In the recent years we have been facing new terms created as a reflection of customers´ needs. Two most important ones are Customer experience (CX) and User experience (UX). But, often stays ambiguous if they are the same, and, if not, what is the difference between the two. So, let me try to explain with examples familiar to us all…
Customer experience is an overall umbrella term for all experiences a customer faces over a period of time while interacting with a company. This means, all interactions with Sales, PR, Product itself, Customer service, Billing etc. So, this is what that customer experiences during his customer journey with that company.
Of course, the customer does not have to be the user of a product. For example, if a parent is buying a pre-paid voucher for his kid´s phone, we immediately recognize that the parent is the customer while the kid is the user. Therefore, User experience is very specific. It relates to the experience a customer has during a specific interaction to achieve a certain goal, very often connected to a digital interaction. So, as you can see, UX is in some way the subset of CX.
Let´s look at this example… if the customer tries to buy a phone by using a Web-shop channel – this would be his user experience. Whether he managed to buy it or not makes this user experience a good, or a bad one.
This allows people that create products to go deeper in the specific interaction and examine why something works for the customer while the other thing doesn´t. That is why the majority of Scrum teams usually have a UX designer on-board. Since Scrum is a framework for creating complex products during which customers are involved the entire time, the presence of UX designers makes a lot of sense. Their job is to make your experience seamless and easy, while achieving the actual goal of that interaction.
This proves that both terms are very much connected, showing that even the perfect UX is useless, if kept in silos, while other things are not functioning properly.
And another, simple but clear example for the closure: you can create a perfect product, but if the company is not presenting it properly to customers, no one will buy it!