User Experience vs. Customer Experience

We at OneDesk have always preached that companies should strive to provide the best customer experience. However, customer experience often gets confused with user experience. The two terms are closely related and often used interchangeably; organizations are constantly trying to define their meanings.

The difference between user experience and customer experience

User experience is about how a person feels about using a product or service. If your customers are saying things like “I like this product because it’s easy to use,” you know that you are providing them with a great user experience. This does not necessarily refer to how easy your product is to use, or how satisfied customers are with your service. According to this blog post, user experience encompass what people feel, think, and able to do as they interact with your product. Are they happy with the way it works? Can they complete what they’re trying to do within a time that seems reasonable to them? Do they understand how to navigate your product? Is it easy and intuitive or does it require people to learn new ways of doing things?

According to Richard Owen, Vice-President, of Dell Online worldwide, customer experience is “The sum total of the interactions that a customer has with a company’s products, people, and processes. It goes from the moment when customers see an ad to the moment when they accept delivery of a product – and beyond.”

Customer experience is the most important aspect in achieving success for many of today’s leading companies. By providing the ultimate customer experience, companies increase their chances of retaining their customers. According to a post on the Harvard Business Review, “Crafting a great customer experience requires enormous amounts of collaboration across groups in a company that often work independently and at different stages of product development. In many cases marketing, product design, customer services, sales, advertising agency, retail partners must all be working in concert to create even a single touchpoint.”

Interpreting user experience

All that being said, the definitions of both terms are still open to interpretation. Many argue that users simply use things while customers are the ones who pay for things. When a user decides to buy a product, they then become a customer. Once they become a customer, their interaction with the company counts. Many associate user experience with technology and online services, and customer experience with the overall experience they have with a product or service.

How OneDesk provides a great user experience

As we’ve already written a blog post about how we maximize customer experience, we thought we would give you a quick overview of our interpretation of user experience.

We at OneDesk feel it’s important to provide the ultimate customer experience to our clients. We do this by assuring our product’s usability is supreme. Thus, we encourage feedback from everyone and are always working to improve the software by facilitating navigation, ameliorating the look, and continuously adding new features.

We want to know: What is your interpretation of user experience?