What is Customer Experience (CX)? Explanation and User Case

So, maybe you saw the words Customer Experience or the CX acronym somewhere and you wondered: what is this?

But of course, this is just a simplification. There’s more to it. Much more!

Some people thinks it’s the same as Customer Service (CS), but this is just one of the parts of CX.

Same goes for Technical Support, Help Desk and other common words.

See the image below to better understand what I mean.

As you can see, Customer Experience isn’t even directly under User Experience . Instead, it’s a part of Service System, which is a part of UX.

And Customer Service and Technical Support are services or strategies that usually require a Help Desk.

But… what is CX or Customer Experience exactly?

According to Wikipedia’s definition:

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with^, and the environments the customer experiences (including digital environment) during their experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience

Simply put: how YOUR USERS interact with your brand.

Or, in other words: one of the most important strategies to keep your clients happy and your revenue growing.

Customer experience encompasses all interactions from attraction and engagement through marketing, discovery, purchase, usage, and customer service. Even negative interactions like cancelation, cart abandonment, complaints, etc. All of these user interactions are accounted for, regardless of the channel through which they occur. Therefore, CX is comprehensive and unifies the work around the customer’s vision.

Getting Started with CXM (Customer Experience Management)

Now that we know what CX is, let’s briefly mention the management specialization that revolves around the topic of this article: CXM.

Companies cannot fully control the customer experience because that would be like being the owners of their customers’ perceptions, feelings, and behaviors, which is virtually impossible.

But there is a specialization called Customer Experience Management, also known as CXM. This management specialization has a set of techniques that allow companies to deliver exemplary experiences and correct what their customers perceive as pain points.

There are many CXM strategies and techniques that are far beyond the scope of this article, but we will cover this topic in detail in a future article.

A user case about Customer Experience

This is a mostly offline project we did for a local company.

They sell furniture, in two lines: handmade crafts and prefabricated furniture.

The handmade line was taking a hit because of its price against the cheaper ready to assemble furniture.

At the same time, the company had troubles even with the cheaper line, because they had a lot of competitors.

So… what to do? Lots of competition, low budget, sales going down…

And UX and CX Theory came to the rescue.

We couldn’t create a lower price strategy, because the company was struggling on the financial side.

A big marketing campaign was out of discussion, there was no budget.

SEO would take a lot of time. SEM? Sorry, no money.

I assume you already figured the solution out. But in case you didn’t, what you’re going to read below is called growth hacking.

So we did this: we created a beautiful, colorful uniform for employees and trained them on how to interact with users.

We trained those employees on how to get the client’s information, giving free gifts in exchange of their social media accounts.

Also, we recommended to move some particularly less than friendly employees to other parts to avoid contact with clients.

Finally, we organized small happenings (yes, like in the 60s!) and tagged those clients from which we got their social media accounts.

And they replicated that info on their social media time and time again!

Finally, we gave each person who bought something, a completely unexpected gift.

Small vases. Some small tools to assemble furniture. Flowers. A framed picture. Small things like that.

And of course we “tied” everything to social media and analytics tools to identify user’s behaviors and the effectivity of the campaign.

Sales doubled in less than 4 months.

With less than half the budget they were using for advertising.

Oh, I forgot something… the first thing we recommended was to… raise the prices!

How expensive is CX or a Service System?

As you can see in the user case above, it could be quite affordable.

You don’t need a lot of money. You need a lot of EMPATHY.

Think about the things that make you smile. The little surprises. The unexpected little gestures that brighten your day.

Now think how you do that for your customers. How can you connect these empathy strategies with your systems?

Or, in other words, how can you make your customers go WOW! and have the analytics and data for those things that made your clients say WOW!

It really doesn’t take a lot of time or effort if you know what you’re doing and you have data at hand.

And if you need any help, just make sure to Contact Us and we’ll discuss the best option to grow your site by retaining your customers!

Additional CX Resources and Bibliography

If you want to delve further on what is CX and how can you use it in your projects, we made a curated selection of resources and bibliography about CX.

The following are academic research papers, so you can be sure you’ll learn a lot about the subject

Guiding directions and propositions: Placing dynamics at the heart of customer experience (CX) research – C Meyer, A Schwager (PDF)

Customer experience creation: Determinants, dynamics and management strategies – Peter C.Verhoef – K.N.Lemon – A.Parasuraman – A. Roggeveen – M. Tsiros – L. A. Schlesinger

Customer experience modeling: from customer experience to service design – R Verma, J Teixeira, L Patrício, NJ Nunes (PDF)

How to sustain the customer experience:: An overview of experience components that co-create value with the customer – C Gentile, N Spiller, G Noci (PDF)

Beyond good and bad: Challenging the suggested role of emotions in customer experience (CX) research – from NHI.gov : A Manthiou, E Hickman, P Klaus.

Fabio Devin

Fabio is Bachelor in Marketing, Master in Human Computer Interaction and a UX Evangelist.

He worked for some of the biggest companies in the world. As such, he has developed entire systems and businesses for clients of all sizes.