Customer Experience and User Experience.

What makes a good experience for a customer?  Is it ease to transact, speed, intuitive process, comfort, innovation?

 

The truth is that it’s not a single or simple answer and for every individual it will be slightly different.  Identical demographics of age, gender, ethnicity and location are no guarantee that matching groups will behave, feel or respond the same way.  They will be impacted by an enormous number of influencing factors including upbringing, education, ethnicity and those influencing factors impact our responses.

 

To make things even more difficult, the answer to each of those elements can change for each individual.  Sometimes we’re feeling pretty adventurous and actually like moving out of our comfortable space while on others we just want to do things the way we’ve always done them.  If only we could target individuals rather than segments (more on programmatic advertising later).

 

The importance of customer experience has spawned a huge user and customer experience industry.  Of course wanting to align customer needs with delivery has been around for a long time and one could argue that Customer Experience is Customer Satisfaction under a different guise.  But I’d argue that it goes deeper and is broader because it encompasses all of the interactions a customers has with your brand or service.  Throw in User Experience and the waters get a bit muddy.  Are they all just buzzwords saying the same thing in a slightly different way?

 

I read recently that a senior UX researcher described his job as helping people interact better with technology.  I think that’s a neat description and one that makes a lot of sense to most people.  And consequently the measures used make sense – things like error rate, abandonment rate, clicks to completion and when these rates are high, the user experience is poor.

Customer experience is broader and looks at the total experience that a customer has with an organisation.  It encompasses the total of the old familiar measures of loyalty, satisfaction and likelihood to recommend.

 

Customer and User Experience rely on each other.  A bad experience with an app that is hard to move around and difficult to make sense of is going to result in a poor customer experience no matter how hard the marketers within the organisation try to tell you they’re the best option around.  User Experience plays an enormous role in the overall Customer Experience.  So, although they are different they are intertwined and form part of the total customer journey.

 

Call out if you need some help on creating the very best User Experience you can and in meantime, here’s some reading:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2018/07/15/customer-experience-is-the-new-brand/#262c9e817f52