improving. Your brand’s journey and experience are in your hands.

Need guidance? SurveySparrow’s here to help you ace these game-changers. Try it out for free!

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Customer Success vs. Customer Experience: 5 Key Differences

cx vs customer journey

Do you feel a sense of confusion around the terms customer success vs. customer experience? You are not alone. 

Business terminologies can seem greek to most people. But understanding the smallest of differences between important terms can help you become a customer-centric brand. 

The quality of both customer success and customer experience can help you alter the customers’ perception of your brand, encourage repeat purchases, increase loyalty, and drive business growth. 

Customer success (CS) is a term that has gained massive popularity in recent years. But what does it actually mean? What is the difference between customer success and customer experience? Can you prioritize both without losing focus on the customer? 

We understand you must be full of questions. In this blog, we will explore their definition in detail. Later, we will understand the 5 key differences between the two and see how you can improve both to win more customers for your business. 

Let’s go! 

What Is Customer Success? 

Customer success is a business process that operates with the intention of helping customers reach their desired goals and outcomes. The main purpose is to help customers make the most of your offered products or services. 

Modern companies have dedicated customer success teams to proactively help customers use products effectively and attain success. Customers will likely continue buying from you when they can reap the maximum benefits from your products and services. 

Here are some common roles and responsibilities of customer success teams: 

  • Providing in-depth onboarding sessions
  • Encouraging renewals and repeat purchases
  • Increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) and revenue
  • Collecting and implementing customer feedback

What Is Customer Experience?

The customer experience (CX) is the result of the interactions a customer has with your brand across various stages of the customer journey. The customer experience is composed of different interactions – from browsing an online website to speaking to a sales or customer service representative. 

Customer experience has the power to make or break a brand. If customers have a delightful experience, they will stay loyal, buy more often, and recommend your products to friends and family members. On the other hand, a poor experience can make you lose existing and potential customers. 

Here are some benefits of delivering great CX:

  • Enhanced customer satisfaction
  • Increased customer loyalty
  • Improved word-of-mouth marketing 
  • More product or service recommendations

Read More: 10 Surefire Ways to Improve Customer Experience With Help Desk

5 Key Differences Between Customer Success & Customer Experience 

Here are the top 5 major differences between customer success and customer experience: 

1. Timeline 

Customer experience begins with the customer’s first contact with the company. This could be even before they buy from you. For example, when they are scrolling through your e-commerce website or when they receive a cold call from your sales team or an email from the marketing department. 

On the other hand, customer success comes into play at a very later stage of the customer journey. Customer success teams are brought into action when the customer actually makes a purchase. The main focus is ensuring customers have a smooth experience using a new product or service. 

2. Objective 

On comparing customer experience and customer success, you will notice that the former is a broader concept than the latter. The main objective of customer experience is to build a healthy relationship with customers across different stages of the customer journey – from awareness to purchase to advocacy. 

Customer success is only a small part of the customer experience. The main objective of customer success is to ensure customers attain their desired goals and expectations when they start using your product or service. For example, if you sell a team communication app, the objective of your CS team would be to help customers collaborate with team members without any hassles. 

3. Metrics for Measurement 

Businesses use different metrics to measure the quality of customer experience and the efficiency of customer success teams. Let’s discuss them right away. 

Customer experience is measured using metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), customer acquisition rate, etc. 

On the other hand, customer success is measured using metrics such as renewal rate, customer lifetime value, customer health score, customer churn rate, repeat purchase rate, etc. 

Read More: 15 Help Desk Metrics to Improve Customer Support

4. Responsibility

There is another major difference you must know about in this battle of customer experiences vs. customer success. The responsibility for the quality of customer experience falls on the entire company, involving different departments. While the product team is responsible for developing well-designed products, the sales team must offer the best deal to customers to enhance their experience. 

However, when it comes to customer success, only one department is responsible – the customer success team. They are responsible for ensuring customers attain success as quickly as possible and make regular purchases to boost the company’s revenue. In some cases, even the customer service teams are responsible for helping customers better understand a product and achieve their desired outcomes. 

