Customer Experience, or CX, is the overarching practice of following a customer’s journey and elevating their experiences as they interact with a company.

Most people don’t see CX as its own practice within an organization; they see it sitting across the organization.

For example: CX touches marketing, sales, IT and HR – it pretty much touches everywhere your customers reside (both online and offline). It’s incredibly important to pay attention to the word “customer” within CX; a customer may not only be an external customer, but it can also be an internal customer as well.

UX on the other hand, plays a significant role within CX – and is more tactical. We love this quote:

“CX drives emotion whereas UX drives interaction.”

Basically, UX is but one component of CX. Let’s think about it a different way: consider your perspectives and interactions when you deal with a particular company. For example – think about seeing an ad that triggers you to order a new set of headphones online.

From the time you see that brand’s advertisement, you’re interfacing on the fringe of a company’s CX strategy. What drove you to consider those specific headphones? What kind of emotions did they elicit? The goal of CX is to explore these emotions and to smooth the consumer’s path to purchasing products – so that the entire process, start to finish, is frictionless. But then, once you decide to go to the company’s website and begin the ordering process, you are now in the UX realm.

The goal of UX is to make the process of ordering the product as easy, fast, and seamless as possible. CX was responsible for telling the story, making you feel something and capturing your attention – which ultimately steered you towards making a decision. UX goes beyond advertising, because it evaluates the thought processes and actual interactions a customer goes through as they interact with a company. It leverages your consumer’s behaviors – which directly impacts messaging and how interfaces are designed.