Customer Experience vs User Experience: What's the Difference?

8 min read The terms CX and UX are often confused or used interchangeably. Here we define each one and explain the differences between them.

UX, CX. Are they two sides of the same coin, or a couple of unrelated terms that get lumped in together by mistake? The answer may be a little of both.

Usability experts Nielsen Norman Group point out that the original sense of UX was equivalent to what’s now called CX, and that the term UX has evolved to describe a more specific and functional kind of interaction. They have described CX as UX over long periods of time.

Whatever the terms might have meant to begin with, we can now draw a clear distinction between CX (customer experience) and UX (user experience) and point towards how they fit together to create successful outcomes.

Customer experience is the way a customer perceives a relationship with a brand or organisation, incorporating everything from first impressions and reputation to becoming a customer and making repeat purchases. It’s a long-term, macro-level phenomenon that happens on a cumulative basis and is the sum of many parts.

User experience describes an end-user’s thoughts, feelings and impressions when they go through a specific interaction. In contrast to CX, it usually refers to self-contained, stand-alone tasks and environments such as filling and submitting a form, buying an item or setting up an electronic device.

Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but there are some key differences between the two. In this article, we’ll break down what each term means, how they differ, and why both are critical for business success.

Defining Customer Experience and User Experience

First, let’s clearly define both terms:

Customer experience (CX) refers to a customer’s holistic perception of their relationship and interactions with a company or brand over time. It encompasses every touchpoint and moment that a customer has with a business across all channels from awareness and research to purchases service, and advocacy.
User experience (UX) more narrowly focuses on how easy or satisfying a product or service interface is to use from the perspective of the user. This includes elements like visual design, information architecture, navigation, usability, functionality, and performance

CX is about the overall relationship and impressions a customer has with a brand.
UX is specifically about the interaction between a user and a product or service.

While CX takes a broad, longitudinal view, UX zooms in on individual touchpoints and interactions. UX is an important part of CX, but CX encompasses more than just UX.

Varying Scope and Levels of Experience

Another way to differentiate CX and UX is by looking at the scope and levels of experience:

Interaction level: The immediate experience a person has using a product or completing a task through a single touchpoint. UX design typically happens at this tactical level.
Journey level: The experience a customer has across multiple touchpoints as they work to complete a goal or journey. It focuses on the connections between interactions.
Relationship level: The holistic lifetime experience between a customer and brand across all interactions and journeys. This is the broad view of long-term CX.

While UX often concentrates on individual touchpoint interactions, CX connects these pieces together into an end-to-end journey and relationship. Strong UX is needed as a foundation for great CX.

UX as Part of the Customer Journey

We can also view the difference between UX and CX through the lens of the customer journey. The customer journey map tracks all the stages and touchpoints a customer goes through in their relationship with a brand. This typically includes:

Awareness: Discovery and initial research
Consideration: Comparing options
Purchase: Buying or acquiring
Onboarding: Getting set up to use a product or service
Usage: Integrating the product or service into life
Support: Getting help as needed
Loyalty: Ongoing relationship and brand affinity

UX focuses on the specific product and service touchpoints within the customer journey, such as:

Website or app usability
Ease of checkout/purchase process
Onboarding experience
Product features and functionality
Self-service account management
Help/support interactions

Meanwhile, CX looks at the quality of the end-to-end journey and the overall relationship. UX is a subset of CX.

Why UX and CX Work Together

While UX and CX have different focuses, they work together to create great customer experiences. Here are some of the key synergies:

UX builds trust and confidence. Smooth, seamless UX demonstrates competence and earns customers’ trust in a brand. It’s an important CX foundation.
UX prevents frustration. When interfaces are confusing or tedious to use, it damages the CX. Strong UX eliminates user friction.
UX enables self-service. Well-designed self-service experiences give customers autonomy and make for efficient CX.
UX creates consistency. Following UX best practices and style guides ensures a consistent experience across touchpoints.
CX provides UX context. Knowing CX goals and customer needs informs UX decisions and priorities.
CX identifies UX pain points. Customer feedback on poor experiences highlights UX areas for improvement.
Teams must collaborate. UX and CX teams need to partner closely to map journeys, share insights, and align efforts.