Read More: 10 Tips to Build a High-Performance Customer Success Team

5. Industry 

Customer experience is a common area of focus for almost all industries. From banking to healthcare to e-commerce, companies belonging to these industries know that in order to survive, they need to improve the CX. 

But this isn’t true for customer success. You will find customer success teams in companies belonging to the SaaS (software as a service) industry. Here the sole focus is to educate customers about the product through detailed walkthroughs and training. CS teams can also be found in B2B companies that sell technical or complex products such as machinery, electronic gadgets, and more. 

Can Customer Success and Customer Experience Work Together? 

For optimum success, customer success and customer experience teams should work together like a well-oiled machine. 

As discussed above, customer success is only a part of the customer experience. This means their functions often overlap with each other. Both teams share common goals of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty and driving rapid business growth. 

If you have dedicated teams for both, here is how you can make them work in sync. While the customer success team can focus on people who have already signed up for your product or services. The CX team can focus more on making potential customers aware of what the brand stands for and how it can solve their unique problems. 

It is also important to ensure you track their performances using different metrics. For example, you can adopt a more quantitative approach to measure customer success – renewal rate, churn rate, repeat purchase rate, etc. On the other hand, a qualitative approach can help you measure customer experience – CSAT or open-ended surveys, interviews, etc. 

Read More: 8 Ways to Excel at Customer Service Team Collaboration

Role of Customer Success & CX in the Customer Journey 

Well-trained customer success and CX teams can positively impact the customer journey. But what exactly is the customer journey? 

The customer journey can be defined as a map that includes all the interactions a customer has with a business. Every touchpoint of the customer journey should further familiarize the customer with your brand and leave a lasting impression. This can only be done successfully if you give equal consideration to customer experience and customer success. 

  • Businesses with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their competitors.
  • According to a study , over 72% of companies say that improving customer success would be their number one priority

Now, let’s see how these two teams can help you improve the onboarding stage of the customer journey. 

During the onboarding process, the CS team can offer in-app walkthroughs and training sessions to help customers understand the product better. They can even share links to self-service articles, FAQ pages, video tutorials, etc., to answer all their product-related queries. 

On the other hand, the CX team can share surveys or have one-on-one sessions with customers to understand their pain points. They can then share this data with the CS team to improve future onboarding processes. 

Prioritize Both Customer Success and Customer Experience 

Successful businesses such as Apple, Amazon, and Disney have their eyes on both customer success and customer experience. While both the terms are often used interchangeably by industry experts, there lies some major differences between the two. 

While customer success teams attempt to help customers reap the best results from their products or services. On the other hand, customer experience is a broader approach that aims to measure the quality of interactions across multiple touchpoints. 

So is there any tool that can be used by both CS and CX teams? We are glad you asked! You can use ProProfs Help Desk to manage all customer communications in one place, encourage self-service, generate leads, and capture feedback using versatile surveys.

Jared Cornell

About the author

Jared cornell.

Jared is a customer support expert. He has been published in CrazyEgg , CoSchedule , and CXL . As a customer support executive at ProProfs, he has been instrumental in developing a complete customer support system that more than doubled customer satisfaction. You can connect and engage with Jared on Twitter , Facebook , and LinkedIn

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User experience vs. customer experience: what’s the difference.

Portrait of Kim Salazar

July 6, 2023 2023-07-06

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Are customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) the same? Well, the answer is yes and no. Here’s why.

In This Article:

Defining user experience and customer experience, varying scopes and why they matter, interaction level, journey level, relationship level, which term should you use.

Definiton: The concept of a user experience  (UX) encompasses all aspects of a person's interaction with a company, its services, and its products.

Originally, "user experience" was meant to describe the totality of the interactions that users have with an organization. But because it was proposed in an era where computers were the main form of digital interaction, some have started to assign to it a limited interpretation. Their perspective associates user experience with one interaction, as opposed to the lifetime relationship between the customer and the company. To escape this limited perspective, some teams began to use a new term.

Definition:   The term customer experience (CX) has been used to describe the totality of the interactions that a user has with an organization over time.

Although we rant against vocabulary inflation and creating new names for old things, we can’t fight the way in which language evolves. Whether you use the newer term “customer experience” or prefer the older “user experience,” the point to remember is: there are multiple levels of experience and each is equally important in delivering a good experience to your users.

