UX vs. CX vs. Service Design: What’s the Difference? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Let’s face it, the lines between user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), and service design are fuzzy. Even those who work in UX, CX, or service design can have a hard time distinguishing between the three. In this blog post, we’ll give a rundown of each and explain how they differ, as well as how they complement each other. Then, will examine how design thinking principles can guide design activities across all three disciplines, ensuring the user always remains the focal point. Read on for a quick primer of UX, CX, and service design, and their similarities and differences.

WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE (UX)?

For those out of the loop, UX can seem like just another tech buzzword thrown around by CIOs during conference keynotes. But in reality, UX is a key component in bringing truly transformative digital products and solutions to the marketplace. UX designers work tirelessly to ensure that every aspect of a product — from its usability and functionality to its branding and visual elements — is implemented with the end-user in mind. The goal of UX design is to make sure products are simple, easy to use, and delightful for users to engage with. Ultimately, good UX design is a key factor in improving overall user satisfaction and loyalty by enhancing the experience people have when they use a digital product or solution.

As Codal Senior Design Manager Joe Comins puts it, UX is a constantly-evolving discipline committed to consistently advocating for the user. “UX is the process — from discovery to final designs — that incorporates everything we learn about a client’s existing users, comparatively to the users in the rest of the market,” he says. “We try to understand their aims and objectives, and plot a path from ideation through to conversion for each of the user types. We plot the movements, the feelings, the journey of users — and pair that with the business requirements of the company. It’s a difficult balance to perfect, and everyone skews it slightly differently to a different end goal. In the end, we just want users to have a frictionless experience, allowing the company to benefit from the ease of a customer’s transition.”

So what does good UX look like? It uses a variety of methods to establish an emotional connection to users. It incorporates clever functionality — like microinteractions — to acknowledge and guide users. It is continuously revised and revamped to ensure it is evolving along with its users. And it tailors experiences to extremely diverse user bases.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE (CX)?

While CX incorporates some of the same key principles that drive UX, its scope is considerably larger. UX is concerned with how users interact with and experience individual products or solutions, but CX deals with how people experience and engage with your overall brand. In all consumer-facing activities — like marketing, sales, and customer service — CX governs how businesses engage with people. Good CX drives the entire buyer’s journey, making sure consumers don’t just have a positive impression of your products and solutions, but of your brand as well. This entails all of the interactions customer’s have with your brand, both online and offline.

In today’s increasingly competitive tech space, it’s no longer enough to simply offer a great product. Businesses need to use all methods at their disposal to truly distinguish themselves from competitors offering similar solutions. A recent Walker study found that 86% of consumers will pay more for a better CX. That speaks to the power good CX can have on influencing buyer behavior.

Consumers crave connection to brands and will reward the brands that recognize and respect them with loyalty. Every consumer-facing touchpoint is an opportunity to strengthen that connection, improve CX, and drive customer loyalty. More brands are realizing this, and investing heavily in improving their:

• Marketing emails
• ECommerce websites
• Customer service call scripts
• Chatbots
• Website content

By strengthening customer loyalty, CX has a direct impact on revenue. It’s no secret that it’s way more expensive and time-consuming to bring in new customers than it is to keep existing ones. Investing in CX not only drives revenue by ensuring you retain valued customers, but also presents cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Returning customers typically have higher cart values and become advocates for your brand, driving sales through word-of-mouth — the best kind of free marketing.

WHAT IS SERVICE DESIGN?

In order to understand service design, we have to start thinking holistically.

A popular example of service design concerns airlines. The entire flying experience — from booking to getting boarding passes, to check-in, to the actual flight itself — is a prime example of service design in action. Throughout the entire process, people interact with numerous touchpoints, be it the airline’s online booking system, a kiosk at the airport to check-in and print boarding passes, the flight attendants that conduct the boarding process and make sure all passengers are situated. And that’s just the beginning. When you factor in all of the airline’s advertisements, its mobile app, and even how its pilots address passengers from the flight deck prior to takeoff, you realize just how many unique touchpoints there are that engage directly with people.

Service design is concerned with how all of these individual touchpoints interact and connect. As service designer Hannah Steele puts it, “Service design is about understanding the holistic service experience, as it happens over time. As SDers, we include each and every touchpoint; from a digital app to a conversation with customer service staff, and even the messy bits in between.”

