Key takeaways:
- Customer Experience (CX) is the overall customer experience with a brand across all digital and physical channels; CX insights inform company strategy
- User Experience (UX) is the user experience with a product, service, or system; UX insights inform product strategy
- The disciplines have different roots (CX more in marketing, services, and operations; UX in HCI/HCD), but are gradually converging
- Both draw from design thinking and research methods, i.e., understanding needs, prototyping, testing, data-based learning
- In successful organizations, they work complementarily toward building competitive advantage – UX influences individual channels, CX maintains the macro view
Despite the CX global market's maturation, in practice we observe that even many large players still lack "design hygiene" – for example, they confuse the terms CX and UX. Properly grasping both disciplines is important if you want to build competitive advantage through customer experience.
What is CX (Customer Experience)?
Lewis P. Carbone published a study in 1994 titled "Engineering Customer Experiences," where he first introduced the concept of "experience engineering." This moment is often considered the formal beginning of the CX discipline.
Customer Experience represents the overall customer experience with a brand throughout the entire customer journey. From first contact through product/service usage to customer care.
Even if the UX of one touchpoint (e.g., a mobile app) is performing well, the overall customer experience (CX) can fail due to inconsistent processes, inconsistent information across channels, or poor service design. CX therefore looks at the end-to-end customer journey with the brand and strives for coherence across touchpoints. It enables the organization to understand relationships and trends in customer signals (behavior, feedback, NPS, CSAT) with business outcomes like retention, churn, average purchase value, or customer lifetime value .
CX specialists define the target experience, orchestrate changes across channels and departments. They are responsible for connecting customer metrics with financial and operational indicators.
Common tasks include mapping journeys (as-is) and designing the future experience (to-be), coordinating touchpoint ownership (journey level management), prioritizing pain points, and service blueprints (connecting frontstage with backstage processes).
Case study: How we helped Dôvera, the market leader in insurance, reorient toward customers and prepare for the future.
More mature companies strengthen CX through leadership positions such as Chief Experience Officer (CXO), who collaborate with other C-roles and co-create corporate strategy.
In less mature companies, CX is often organised under marketing or customer support and deals more with collecting feedback than orchestrating the entire experience.
Proper integration of CX within the organizational structure is crucial for building competitive advantage – it enables effective translation of customer insights into new exceptional brand experiences.
What is UX (User Experience)?
The UX discipline formed from principles of ergonomics (specifically HCI/HCD) and cognitive psychology (specifically design thinking). The term itself was popularized by Don Norman (NN/g) in the 1990s, primarily for the IT field.
User Experience has stabilized over decades mainly as the experience of using a product, service or system, usually digital, but sometimes physical.
Poor UX can immediately deter customers and employees from using a product or service (higher drop-off, errors, support contact). Good UX, conversely, increases satisfaction and improves interaction efficiency with the channel, leading to higher conversions and better product and service adoption. Ultimately, it's one of the factors influencing the business results of a specific touchpoint.
UX specialists primarily design the information architecture and interactions of a given touchpoint to be understandable, usable, and accessible. Their design decisions are linked to channel goals (e.g., conversion, error rate, support needs).
Common tasks include user research, Information architecture, prototyping, usability testing, working with design systems and accessibility (A11y), and measuring UX metrics. A new form for Union increased supplementary service sales by 60%.
In more mature companies, UX is part of mixed product teams in parallel discovery and delivery (Dual-Track Agile), continuously reducing development risk and increasing touchpoint value. Thanks to being close to both the customer and business, it co-creates product strategy.
In immature companies, UX is often diluted in other roles (e.g., marketing, business analyst) or reduced to UI "screen drawing" in late development phases without systematic research, hypothesis validation, or quality standards.
In moderately mature organizations, UX and CX sometimes appear disconnected side by side (no or weak shared governance elements, duplicated initiatives), leading to resource waste and lower added value of design for the organization.
CX and UX are complementary strategic tools
CX and UX both co-create strategies – CX at the company-wide level, UX at the level of specific digital touchpoints. If you want to ensure maximum return on investment in both disciplines, CX and UX must work complementarily within the corporate ecosystem.
Example of a missed opportunity
A client wants to open a new bank account.
The UX team, based on collected user data (drop-off, guerrilla testing), optimizes the registration form in the mobile application – reducing the number of steps and improving interaction with form elements. As a result, conversion increases by 15%.
However, the CX team discovers a few months later, while mapping the entire journey, that clients don't complete the registration process also due to inconsistent information on the website and at branches – the CX team therefore coordinates unification of communication across channels (web, app, branch, call center).
As a result, conversions increase by another 20% and the number of registration inquiries to the call center decreases by 50%.
Model areas of collaboration
- DesignOps – UX and CX specialists jointly define the organization's design process, workflows, and manage the design system to maximize design's impact on the organization; they document design decisions, customer journey maps, and service blueprints.
- ResearchOps – UX and CX specialists manage research repository, calendar and backlog of UX + CX research, coordination of research across channels.
- Shared metrics – linking UX metrics with CX metrics and joint interpretation of trends over time.
- Employee experience – UX design reduces friction in front-line processes (faster service, fewer errors), which translates into CX (shorter resolution time, fewer repeat contacts).
Examples of inappropriate competition
- Isolated optimizations: UX team fine-tunes the registration form but ignores CX findings about unclear onboarding processes across channels. The organization loses new customers.
- Competing budgets: The CX team requests investments in omnichannel solutions, the UX team in mobile app redesign. The organization invests duplicatively and the experience is inconsistent.
- Conflicting metrics: UX team optimizes for task speed, CX team for building trust through personalization. The customer feels tension between speed and distrust.
Synergistic effect creates competitive advantage
When CX and UX collaborate, a synergistic effect emerges – individual touchpoints combine into a coherent experience that is a strong competitive advantage. Mature organizations therefore don't perceive CX and UX as competing camps, but as two levels of one craft: CX sets the direction and orchestration across the company, while UX ensures that each touch is understandable, usable, and valuable.
For less debate about "labels" and more measurable impact, disciplines must be consciously connected – for example, by linking metrics and building reliable DesignOps.
Don't know where to start your customer experience transformation?
Our CX audit will give you a clear picture of your organization's current maturity in customer experience and create a practical development action plan.
It's based on the Nielsen Norman Group methodology and systematically evaluates your organization – through research and analysis of your organizational structure, processes, human resources, and design tools. The result is a tailored roadmap that leads to measurable business outcomes.
If you're interested in an introductory meeting, contact us.