If you consider the relationship between a person and a company across that person’s lifetime, you can define that user’s experience at three different levels:

  • The single-interaction level , which reflects the experience the person has using a single device in order to perform a specific task
  • The journey level , which captures the person’s experience as she works to accomplish a goal (possibly using multiple interaction channels or devices in order to do so)
  • The relationship level , referring to all the interactions between the person and the company, throughout the life of the customer relationship

What it takes to deliver good user experience at each level can be quite different.

Interaction-level experience is what is commonly understood as the focus of UX and is concerned with designing the experience of a single interaction that a user has with a company to perform a task. Most UX designers work at the interaction level: they design the interface for a website or an application. But interaction-level experience pertains not only to digital channels, but it can also apply to physical channels.

Examples of interactions include:

  • Receiving support on the phone
  • Getting money at a teller window in a bank
  • Filing a claim on an insurance provider’s website

Each of these interactions has a specific experience that is just a small part of the relationship between the customer and the company.

At the interaction level, we design using channel-specific principles, guidelines, and patterns.

The next level of experience is the journey level. A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through in order to complete a goal over time. This process may use multiple devices and interaction channels (e.g., web, desktop or mobile apps, email, online chat, phone). Customer journeys can technically consist of one interaction if a user goal is completed as a single task and no other related interactions take place. However, most journeys consist of a series of related interactions aiming to complete a single goal.

Journey level UX

Providing a good experience at the journey level introduces unique design challenges that require more focus on integration and coordination of elements than is necessary for interaction-level design.

Some journey-level challenges include:

  • Delivering consistent messaging across channels and interactions
  • Creating seamless cross-channel transitions
  • Delivering a cohesive look, feel, and tone of voice across interactions
  • Back-end technology integration to allow customers to move effectively between channels over time with the same quality of experience

The widest scope of user experience is the relationship level (aka the customer experience). At the relationship level we focus on the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and his cumulative impression as a patron of that organization. Rather than assessing the quality of one interaction or one journey, the holistic level is concerned with all interactions and journeys between that person and the company.

Some examples include:

  • The combined experience of researching, buying, using a product, and receiving support for that product
  • The experience of subscribing to a software as a service platform, using it, troubleshooting issues, and receiving newsletters from the organization through termination of the account
  • The combined experience of researching and buying an insurance policy, and interacting with the provider via phone calls, agents, and the website, throughout the life of the policy

relationship level ux

A good relationship-level experience requires good interaction-level and journey-level experiences, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It isn't enough to have good interaction- or journey-level experiences to get a good relationship-level experience. A good relationship-level experience involves effectively weaving together broad experience components such as key customer journeys, ad campaigns, print-to-mail items, product and service offerings, and call-center procedures and supporting graceful transitions across all different interactions and journeys.

Examples of relationship-level experience components include:

  • Coordination between internal departments to tie together awareness and procurement campaigns with interaction-level experiences that truly deliver on expectations set in acquisition marketing.
  • Being a steward of the ongoing relationship with users by anticipating their needs and proactively delivering the right content and service offerings at the right time
  • Front-end staff training to utilize customer data to provide personalized support based on user’s prior engagements

Levels of UX

Whether you use the term “UX” or “CX” is not important, because they basically mean the same thing if you have the “correct” interpretation of the terms.

What’s important is that:

  • You understand the different scopes of experience and strive to optimize the experience at all levels; and
  • You and your team use these terms consistently so that you minimize friction and misunderstanding

Designing the experience should not only take place at the interaction level. When individual experiences are designed and evaluated in silo, they will often pass acceptance criteria. But when you put independently designed interactions together into a realistic user journey, things often begin to break down, impacting the broader scopes of UX.

For example, the claims process may function flawlessly and meet user needs when tested in the lab, but if the information provided in the confirmation email contradicts or confuses the messaging from the claim workflow, the journey breaks down. And if the entire claims process changes dramatically without proper communication, longtime customers could face unexpected challenges completing tasks that were once easy. Then, the relationship-level user experience has been affected.

