Customer Experience V User Experience

It's a confusing world! Definitions and boundaries become blurred when titles that actually have different meanings, are interchanged incorrectly.

A Usability expert is not necessarily an information architect nor are IA necessarily interaction designers. Moreover, the subject of this little grunt is 'user experience' versus 'customer experience'. They are often used interchangeably, yet are very different beasts. User Experience is very much a a subset of Customer Experience.

A 'User' (in this context) is person who interacts with a computer system via hardware and software. The experience with that system is determined by system designers who draw on tools and techniques from usability, HCI, interaction design, information architecture etc. The primary concerns of the system designers are (hopefully) the users,their goals and the tasks performed on the system to achieve those goals.

The Customer Experience however, should take into consideration a much bigger picture. A 'customer' is much more than a user, in terms of brand relationships. A user interacts with a system but a customer buys into a relationship with a brand.

This has a number of implications when setting out to design a good customer experience that involves the design of software.

A Customer Experience designer should consider more than goals, tasks and features as they need to influence the interaction not just between the user and the system but also between the customer and the brand.

This doesn't mean that systems designers suddenly have to be brand experts as well as interaction experts (although it does help) but it does mean that a new kind of team is required. A customer experience team ideally should have representatives from marketing, branding, products, operations, sales, customer service as well as the technical teams. And in order to create a truly integrated customer experience these traditionally siloed disciplines should share knowledge about their areas of expertise.

Systems designers can help operations ensure the Customer Service training programme accurately reflects the system and customer service can feedback to the system designers about customer queries. The marketing department knows about competitors and can help system designers determine which features could be emphasised in order to boost interest and sales and equally system designers can contribute to marketing by offering detailed and accurate product information for the sales collateral and user guides.

Software development is traditionally self-interested. But I'd like to end this grunt by saying that while we commonly think of a system as interaction with computers, the system is in fact the whole interaction with the customer. The entire group of independent but interrelated elements constituting the whole end-to-end experience. From when the customer first hears about a product, through the pre-sales, sales and fulfilment process, to the post-sales support until the product is either upgraded or retired.

Agree? disagree? don't care? leave your comments so I know.