Disambiguity: Customer Experience vs. User Experience

What is Customer Experience?

Turns out there is this whole other profession, born, it seems, mostly from the marketing discipline, who have an active interest in orchestrating company wide good experience for their customers. They are experienced in making strong, financially driven business cases to management at the highest level, getting decent budgets and then investing in infrastructure that enables an organisation to deliver good customer experience.


Reading some of their books (I particularly enjoyed  this one) it strikes me that they have a much more mature and structured way to approaching company wide good experience than we User Experience people (generally) do.

Similarly, in reading what they write about, it is disturbing how little reference Customer Experience people make to User Experience people. I've come across several references to human factors and usability, but you'll almost never find Customer Experience and User Experience in the same book/article/room.

We should be working together, but I think we don’t because a) it’s in Customer Experience’s best interest to drive to conversation and have User Experience types under them (probably as they should), and b) CX types have done a better jobs defining the value proposition, especially in defining their title (what’s more important than the customer?).

Most Customer Experience professionals understand sales, marketing and customer support better (all touchpoints essential in Customer Experience), so they have a better grasp on how the business provides value. We tend to be siloed in our experience.

The post talks about User Experience folks have done a poor job explaining how to provide value, other than saying, “it’s part of the process.” We have to show real world examples other Apple. That’s our challenge for 2012.