However, it’s not the case that the relationship-level experience is better or more important than the experience of a single interaction. We’ve seen many grandiose plans falter on a few poorly written words of UI copy. While it is important to design the longitudinal experience, it’s equally important to design its components. If people can’t understand your website, they won’t become customers in the first place. Or if callers are offended by their treatment when they place a support call, they won’t remain customers much longer.

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cx vs customer journey

Journey to Customer Happiness: Proven Strategies for Building Exceptional CX Programs

Journey to Customer Happiness: Strategies for Better CX Programs

Guest writer: Thomas Maiwald

Building a successful Customer Experience (CX) program, also known as a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program, requires careful planning, implementation, and constant adaptation. From startups to multinational corporations, organizations across industries are recognizing the paramount importance of prioritizing the customer journey.

In this article, we explore the essential strategies and actions that every organization can implement to enhance their CX program. With over a decade of experience in the customer experience field, I’ve distilled these recommendations into 13 key steps that have proven to drive tangible results. 

Whether you’re looking to improve customer satisfaction, boost loyalty, or optimize internal processes, these actionable insights will serve as your roadmap to success. 

What are my Key Steps to Top Customer Experience in Any Organization

After over 10 years of experience in the customer experience field, these are my key steps and points that every organization should consider:

  • Step 1 – Involve senior management: Start with buy-in and support from senior leadership, make it clear that this is not a one-time project, and explain why this is so important. Strong commitment from the top is critical to ensure resources and support for the program.
  • Step 2 – Set goals: At many companies, they say to themselves, we want to center the customer, and this is the goal. Bravo, I guess. However, much more is needed. Define clear goals for the CX program and Milestones. It is also very important to review these goals and milestones regularly. Always remember that a CX program is not a one-way street but requires constant adaptation. By setting goals, you can increase customer satisfaction, improve customer loyalty or optimize processes to solve problems.
  • Step 3 – Identify customer feedback sources: Create a plan of where you can ask for feedback everywhere and through which channels. This can be on the website, when the customer leaves the webshop, after ordering, after contacting customer support, etc. Don’t forget the social media channels or the numerous review platforms.
  • Step 4 – Customer journey mapping: The creation of a customer journey map is unavoidable, as it is essential for the company’s strategy. It leads to a deep understanding of customer needs and is easy for the company to understand through visualization. Carry it out to create a solid foundation for designing an outstanding customer experience. Mapping helps you to use your resources more effectively by enabling you to identify and implement targeted measures to optimize the customer journey. It also provides insights that can be used to develop new products or services that are tailored to the customer’s needs. Also, remember to repeat the customer journey mapping, as the customer journey also changes over time.
  • Step 5 – Implement feedback mechanisms: In customer experience, we also talk about transactional surveys, which are surveys that take place automatically after a transaction/touchpoint with the company. This automation helps you to continuously collect feedback from this touchpoint, measure the customer experience, and always keep your finger on the pulse. In addition to automation, however, the timing is also extremely important, as the survey should take place at the moment of truth, i.e. when the customer has their experience with the company, so that the experience is still fresh. It will also be a great experience for the customer. Just make sure that you include a so-called resting period and have obtained a double opt-in from the customer beforehand.
  • Step 6 – Analyze data: Analyze the collected data thoroughly to gain important insights into customer needs, preferences and problems. In addition to classic online dashboards, where you analyze key figures and time trends such as NPS, CES or CSAT, so-called heat maps and blindspot analyses help to identify problem areas. In addition, driver models and signifiers as well as cross-tables help to gain deep insights. A very important point, however, is also the text analysis, which provides you with deep insights, this can already be analyzed in depth and automatically via sentiment AI. Please don’t forget to feed the insights back into your organization. A dashboard is a great way to do this, make sure that the data tells a story and is not too overloaded. You should also use knowledge databases such as Insights hub to structure the collected insights.
  • Step 7 – Create customer profiles: Create detailed customer profiles to better understand the different customer segments and their individual needs. You can also use this to create individual offers and offer your customers additional products.
  • Step 8 – Engage employees: Train employees to make them aware of the importance of customer experience and ensure that they actively collect feedback and effectively address customer concerns. It is very important to take away the fear of negative feedback. Only if a feedback culture is established in the company will employees be able to deal with it.
  • Step 9 – Continuous improvement: Implement a continuous improvement process based on the customer feedback data collected. Identify areas for improvement and implement measures for optimization. Our Outerloop tool helps you to create initiatives and evaluate them using an ROI model so that you can see exactly which of the initiatives should be prioritized because they have a very high customer value.
  • Step 10 – Transparency and communication: Communicate openly with customers about their concerns and show that their feedback is heard and valued. Transparent communication builds trust and strengthens customer loyalty.
  • Step 11 – Measure performance: Define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the success of the CX program. These can be metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc.
  • Step 12 – Use technology: Use CX management platforms and tools to automate and streamline the process of data collection, analysis and management.
  • Step 13 – Collect regular feedback: Ensure that customer feedback is regularly updated to capture and respond to changing needs and trends.

