From UX to CX
Customer experience may seem ordinary and yet its introduction is recent, and constantly evolving. The goal of the customer experience (CX) is to create a unique, impressive and significant momentum of interaction between the consumer and the company.
Regardless of the channel, CX reaches all interactions from the attraction and interest generated by marketing, discovery, purchase, use and customer service. CX is a customer’s overall perception of your brand, based on their interactions with it.
Customer experience (CX) is a perception a customer has about a company based on all touchpoints, interactions, and engagements with the company, its brand, and its product. — Myk Pono
A good customer experience listens to customers‘ top priority, gets customer feedback to develop an understanding of your customer needs, creates systems to help you collect feedback, reduces friction and solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges. Its scope is inclusive, uniting the business around the customer’s vision and increases customer satisfaction.
That’s why knowing your customer base and spending time with your user as much as possible is super important. Providing experience is more important as being than just providing the product. A model like the “1000 True Fans”, written by Kevin Kelly, can help you to make better and deeper connections with your customers. The mark of a true fan is based on empathy. This idea helps businesses develop relationships with customers. By segmenting the customer base and offering greater value to top fans the paid version for the efficiency and heightened user experience.
All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience: subscription businesses can increase retention and reduce churn, e-commerce marketplaces can optimize sales and reduce returns, and service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints.
UX to CX
Some companies don’t understand why they should worry about customer experience. User experience (UX) comes from the interaction between the user and the product while the CX depends on the brand. But then, are there any real differences or is the CX just a natural evolution of the UX ?
Such attention to customers requires a loop process in which every function worries about delivering a good experience. UX and CX have many similarities but they span different realities:
- User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. The focus of UX is the interaction level. Inside the product. Most UX designers work at the interaction level, designing the interface for a website or an application. And regrettably in most cases, UX suffers a lack of experiments.
- Customer Experience (CX), in contrast, encompasses all aspects of a person’s interaction with your brand. It‘s the full experience. It’s everything that happened outside the product. CX tries to answer how to give a complete and comprehensive experience to your clients.
Both disciplines have been formalized over time to become UX designer and CX designer, one specializes in product realization and the other in the realization of service and customer journey in real situations. People think one part of the work of the CX designer will be the beginning of that of the UX designer. But, in fact, the CX, like the UX, has been formed over time in order to concretize the improvement of the experience of a user throughout his journey with a brand, through the products or services it offers. The main difference lies in the behavior of a human which is necessarily different when faced with a man than when faced with a machine. If the store experience is missing from the digital experience or vice versa, the result will be disappointing for the user. So you have to create a real junction between the two and standardize the customer journey regardless of their majority point of contact.
Today, many companies operate to make money. Bear in mind that money is an outcome, not a purpose.
Simon Sinek says, you sell starting with the Why as much as the What and How. It would be a bit confusing for people what is the Why. Finding out why is a process of discovery that involves setting a goal, a belief that gives our lives deeper meaning and makes the rest secondary. People do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
“When communicating from the inside out, however, the WHY is offered as the reason to buy and the WHATs serve as the tangible proof of that belief. The things we can point to rationalize or explain the reasons we’re drawn to one product, company or idea over another.” — Simon Sinek
Knowing the purpose of your initiative and how it connects to the Why of your brand sets the principles for every decision for your customer experience.
Companies that invest in improving their customer experience, with a simultaneous bridge to UX, are more likely to increase retention, engagement, loyalty and customer satisfaction. To create a CX-centered mindset, the main thing is to design systems that interact with the Customer Experience as a whole. Here are the principles to follow:
- Make the link between users and customers, and to design an optimal experience for them.
- Describe a customer’s experience at all touchpoints of a brand. Online and offline customer journey review.
- Understand and analyze the multiplicity of channels (online and offline).
- Use useful technologies (CRM, mobile solutions…). Centralize information through omni-channel solutions.
- Create a gateway between UX and CX (many customers start their product search on their smartphone).
The context will define the importance of a CX / UX designer during the development of a project. Several companies are working to ensure that the entire team is aware of user-centered design. Some real world examples of CX in severals sectors:
- Zappos is a unique company, fostering a customer-centric culture with exceptional customer service.
- Captain Train solves all customer issues within 2 hours.
- Gusto got an NPS of 75 by not caring about NPS.
- Purple (maker of mattresses, sheets, pillows, seat cushion) uses a Youtube channel with a lot of CX-centric videos, including unboxing.
- Adidas choice to focus on digital customer journeys has led to significant payoffs. They use technology to fuse a customer’s online and offline experiences.
Fostering a culture of customer experience, you can realize a positive impact on customer loyalty, higher retention and increase your revenue growth.
In short
The customer becomes even more empowered, increasing the importance of the customer experience. Customer expectations are higher than ever and word of mouth travels fast! CX needs constant nurturing and care.
Developing a unique CX strategy capable of transforming in-store experiences and online engagements is the highest success of every business. Your customer experience value is your greatest intangible asset. With a great focus on customer experience strategy, companies will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
There’s myriad facets that go into customer experience, both on the consumer end and the current customer side of things. Do you know what they’re thinking? Do you know what they want? How have you and your team answered all these questions? And do you have a person in charge of the customer experience? Are your digital customer experiences in the form of an algorithm or interactive heuristic approach?
Learn more about CX → Continuous.lu
