How Does User Experience (UX) Impact Customer Experience (CX)?
As per a survey conducted by Segment, 49% of buyers make impulse purchases after a personalized customer experience. Moreover, a survey by BizFeel reveals, 57% of consumers prefer online shopping to physical purchases.
With the business world moving online, user experience is more critical than ever for serving customers better, improving conversions, and eventually increasing revenue. Thus user experience is considered a part of a wider concept of Customer Experience. Without a solid UX strategy in place, one might have a hard time offering the best customer service in the business.
Understanding the Relationship Between UX and CX
User experience is all about the interaction a customer has with your digital products or services. It is usually measured by bounce rate, time spent to complete a task, the number of actions or clicks performed, success rate, abandonment rate, etc.
On the other hand, customer experience is reflected in the quality of interactions a customer has with your company including quality of customer service, advertising, packing, etc. It is measured by customer satisfaction and loyalty, the likelihood to continue the interaction with the company, and recommendations made to others.
A poorly-designed user experience (UX) deters the users, so it is only logical to work hard on that part of your digital footprint because a great customer experience does require a well-designed UX.”
Best UX Design Practices to Improve CX
UX, customer service, and ROI go hand in hand. When user experience improves the customer experience, it directly affects the company’s ROI hence investing in UX only enhances your customer satisfaction. Here are 5 best practices to keep in mind when it comes UX design process:
- Stakeholder Interview
“A problem well stated is the problem half solved.” – Charles Kettering
The UX design process starts with understanding the customer expectations. Interviewing the people affected or who can be affected by your service helps you to brainstorm the best UX processes. It helps you to understand user behavior, identify technical constraints, usability problems, and what customers expect out of the final service.
Such rich insights help UX designers to get started with the right approach. By knowing what customers are envisioning out of your service, it is possible to provide them a positive and essential experience.
- User Research
While stakeholder interviews give us insights into the business objective of a product, user research tells us what features users expect from the product. The two essential facets of user research are – persona development and customer journey mapping.
Persona Development – A user persona helps you to know exactly who your target audience is to customize your UX design as per their needs and deliver the best user experience. This includes information like age, gender, education, income group, interests, and purchase behavior.
Customer Journey Mapping – Customer journey describes the different paths users follow to complete a specific task within a system, a website, or an application. It helps in understanding the application from a user’s point of view, gives valuable insights to create the flow of activities from one end to the other so that users can complete a task effortlessly.
Relatable Reading: Understanding 6 Key Benefits of UX Research and Design
- UX Audit
A UX audit or usability audit is the process of evaluating a website or application interface to identify usability problems in your digital products. It helps to detect problematic areas that cause headaches to the users and make them abandon their buying journey.
While a UX audit cannot directly solve all the website problems, it can answer some profound questions, offer recommendations for improvements and solutions for user-centric enhancements. To simply put, UX audit helps to boost conversions by making it easier for users to navigate through the website or the application.
- Wireframing
Wireframing helps you to get an idea about how content will flow across different devices and thus gather feedback at an early stage. It is the best way to implement customer-centric UX design with minimum losses. The purpose of creating wireframes is to help developers create usable content structures out of complex sets of information.
- Usability testing
According to MeasuringU, a staggering 85% of all UX issues can be resolved by performing a usability test on a group of five users. And according to VitaminT, developers spend half of their time dealing with UX problems that could have been easily avoided.
The objective of usability testing is to offer insights into how real users will interact with your website, make changes accordingly and thus avoid any design mistakes. Such testing is performed on prototypes to identify usability issues, improve a website or application’s design and help users to complete a task with ease.
Closing Thoughts
According to research by Jacob Nielsen, if you spend 10% of the development budget on UX, you’ll get 83% in conversion lift. That means, when UX improves the customer experience, it increases a company’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) up to 83% in conversion lift. So if your UX is not improving KPIs and ROI, then it’s not good UX. The earlier you start investing in a UX the better your CX will be and the more ROI your design efforts will reap.
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Endnotes
2. https://brizfeel.com/consumer-online-retail-shopping-behavior/
4. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/conversion