In wrapping up…

Creating a stellar Customer Experience (CX) program—also known as a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program—is like crafting a masterpiece. It’s not just about putting paint on the canvas; it’s about careful planning, constant tweaking, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. Over my 10+ years in the field, I’ve seen the magic happen when organizations follow some key steps.

Let’s talk about getting everyone on board, from the bigwigs to the frontline staff. Without their support and enthusiasm, it’s like trying to row a boat with one oar. Clear goals are the stars we navigate by, helping us stay on course and measure our progress. Then comes the fun part—tapping into all those juicy feedback sources, mapping out the customer journey (think treasure map!), and setting up feedback loops to keep our finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction. 

But hey, it’s not all charts and graphs—there’s plenty of heart in engaging our employees, empowering them to champion the customer cause and turn feedback into action. It’s like having a big family working towards a common goal! And let’s not forget the importance of listening to our customers, being transparent, and using all the cool tech tools available to make our lives easier. With the right mix of strategy, empathy, and a sprinkle of tech magic, we’re on track to creating experiences that’ll make our customers do a happy dance every time they interact with us!

If you’d like to learn more about the influence of EX in CX, join us for our upcoming webinar on March 5th, discussing the top 6 hacks and tricks to provide a successful customer experience in any industry.

*It is necessary to understand German.

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CX vs. UX: The Yin and Yang of Customer Loyalty

Published by Martha Brooke, June 19, 2023

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CX vs. UX: I’m often asked what’s the difference.

CX (short for customer experience) and UX (short for user experience) are sometimes used interchangeably. But they have different agendas and focal areas.

The best way to think about CX vs. UX is that customer experience spans the ENTIRE customer journey. UX is a piece of that journey, the part devoted to product and website design.

When done well, both disciplines use touchpoint maps, observational studies, and scientific methods to identify friction points and opportunities.

CX vs. UX: A Deep Dive

UX focuses on an individual user’s interactions with products and websites.

Companies that employ UX designers strive to build interfaces that are straightforward and easy to use. (For an example of a “difficult to use” product, see my recent yogurt ordeal! ) As customers, we have all felt the difference when a company makes UX a priority.

An e-commerce site with bold checkout buttons and a simple shopping cart icon demonstrates the fundamentals of good UX design. Likewise, if your tablet or smartphone conforms to the ergonomics of your hand, no doubt it was tested and re-tested in UX labs.

In contrast, companies with an appointed CX director aim to improve customer relationships at all touchpoints — packaging, store layout, customer service, onboarding, repairs, billing, product returns, and more — not just the products and websites.

A killer product alone is never sufficient to retain customers, and studies have found that up to 86 percent of consumers will stop shopping with a company due to just two poor customer experiences. [i]   In this way, having a customer experience czar makes a whole lot of sense.

CX vs. UX in the Real World

In reality, customer experience teams rarely have the top oversight seat in the house. More often, they oversee operational issues or marketing, but not the whole enchilada. But they should. Every aspect of your company that in some way interacts with customers is part of the customer experience.

“As an app, software, or website owner, your product is not the totality of your brand and, therefore, not the totality of the customer experience.” writes Rafał Warniełło.

Design Thinking Started It All

In 1969, cognitive scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon laid out the basic principles of Design Thinking, a method for incorporating the user’s perspective into how products are designed.