LET’S COMPARE

While UX, CX, and service design represent individual disciplines, they are definitely complementary. From an enterprise perspective, it’s essential to ensure your organization is committed to all three. Let’s look at ways in which UX, CX, and service design overlap, as well as ways in which they differ.

UX VS. CX

While both disciplines seek to advocate for the user and deliver seamless digital journeys, they differ in some key ways. UX designers are product-focused, meaning they are mainly concerned with how users interact with a single product or solution. CX designers, on the other hand, tend to be customer-focused, and primarily work to improve customer experience with brands as a whole.

While UX design prioritizes conducting extensive user research and testing to improve a product’s overall usability, CX design consults metrics like churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and net promoter score (NPS) to assess customers’ overall experience with a brand. Part of improving the customer experience could entail overhauling a product’s UX. But there are many other customer-facing touchpoints and processes that drive CX.

CX VS. SERVICE DESIGN

On the surface, CX and service design may appear to be merely two sides of the same coin. It’s true that both CX and service design prioritize the customer journey and seek to create a positive impression of brands and organizations as a whole. Both disciplines consist of multiple touchpoints, and ensuring that these touchpoints are compatible and intuitive is essential. Delighting customers is at the heart of both CX and service design.

While they share similarities, they differ in a couple of key ways. First, CX designers tend to be more concerned with metrics and performance. Because CX activities can by definition be revenue-generating, they rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics to monitor performance to ensure they are delivering against predetermined goals. Because service designers deal with many customer touchpoints that are abstract and hard to quantify — think about that pilot coming over the intercom before takeoff — they are rarely concerned with benchmarking, metrics, or other quantitative data, instead focusing on qualitative insights.

Second, service design considers how customers interact with all channels and touchpoints not just from the customer perspective, but from an organizational one as well. Service designers look at what internal processes and best practices are needed to successfully deliver quality services to customers. They implement design thinking practices, operating models, organizational planning, infrastructure improvements, and much more to make sure a company has the internal architecture to provide for customer satisfaction and delight.

You can’t have great CX without intelligent and holistic service design. CX designers think in terms of customer loyalty, advocacy, and gratification. Service designers think about the organizational structures, processes, and infrastructure that enable successful CX.

SUMMING IT UP

Put simply, UX focuses on the design of actual products, CX focuses on standing up and maintaining all customer-facing touchpoints, and service design examines how all of these touchpoints interact from an organizational perspective.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DESIGN THINKING

Across all three disciplines, the user is the main focus. Prioritizing the user’s needs above all else ensures that product experience, the customer experience, and the service experience are optimized for usability. It’s critical that designers across UX, CX, and service design take a “human-centered” approach to gain true insight into how people engage and interact with a product or service, rather than how they think users will engage and interact with it. Design thinking provides a framework to make sure that the user is always at the center of all design activities.

Initially theorized by Tim Brown, the CEO of global design firm IDEO, design thinking has spread like wildfire. Brown defines design thinking as a “human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” At the heart of design thinking is empathy for the user. It emphasizes true observation of how people interact with technology and advocates for a hands-on approach to designing using insights gleaned from user research.

That research is a crucial component of any design thinking strategy. Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, design teams must gather extensive insight into how users engage with dynamic digital environments in order to contextualize their understanding of the user experience and help solve complex challenges.

Insights gathered from user research can help teams challenge long-held assumptions and take unconventional approaches to solve problems that help them explore, test, and implement user-centric ideas.

All UX, CX, and service designers serve as advocates for the human being on the other end of a product, experience, or service. Using design thinking methodologies, designers can ensure that the user perspective is incorporated for the entire lifecycle of a project — from development, to launch, to maintenance.

To learn more about embracing design thinking techniques and methodologies, check out this blog post.

THREE APPROACHES TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN

CX, UX, and service design are unique concepts, but they share a common thread. All three seek to create better experiences for real people. Whether it’s engaging with an application, making a purchase on an eCommerce site, or navigating a complex set of touchpoints to complete a task, users need well-designed, engaging experiences that delight them to feel a sense of fulfillment. Design thinking helps designers make sure they never forget the real person on the other end of a screen, and keeps them striving for new ways to meet and exceed user expectations.

Interested in learning more about how to optimize and improve UX, CX, and service design in your enterprise — as well as embrace design thinking practices? Get in touch with Codal today.