Customer Experience – What Is It?

Customer experience (CX) is often a term that gets confused with user experience (UX); however, it is important to note they are not the same. While UX focuses on the experience a person has while using your system, CX goes beyond that to include not only the UX but customer service, delivery, product packaging, etc.

Consider the following example:

• A person might go to a website to shop for a product and while checking out, they have a question about shipping.
• The person calls the company, talks to a service rep and gets put on hold
• The call gets escalated because the initial customer service rep cannot answer the question

The person may have had a great User Experience, on the website shopping for the actual product. But the overall Customer Experience was bad because they were put on hold and then passed around from one department to the next.

What We Heard at Building Business Capability (BBC): Las Vegas

In multiple breakout sessions, speakers emphasized how important it is to think about customer experience while managing requirements for a system. Often times, business analysts only talk to end users and business owners when managing requirements. However, to ensure the customer experience is taken into consideration business analysts need to identify needs that go beyond just using the system. Good requirements can drive not only a good user experience, but a great customer experience.

What Should Analysts Know?

In order to continuously improve and evolve as analysts, we need to think outside the box of the immediate system or product for which we are managing requirements.

• Focus on providing value to the organization as a whole
• Incorporate CX considerations into our requirements
• Encourage product owners to consider reaching across the organization when developing requirements for a project; such as, with marketing, sales, etc.

After all, the system or product that we are building is just one aspect of an organization’s overall customer experience