In essence, Simon’s work laid the ground for the CX and UX disciplines. Before this, products were primarily designed based on whatever the engineering team wanted to build, not what the customer wanted, needed, or was able to use functionally. Founded in 2004, Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design broke down Design Thinking into five distinct phases:

  • Empathize : Understand your customer. Walk in their shoes. What do they see? What do they need? Where are their friction points and obstacles with your products and services?
  • Define: Once you’ve seen the terrain from the customer’s perspective, what are the main problems you want to and can fix? What are the potential barriers? What is the challenge?
  • Ideate : Immerse yourself in all potential solutions. Sometimes called brainstorming, this inventive step is a team effort and aims to identify a few strong solutions to the problem defined in Step 2.
  • Prototype: Build an imperfect model. Think sketches, not photographs. At this stage, you still want your team to weigh in freely. For them to do this, your models must look low fidelity and incomplete. These are your hypothetical solutions that could turn into reality.
  • Test : End where you started: with the consumers. Get honest feedback to see if you’ve actually solved the customer’s problem.

These five phases don’t necessarily occur in order, and designers and engineers may repeat them until the product is perfect.

Ideo and Apple, Two Peas in a Pod

In the 1980s, Ideo produced one of the most famous examples of Design Thinking with its creation of the first usable mouse for Apple. Steve Jobs was thrilled with the result, and the relationship between Apple and Ideo became a famous partnering of minds.

“Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success,” Ideo’s co-chair Tim Brown writes .

While Ideo started writing more about its Design Thinking process, Apple became increasingly known for its sleek and satisfying products.

For example, a problem Apple recognized was that people had to carry a clutter of devices in order to listen to music and take phone calls. The solution was the iPhone.

Apple had set the bar. Customers began to expect intentional, planned, and positive interactions with technology. Design Thinking had become a necessary business practice for every company hoping to keep up with Apple. 

The Birth of UX

Let’s take one more trip back in time, this time to 1981, when the cognitive scientist Donald Norman published The Truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid . [ii] A decade later, Norman joined Apple as their chief User Experience Architect, coining the term “user experience design.”

Norman said about user experience, “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual.” [iii]

The emergence of the Net Promoter Score in 2003 created a simplified system of brand “detractors” and brand “promoters” who rank a company on a scale of 0 to 10. Although NPS remains controversial, it has undoubtedly impacted the CX discipline significantly.

Then in 2008, Bruce Temkin and Jeanne Bliss founded the Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA), establishing a body of CX practices.

The year 2010 marked a turning point in the business world: the end of the “Age of Information” and the beginning of the “Age of the Customer,” according to Forrester Research .

With the rise of smartphones and social media, the prevalence of rating systems, and the growth in apps, customers have become increasingly empowered and vocal. Thus, in the “Age of the Customer,” every interaction between customers and a company is critical.

So where does that leave us in the CX vs. UX distinction? Basically, UX is an aspect of CX. Both disciplines observe and improve experiences. Whereas UX designs customers’ interactions with the products, CX governs their interactions with the entire company.

Seen in this light, the UX team reports to CX. Of course, in the real world of business silos, it doesn’t always work out this way.

CX in Crisis

Unfortunately, most CX today is done poorly. For many companies, CX is simply a survey, worse yet, a survey copied from somewhere else.  When approached this way, CX is more of an afterthought than a true discipline.

But CX was never intended to be merely a box to check at the end of the customer interaction.

When companies genuinely care about and invest in CX, they apply the same methods used in UX, including customer interviews and observational studies .

In the hands of CX practitioners, these methods are directed not just at the company’s website and products but also at its customer service, tech support, and other departments that interact directly with customers.

Especially today, when the customer’s voice is amplified across media, companies simply cannot afford to take a bargain-basement approach to CX and rely merely on simplistic surveys.

Choose Your Team

Given the CX vs. UX divide, I’m also asked which of the two teams matters most. As with so many things, the answer is “it depends.”

  • your company’s products are unique,
  • your customers are entirely loyal because of your products,
  • and nothing about the rest of the experience matters,
  • your website is the only way consumers buy your product, and it’s the only aspect of your company that matters,

…then go narrow and focus on UX teams.

