Customer Experience vs. User Experience: Buying vs. Using

Customer experience and user experience—CX and UX, respectively—are sometime used interchangeably. Other times, they’re completely different and unrelated components.

The reality lies somewhere in between. Customer experience and user experience are closely connected but distinct. The difference comes down to the experience of buying a product or service versus the experience of actually using it.

It’s important to know the difference between CX and UX because each focuses on different parts of a customer’s journey. Only when you can separate the two and focus on each individually can you make sure your UX and CX are pitch-perfect.

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: The Difference is Buying and Using

There’s a lot of literature out there exaggerating the difference between UX and CX, but you can think of them as opposite yet connected.

It all comes down to what the person on the consumer side is doing.

The customer experience refers to what it’s like being a customer of a brand, particularly the journey a customer takes as they purchase their first product. CX encompasses all the interactions a person has with a brand. This includes:

First impressions
Learning more about the brand
Making a first purchase

Unlike UX, the customer experience is the overall experience a person has with a brand through every step of the buyer’s journey. It has less to do with the person’s experience using a specific product or service and everything to do with how they get to the point of buying it.

Imagine it from the customer side.

Remember the last time you purchased a new product? Maybe a budgeting app or fitness tracker? The CX is every step you take from learning about the app to downloading it onto your phone and signing up for a subscription.

The user experience refers to the experience someone has as they put a particular product or service to use.

Let’s go back to the budgeting app example.

Now that you’ve purchased the app, you become more than a customer.

You’re a user now. You have to learn to navigate the app, from entering bank account information to adding expenses and income. Everything you experience during your interactions with the app—the highs and the lows—comprises your UX.

One More Paramount Difference to Note When Improving CX & UX

When you’re working to improve your CX or UX, you need to know who you’re improving either one for.

Many businesses make the mistake of assuming customers are the users. So, they design user and customer experiences for the same people. And that’s a huge reason why one may not be as successful as the other.

You have to remember that when it comes to UX and CX, the journey to becoming a customer versus being a user is different.

Yes, sometimes the customer and the user are the same person. When someone downloads a fitness app and pays for a subscription, they’re both:

Customer: The person who bought the app
User: The person tracking workouts and progress

But importantly, their journey as a customer is separate from their journey as a user.

While your CX and UX improvements may focus on the same person, they will still focus on two distinct journeys.

A person’s experience as a user will be different from their experience as a customer making purchasing decisions.

In other cases, though, the customer and the user are two different people or groups.

Take a software company that sells project management tools. The customers are often decision-makers—like managers—who purchase the software for their teams. But the users are the team members who work with the software every day.

If the company focuses solely on CX, it might focus on marketing the features that appeal to managers, like budget tracking or reporting tools. But this overlooks the UX needs of the actual users, who might prioritize an intuitive experience for task management.

As a result, the tool may feel clunky or frustrating to use daily, even if it meets the CX goals of the purchasing decision-makers.

Keeping the customer and user journey distinct should be at the forefront of every improvement decision you make.

How to Create a Customer Experience Map and a User Experience Map

The first step in improving both the customer experience and the user experience is identifying exactly what a person goes through in each one.

This is what CX maps and UX maps are for.

A customer experience map is a visual representation of every interaction a customer has with your brand.

A user experience map is a visual representation of a person’s journey using a particular product or service or completing a task.

These maps help you find points of friction—the things that are negatively impacting the customer or user experience. For example, a CX map could show you that the purchasing process is too long. A UX map, on the other hand, could reveal that a feature isn’t being used like you thought it would be.

When you find these friction points, you can fix them for a better CX or UX.

Before you head off to create your first CX and UX maps, we’ve got one more big, important tip. You should not rely on what you think the customer and user experiences are like as you create these maps.

This’ll just be a waste of time. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot see things from a customer or user’s point of view with 100% objectivity.

Just look at any study about the false consensus fallacy if you don’t believe us. At its heart, “False consensus is a form of social projection whereby individuals overestimate the degree to which others share their characteristics or beliefs,” according to Kathleen P. Bauman & Glenn Geher in a 2002 piece for Current Psychology.

This fallacy impacts even the most experienced marketers. A 2022 piece published in the Keller Center Research Report, “Why Marketers Fail to Understand Their Customers,” reported data the authors collected from six studies with 714 marketing executives.

The goal of these studies? To see how the false consensus effect impacts top-ranked marketers.

Among other things, the results show that the false consensus effect can negatively impact marketers. Especially if they don’t actively suppress the tendency to assume other people think and feel the way they do.

But the studies also suggest the fallacy can negatively affect the way marketers use data. It can lead marketers to cherry-pick customer data they agree with and leave out what doesn’t.

So don’t do that. Look for data that represents the honest, objective truth.

The more data you objectively include, the better you’ll be able to accurately map your customer and user’s journeys.

Draw from:

Customer surveys and interviews that give feedback on how they felt and what they did
Heatmaps for products to show how they’re actually being used
Analytical data from your digital channels, like purchase history, time spent on a page, page views, link clicks, browse history, most visited pages, and chat transcripts from your support team

One more thing: use two to three ideal customer and user profiles to make the maps.

Don’t just rely on one point of view. You want to optimize the user and customer experiences to support more than one kind of person.

What to Include in CX and UX Maps

Stuck on what to include in your CX and UX maps? These quick lists will help.

Here’s a breakdown of what to include in a customer experience (CX) map:

The first interaction or introduction to your brand
Every touchpoint a customer goes through to learn more about your brand and grow their relationship with you
The resources they use
The content they consume at each touchpoint
How they engage in the purchase process
What they do immediately after purchase
How long each touchpoint interaction lasts
How long it takes until the first purchase or conversion
When they backed out of something

You can put it into a table, like the one below for a fictional company, FreshBlend Smoothies. Or, you can create a flow chart, graph, or other visual representation that works well for you and your team.

Now, here’s what to include in a user experience (UX) Map:

How they turn the product on or start using a service
Their first action after that
Every interaction they have until they’re done using the product or service for the day or everything they do until the completion of a task
What they do the most
What they don’t touch at all
When they backed out of something
How long each interaction lasts
How long it takes until they’re done

Unlike the CX map, the UX map focuses entirely on the experience a person has while putting the app to use. Creating CX and UX maps helps distinguish between these two separate yet linked journeys. Most importantly of all, they make it easier for you to tackle the separate issues that reduce customer and user satisfaction.

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