NETTING IT OUT

Customer and user experience design are typically carried out by two very different groups within most organizations. “Customer Experience” is typically thought of as a marketing function and is often limited to customer experience surveys and reporting. “User Experience” is typically thought of as a step in the product development process—unfortunately too often as the last step before product launch.

Yet both customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) design are strategic differentiators. We advocate creating a unified CX/UX strategy and elevating it to one of your three top initiatives. Product and service differentiation are paramount for preserving customer loyalty and margins.

We’ve watched many organizations embark on CX/UX design as strategic initiatives. Here are some of the questions and issues they’ve encountered along the way, and our answers, based on the best practices we’ve observed.

WHY DO YOU NEED A CX/UX DESIGN STRATEGY?

CX/UX Provides Perceived Value

Customer experience (or CX) has become THE differentiator between companies that retain and attract customers and those that lose customers. The tougher the state of the global economy, the more suppliers are competing on price. The biggest single differentiator beyond price, and the one that may allow you to preserve your margins, is the quality of the customer experience you offer. This means the experience the user has related to all aspects of interacting with your firm, your partners, and your brand, whether it be the experience with your actual products and services or the experience the customer has in purchasing, getting support, upgrading, renewing and managing the relationship.

Today, there is a lot of focus placed on user experience or UX. The difference between CX and UX is cloudy, but we think of it this way:

• User Experience (UX) is about how users interact with the products and services you offer. Do they fulfill a user’s needs? How well do they support the user in getting the job done? How easy are they to learn? How comfortable are they to use? User experience relates to any end-user’s experience with a product or service, including the experience of each employee, who is also an end-user of the tools you provide for her to do her job.

• Customer Experience (CX) encompasses UX, but goes beyond user experience with the use of the product to include the customers’ (which includes end-users as well as purchasers, evaluators, influencers, administrators, maintainers, etc.) interactions with, and relationship to, your brand in its entirety. How easy is it to research, order, and actually receive and install a product or service? Are your customer-impacting business processes streamlined and easy to navigate? Is there a single throat to choke when something goes wrong? Do you provide a great end-to-end experience including any customer interactions with partners? Do the customers feel valued? And, of course, how good is the end-user’s experience with your product/service?

Why Should CX and UX Design Be Integrated?

It’s very difficult to draw the line between where a product experience begins and ends and where a brand experience begins and ends. Apple’s experience design provides a wonderful example of this trend. The experience a visitor has in an Apple retail store or that a customer has in getting support from Apple for a product issue is largely indistinguishable from the experience of using an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook, or downloading or uploading media using iTunes. Apple has set a very high bar for user experience and customer experience excellence for both B2C and B2B organizations. We may not all have the benefits of Steve Jobs’ fanatical attention to detail when it comes to user experience design and execution, but the quality of the Apple brand experience has raised the bar for all of us.

QUESTIONS THAT YOUR CX/UX STRATEGY SHOULD ADDRESS

Once you are committed to creating and promulgating a CX/UX strategy throughout your organization, the next step is to clarify how the strategy is to be implemented. Here’s a list of the questions that we are often asked, as well as our non-client/context-specific answers to those questions... (more)

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