  • you are in a competitive market where many touchpoints contribute to whether the customer decides to buy from you,

…then you need CX practitioners who take a comprehensive approach to CX , as we do at Interaction Metrics.

CX vs. UX: Takeaways

Things may seem new, but they often have a history.

When done well, CX and UX are both firmly entrenched in Design Thinking principles, where companies study customers closely and iteratively develop solutions to problems. Gone are the days when engineers developed products based on what they thought would be cool.

Where UX has a specific focus, CX is broad, covering a customer’s entire journey from initial company awareness to every touchpoint that contributes to creating loyal fans.

CX vs. UX: how do you view this distinction? We’d love to help you sort this out!

[i] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220202005525/en/86-Percent-of-Consumers-Will-Leave-a-Brand-They-Trusted-After-Only-Two-Poor-Customer-Experiences

[ii] http://www.ceri.memphis.edu/people/smalley/ESCI7205_misc_files/The_truth_about_Unix_cleaned.pdf

[iii] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2017/08/28/where-did-the-term-user-experience-come-from

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COMMENTS

  1. Customer Journey vs Customer Experience: The Difference

    Customer Experience (CX) is the consequence of a customer's perceptions after interacting rationally, physically, emotionally, and/or psychologically with any part of a business. This perception affects Customer behaviors and creates memories that drive Customer Loyalty affecting the economic value a business generates.

  2. What is CX (Customer Experience)?

    All of those questions touch on elements of customer experience. The four components of CX are brand, product, price, and service. Basically, CX refers to everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers. And it's crucial in an age when how a business delivers for its customers is just as ...

  3. Customer Journey vs Customer Experience (CX)

    This statistic underscores the critical role that both Customer Journey and CX play in shaping consumer behavior and driving business success. Join us as we delve deeper into these intriguing concepts, offering insights that could revolutionize your approach to customer engagement. ... Customer journey vs customer experience: the differences.

  4. What Is Customer Experience (CX)?

    CX is a broader concept that encompasses all aspects of a customer's experience with a business. CX boils down to emotions and how customers feel about your brand, unlike customer service, which ...

  5. Customer service vs. customer experience: Key differentiators

    The simplest key difference between CX and customer service is that CX is concerned with meeting customer needs during the entire customer journey. Customer service is focused on post-purchase. As such, CS is considered a subset of CX. CX teams are concerned with both short-term tactics and long-term strategy.

  6. What is CX? Customer experience management 101

    As a CX manager, creating an empathy map to be used by all customer-facing departments can also help you sync your team's messaging to provide a frictionless, unified customer experience through every stage of the customer's journey. 3. Create a customer journey map. A customer's journey is everything that happens between "Oh, that's kinda cool ...

  7. Build a Winning Customer Experience (CX) Strategy

    Strong, sustainable customer relationships start with understanding customer experience (CX) value from the customer's point of view. Download this guide to build a clear, customer-centric approach to CX to help you: Ensure the CX is positioned to deliver maximum value to customers. Create a "true north" through which to view every CX ...

  8. Customer Experience: What is CX? Definition, Tools, & Examples

    Customer experience (CX) vs. customer service (CS) Customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably. This can be problematic, as customer service is only one part of the customer experience. Customer service refers to the direct interactions between you and the customer. This happens when a customer requires assistance or ...

  9. The power of the operating model in customer experience

    One European insurance company used a CX factory as part of its overall transformation strategy. To enable customer-centricity, it conducted in-depth customer research and redesigned a critical customer journey. Based on these inputs, the CX team piloted more than 30 ideas and created and tested minimum viable products for 11.

  10. What is Customer Experience (CX)? How to Improve CX in 15 Ways

    Customer experience (CX) is the aggregate of every interaction a customer has with an organization. From the customer's first encounter with the business to the final act of making a purchase, every touchpoint within a customer journey contributes to the overall customer experience for an individual. Providing a favorable customer experience ...

  11. What Is CX? How to Deliver the Best Customer Experiences

    Customer experience or CX is a sum of all the cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral responses during all stages of a buyer's journey. A great experience in all the above areas can help build a positive brand perception and impact brand preference by 37%.