By working together and sharing a human-centered approach focused on customer needs, UX and CX teams can create better products, services, interactions, and long-term relationships.

Key Differences at a Glance

To recap, here are some of the key ways that UX and CX differ:

UX	CX
Focuses on interface interactions	Focuses on overall relationships
Tactical and task-focused	Strategic and broad view
Product/service perspective	Customer/human perspective
Design thinking	Ethnographic research
Usability testing	Surveys and customer data
Iterative design process	Journey mapping
Metrics like completion rates	Metrics like NPS and churn rate

Yet despite their different scopes and approaches, UX and CX complement each other in providing great human-centered customer experiences.

Should You Say UX or CX?

Should you default to using the term UX or CX? My advice is to use the term that makes the most sense for your goals and audience:

Talking to product/engineering teams? Use UX terminology.
Talking to service/marketing teams? Use CX terminology.
Discussing specific touchpoints? Reference UX.
Strategizing at a high level? Reference CX.

But remember that UX and CX are interconnected. Use the terms interchangeably depending on context if needed to avoid confusion. It’s more important that teams take a human-centered approach to crafting end-to-end customer experiences, not which label they use.

Adopting a Unified UX+CX Approach

Rather than pitting UX and CX against each other, leading companies are taking an integrated approach:

DesignOps: Developing processes to connect UX and CX efforts into a unified workflow.
Journey mapping: Involving both UX and CX teams in mapping full customer journeys.
Collaboration: Getting UX, CX, marketing, product, and service teams to regularly communicate and share insights.
Data sharing: Using both UX data like usability metrics and CX data like Voice of Customer feedback in decision making.
Omnichannel perspective: Looking at experience across channels and touchpoints, not siloed initiatives.
Human-centered culture: Promoting empathy, listening, and customer obsession at every level and team.

By breaking down silos and adpoting shared practices, language, metrics and mindsets centered around human needs, organizations can bring UX and CX together to drive business growth.

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

Key points to remember:

UX focuses on product/service interactions while CX looks at the complete customer relationship.
CX is a superset; UX is an important component of CX.
Strong UX provides a foundation for great CX.
Companies should take an integrated approach to UX and CX.

To improve your organization’s UX and CX capabilities:

Audit current maturity and gaps in both disciplines.
Map key customer journeys end-to-end.
Conduct small-scale prototyping and experiments.
Partner UX and CX teams on priorities.
Share insights, data, and design standards.
Iterate quickly to learn and improve.

Approaching UX and CX as interconnected and complementary will lead to human-centered customer experiences that drive growth. Focus on the shared goal of customer delight, not internal definitions.

customer experience vs user experience

So is UX part of CX?

You might do UX as part of a CX program, for example in designing a questionnaire or survey form that you will use to collect customer feedback, or laying out a store floorplan so that it is accessible to all customers. In this situation, UX is a focused and specific part of a wider CX action plan.

From this point of view, CX extends beyond UX. That’s because it is concerned with your brand as a whole, not just the customer’s engagement with specific products and services you have designed. As Rafał Warniełło explains;

On the other hand, UX extends beyond CX because it is used in a much wider range of settings than a business-customer relationship. Public organisations, government, schools and infrastructure are all areas where UX is used to improve the quality of experiences for citizens, visitors, patients, students and many more groups. It can make far-reaching differences on a massive scale – for example, by helping parents make better-informed school choices for their children.

CX, as the name implies, is all about the interaction between a customer and a business. Its purpose is to make a transactional relationship as mutually beneficial and sustainable as possible so that a customer keeps returning because their needs are being met. The customer benefits from good service and a feeling of trust, while the business benefits from repeated sales and an enhancement of their brand.

In other words, there are two sets of interests being served.

UX on the other hand tends to be focused exclusively on the end user, whether or not their experience translates into business benefits. (Often it does, but this will tend to happen as a by-product of good UX rather than a conscious goal.) UX advocates for the end user within a business or organisation.

In both cases, there will be a need to strike a balance between the needs of the user and the needs of the organisation.

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