CX is not customer service, and it is not quite UX either. Here is what Customer Experience actually is, and a real case where it doubled sales.
Customer Experience (CX) is the sum of all interactions between a customer and a brand across their whole relationship: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints, and the environments they experience. It is broader than customer service (one part of CX) and sits inside the service system, which is itself part of UX. Managing it deliberately is called Customer Experience Management (CXM).
Key takeaways
- CX is every interaction a customer has with a brand, positive and negative, across all channels.
- Customer service, technical support and help desk are parts of CX, not the whole.
- In the map of disciplines, CX sits inside the service system, which is part of UX.
- CXM (Customer Experience Management) is the practice of shaping CX deliberately.
- Great CX runs on empathy and data, not big budgets, as the furniture case shows.
What CX is (and is not)
Customer experience is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship.
Wikipedia
CX covers attraction, discovery, purchase, usage and support, and even the negative moments like cancellations, cart abandonment and complaints. It unifies the whole business around the customer’s view. It is not the same as customer service, which is just one touchpoint within it.
CXM: managing the experience
Companies cannot fully control CX, because that would mean owning customers’ perceptions and feelings. Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the set of techniques used to deliver strong experiences and fix perceived pain points.
A real user case
A local furniture company sold two lines, handmade and prefabricated, and was losing to cheaper competitors with no budget for price cuts, big marketing, SEO or paid ads. The fix was pure experience design: smart uniforms and trained staff, collecting customers’ social profiles in exchange for small gifts, moving unfriendly staff away from customers, hosting small events and tagging attendees, and giving every buyer an unexpected small gift, all tied to analytics. The first recommendation, counterintuitively, was to raise prices.
How expensive is good CX?
As the case shows, it can be affordable. It takes empathy and data more than money. Think about the small, unexpected gestures that make you smile, then design those moments for your customers and measure which ones make them say wow.
The sum of all interactions between a customer and a brand across their relationship, including the journey, touchpoints and environments.
No. Customer service is one part of CX. CX also includes marketing, discovery, purchase, usage and even negative moments like complaints.
CX sits inside the service system, which is itself part of user experience. CX is not directly a subset of digital UX but a broader relationship layer.
Customer Experience Management, the set of techniques companies use to deliberately deliver good experiences and fix pain points.
No. It runs on empathy and data. In the furniture case, sales doubled in under four months on less than half the previous ad budget.
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