  12. Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What's the Difference

    Now, let's talk more about CX and UX across the customer journey. How CX and UX Work Together. User experience is a subset of customer experience. Without good UX, you likely won't be able to develop a positive customer experience. UX is all about products. CX is all about people and products. UX has a direct impact on CX based on how the ...

  13. Customer Experience Explained: Strategy, Tips & Metrics

    Free Customer Journey Template. Download our customer journey map (opens in new tab) to create new ideas and identify steps to enhance your business's customer experience. It's a great starting point to get a high-level overview of your customer journey, with phases and touchpoints that could give you the ideas to improve your CX.

  14. Create Effective CX Journey Maps to Maximize Customer Experience

    Download this Gartner guide with actionable steps to: Put foundational CX elements in place first. Create actionable, accurate customer journey maps. Derive value from your journey maps. Whether you are new or experienced with the journey mapping processes, these insights will help build your customer experience success.

  15. CX Explained: The 2024 CX (Customer Experience) Guide

    CX (customer experience) refers to the overall experience that a customer has with a company, product, or service, while UX (user experience) refers specifically to the experience that a user has when interacting with a digital product or service. CX encompasses all touchpoints a customer has with a business, including but not limited to ...

  16. The 9 key steps of customer experience (CX) journey mapping

    1. Review the goals. Consider the goals of the CX journey mapping process, as well as the goals of the organisation and its product or service. 2. Gather research. Conduct research based on relevant resources, including both qualitative and quantitative findings, and gather the results together. 3. Define channels and touchpoints.

  17. Customer Journey vs Customer Experience: A Comparison

    Customer Journey: 1. Definition. CJ: The customer journey is the detailed roadmap that outlines every step a customer takes when interacting with a brand. It's like a storybook of their interactions, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. CX: The customer experience is about how customers feel during their interactions with a brand. It's the emotional and qualitative aspect of ...

  18. Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience: Study Guide

    Designing an Effective Omnichannel Experience. A great customer experience is the product of a well-designed omnichannel ecosystem. There are five components that together create a successful omnichannel user experience: Consistency, Optimization, Seamlessness, Orchestration, and Collaboration. These components and other journey-design ...

  19. Buyer Journey vs Customer Journey: Key Differences

    4 How QuestionPro CX can help in the Buyer Journey vs Customer Journey. 5 Conclusion. The Buyer Journey: Exploring the Path to Purchase. The buyer journey (or the path to purchase)l, is a fundamental concept in marketing and sales. It's a framework that helps businesses understand and navigate potential customers' processes before ...

  20. Customer Journey Map: Everything You Need To Know

    Customer journey mapping is an essential tool used by businesses to help them understand their customers' expectations better and help them improve their overall customer experience (CX) level ...

  21. Customer Success vs. Customer Experience: 5 Key Differences

    4. Responsibility. There is another major difference you must know about in this battle of customer experiences vs. customer success. The responsibility for the quality of customer experience falls on the entire company, involving different departments. While the product team is responsible for developing well-designed products, the sales team ...

  22. User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What's the difference?

    The widest scope of user experience is the relationship level (aka the customer experience). At the relationship level we focus on the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and his cumulative impression as a patron of that organization. Rather than assessing the quality of one interaction or one journey, the holistic level ...

  23. 10 Customer Service And CX Metrics You Must Consider

    1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This may be the most popular way to measure how satisfied a customer is with your product or service, or any part of the customer experience.It's a rating scale ...

  24. Journey to Customer Happiness: Strategies for Better CX Programs

    Step 4 - Customer journey mapping: The creation of a customer journey map is unavoidable, as it is essential for the company's strategy. It leads to a deep understanding of customer needs and is easy for the company to understand through visualization. Carry it out to create a solid foundation for designing an outstanding customer experience.

  25. CX vs. UX: The Yin and Yang of Customer Loyalty

    The best way to think about CX vs. UX is that customer experience spans the ENTIRE customer journey. UX is a piece of that journey, the part devoted to product and website design. When done well, both disciplines use touchpoint maps, observational studies, and scientific methods to identify friction points and opportunities. CX vs. UX: A Deep Dive