Last week’s interesting travel conversation was about the difference between User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Relationship Experience (CRX).
Thanks to Liz-Ann, my unfortunate victim, trapped by me in the Delta Sky Club. She is not in Marketing or eCommerce but in IT Finance. But she asked me to post this so she could pick it up on Twitter and send to her team so here goes.
The three CRX, CX and UX terms are commonly muddled and mistaken for each other but require very different skills and abilities. The difference is important for thinking about the problem you are looking to solve, hiring or allocating employees and certainly for identifying and retaining consultants and solutions’ companies.To keep it simple, definition by example and a few simple questions to think about.We will use airline travel as an example (thanks Delta) since that is where we were.
User Experience – The experience WITHIN A SPECIFIC CHANNEL or the way a particular interface works for the user or customer to achieve a specific transaction or objective. This could be an information share or eCommerce on a desktop or mobile internet channel, a text interaction on mobile text, a contact center conversation, a store visit, a social media visit or intercation, a TV viewing, radio listen, print media view etc. To illustrate one on my favorite digital user experiences, booking a ticket Delta Airlines at www.delta.com). Great UX design and creation requires very specific skills in visual or voice interface or store design or media including deep understanding of how technology affects, presents and enables the “visit” or “view”. Digital channels of course allow us to monitor those experiences to improve them and learn about customers.
Customer Experience (CX) – The experience a customer has ACROSS CHANNELS AND MANHY USER EXPERIENCES to achieve a particular result often requiring multiple transactions (theoretically a Customer Experience (CX) could consist of one transaction or one User Experience but when you look deeply very few do). For example booking my business trip above in addition
to booking the ticket on Delta (www.delta.com) actually involved research of alternate flight options on Travelocity (www.travelocity.com)
then looking at my mobile Delta app after booking my ticket to try and find out my upgrade likelihood (I still cannot figure out how to do that on Delta mobile). After that I call Delta’s customer service center to try to
figure out the same thing (“Pretty much No” was the answer), booking my hotel on Hotels.com (www.hotels.com ) and getting email confirmations from www.hotels.com and www.delta.com (and a “you forgot to book”
email from Travelocity. Then I looked at Time Out New York magazine to see what interesting entertainment events are happening while I am in town in case I have some time off. Great CX design and creation involves skills in 
understanding behaviors, multi-channel and omni-channel process and event modeling, affiliate and partner business models and (if you have an experience you want to link together) deep data skills to understand what information is required to move from item to item.
This gets particularly complex when the media
and channel changes such as the contact center conversation or visiting a store. usually represented by a customer journey chart that shows how the customer moves back and forth across specific channels, what happens at each event, how the customer is treated, what is next and what data is extracted from each event.
Customer Relationship Experience (CRX) – The COMBINATION OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES OVER TIME which define the overall relationship that a customer has with you. This may apply to an end to end transaction like the travel experience example adding to the booking experience the actual travel experience (text my boarding pass to me, drive to airport, park, go to kiosk because I deleted the text !, airport security, fly, taxi to office, train to hotel, dinner, office next morning, taxi to airport, fly to home airport, drive home, arrive home, receive customer service email from Delta and Hilton etc). At a more extreme level the CRX involves all the experiences over a protracted period of time. The latter being critical for designing and optimizing loyalty programs and maintaining customer engagement levels. Absolutely critical for managing long term relationships for long term results and defining and optimizing CRM strategy. Especially critical in the many businesses (and non-commercial endeavors where business profitability and success is dependent on multiple transactions over time because customer acquisition costs are so high.
In our Delta example the simplest version of a robust, comprehensive and critical CRX would be my 2013 Platinum frequent flyer status in 2013 requiring 88 flight “segments” this year (so far) and MORE BROADLY 20 years of trips it took to reach “million miler+” status.
A CRX map would cover how a customer achieves specific relationship levels (annual Bronze, Siler, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and lifetime levels such as Million Miler status or 5 Million Miler status).
There are few established models for documenting Customer Relationship Experience (CRX) but the best is to use a combination of Customer Journey charts and state transition charts.
Real world CRX design (and in fact CX design) is complicated by affiliate partners (like Hilton, Starwood, American Express, Hertz, Avis etc in Delta’s case). This gives rise to interesting sidebar considerations like the current burning issue for frequent flyers of all the people earning miles and status through credit card earned points who rarely fly but put pressure on flight upgrades, Sky Lounges etc.
Great CRX design requires broad time based process skills, systems thinking and behavioral modeling and understanding, a deep understanding of data design considerations and long term customer benefits modeling. Very different design and thinking skills to User Experience and a different perspective than single Customer Experience design and creation.
A Few Questions & Thoughts To Consider – A few questions for consideration when looking at UX, CX and CRX design.
- What is the outcome you are trying to design for and behavior you are trying to understand and influence, does it vary by persona?
- Is this basically a UX, CX or CRX issue?
- Do you have the right skills on your team to address this?
- What are the series of activities and events required for the customer to achieve the particular result over what period of time?
- Do you have the most important and impactful short and long term journeys, events and experiences documented?
And for More thought leadership and expertise click on these Twitter handles
Forrester Research
- Kerry Bodine, co-author of Outside In – @kerrybodine
- Harley Manning – coauthor of Outside In – @hmanning
- Fatimeh Khatibloo – Customer Intelligence and Customer Engagement @fatemehx2
- Megan Burns – Customer Experience Leader @mbcxp
PLUS
Bruce Temkin – Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association @btemkin
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