We would like to start a new series of articles about Customer Experience Analysis and show you how important it is to understand your own customer or customer base.
Some time ago we conducted a survey about Digital Business and Customer Experience with our own customers. I remembered an answer that I still don’t know how to understand. The question we asked was “Have you ever done a Customer Experience Analysis?” and the answer was “Yes, within the framework of the agile process.
My first thought was “Does agile process mean that a backlog item was a customer experience analysis? But I very quickly denied that this would mean that the analysis would have been performed across sprints or split into individual backlog items. Which is certainly possible, but wouldn’t make sense. My most obvious explanation was that you might not know exactly what was meant by customer experience.
User Experience vs. Customer Experience
I would like to take the above-mentioned experience as an opportunity to first define two concepts. Although these terms belong together, they have to be bordered by each other because they have different meanings:
• User Experience (UX)
• Customer Experience (CX)
We could complicate the whole thing if we were to separate CX and UX from UI, but that’s what we’re giving away here. For the sake of simplicity, we consider UI to be part of UX.
So what exactly is User Experience? Well, UX is simply the design and operation of customers’ different touchpoints with one company. This includes, for example, calls to a service center or the web shop that is offered on different devices (laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.). So here we are talking generally about the appearance (UI/Visual Design), the information architecture or the interaction possibilities with, for example, a web shop.
Customer experience goes much further here. Here the customer journey is given a lot of attention, i.e. from the first contact with a customer, e.g. via a marketing campaign, via purchasing in the web shop, participation in a loyalty programme, calling a service employee right down to the supply chain. Here the silo thinking has to be broken down and a uniform view of the customer has to be achieved. But also transparent and fair prices, personalized advertising measures, the ordering and processing process itself, the product design or how the products are packaged play an important role. One can well imagine that CX and UX cannot be considered separately and that a good CX is not possible without a good UX.
Conclusion
Let’s keep in mind: A good UX is an excellent basis for a good CX, but a good CX needs many more steps and actions. In the next blog articles we want to show you the steps for a customer experience analysis and how you can decide what can increase the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers.
