What’s So Right (and Wrong) About Customer Experience (CX)

At its heart, CX revolves around asking: “How do customers feel about my brand or product?”

Digital creatives and businesses need to foster a culture that delivers unique value within their CX. This minimises any potential for a customer to leave their brand for a competitor.

One way to deliver exceptional CX is through a product’s user experience. According to the notable Behavioural Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the ‘Peak-End’ rule suggests that people judge an experience by the most intense point and the endpoint of the interaction. This is because the human brain is hardwired to recall the highlight and the last point of any memory.

For example, when a customer walks into an Apple store, the peak of their experience may be the purchase of an item or the assistance they received from a staff member at the Genius Bar.

The ‘peak-end’ experience is amplified by the endpoint of their experience, which may also involve being greeted on their way out of the store.

Why CX Fails

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to CX. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when improving a client’s CX:

Failure to identify the goal of CX

CX is a marathon, not a sprint. Each experience isn’t the responsibility of singular marketing, product, or digital team, it requires a company-wide culture of continuous improvement.

Organisations must work collaboratively to identify the core goal of a CX strategy that is aligned across the business.

As Charbel Zeaiter, Co-Founder of Academy Xi says, “One of the most dangerous mistakes that any CX, UX, Service Designer – or any designer, in fact, can make – is being focused on only the customer.”

“The reality is that the role of a designer is to bridge user and business needs. No business = no user anyway! In fact, I don’t like the word “User” because it’s cold and disconnected from what our responsibility is: to design for all people.”

Stand out from the crowd with an expert-led course in UX Design or Service Design at Academy Xi.

Failing to Measure the Effectiveness of CX

Whether it’s top management or an individual’s experience, failure to measure your customers’ interactions with your brand is equally dangerous as launching a product without conducting any research. To ensure your CX strategy is effective, you must be able to measure, and action the feedback you receive. Some methods to measure your company’s CX include:

i.Net Promoter Score (NPS)

ii.Customer Satisfaction

iii.Customer Effort Score

iv.Customer Churn Rate

v.First Response and Average Handling Time

vi.Slow adoption and change

For CX strategies to remain relevant and useful, they must be nimble to change. The importance of measuring your company’s CX effectiveness must coincide with the ability to make changes upon qualitative and quantitative customer feedback.

Capturing only part of the customer experience

Too often, companies fall into the trap of measuring only parts of the CX. Considering elements such as website functionality or after purchase support are fine, but failure to consider and understand the entire end-to-end customer experience risks oversimplifying your CX.

Poor User Experience Design

CX and User Experience (UX) Design work hand-in-hand to determine a customer’s ideal experience with your product or service.

At the end of last year, research indicated that up to 52 percent of people will not return to a non-mobile friendly website, especially if it was visited on their mobile device. The attention span of customers is getting shorter and a poorly designed website will discourage customers from engaging or re-engaging with your product.

Having Strong UX Delivers a Great CX

UX Design is the subset of a customer’s overall CX and involves understanding a user’s experience with a specific product — whether it’s a website, app, or software. By focusing on the feasibility, viability, and usability of a product, UX bridges the gap between aesthetically pleasing designs and the customers’ experience of those designs.

UX Design has become such a crucial part of CX because it focuses on delivering value based on the human psyche. UX explores more than just knowing what the user wants and expects, it uses empathy to accommodate customers’ emotions and needs.

Going beyond just the product’s features and executing customer suggestions, the goal of UX Design is to provide the best solution to the most number of users within the product’s target audience.

Utilising user research and data, a UX Designer creates personas of their audience to identify their goals, motivations, needs, and behaviours. These personas add a human touch to research and identify groups of users who engage with your product or service.

UX Design Principles ensure a user’s choice is seamless. Whether it’s helping users to navigate to the right button on a website or the ability to make a fast decision, the principles of UX Design allow you to create experiences that delight and fulfill core business goals.

To illustrate the importance of UX as a subset of overall CX, let’s explore two examples:

Bad UX, Good CX: You decide to purchase a game in the app store. Upon purchase, you find the layout and navigation of the game is hard to understand. Fortunately, the app developers provided contact details and you’re able to receive useful step-by-step support. The game’s poor navigation is an example of bad UX, however, the app developers ability to provide excellent customer support is good CX.

Good UX, Bad CX: It’s been awhile since you’ve travelled overseas and you decide to organise a trip online. You register, book, and purchase plane tickets on a website from an airline that you’ve never travelled with before. The process is straightforward and seamless. However, on the day of your trip, you arrive at the airport and it’s a disaster. The check-in queue is long and you struggle to navigate from each checkpoint due to the airline’s poor directions and signage. Your experience with the ticket purchase demonstrates good UX but your experience at the airport is a primary example of bad CX.

Ultimately, both UX and CX are user-centric processes that prioritise the human experience above all elements and take into account the user and their circumstances. Good UX Design is essential for any business’ overall CX approach. The right design can bridge the gap between a business’ goals and objectives.

Discover new ways to improve your CX with an industry-recognised course in UX Design at Academy Xi.


Academy Xi has partnered with Design + Technology Collective to offer members an exclusive 20% discount to on all Xi courses. Learn how to think creatively and think customer with Academy Xi.