CX & UX - A Match Made In Heaven?

In this episode our question is a slightly existential one about when is UX the same as CX, or is it.

How do clients understand the difference. How does one inform the other?

We clarify the difference between UX and CX, and investigate how they complement each other. 

Presented by Sue Carter. Featured guests Stephen Priestnall & Sunali Aggarwal.

Recorded & Edited by Mr Anderson Limited for oomph.

Transcript

Sue Carter: 0:05

Hello, and welcome to the third edition of the joy of CX brought to you by oomph agency and guests. We've got an interesting one for you today, which is probably a bit more existential maybe. So just to whet your appetite there. I'm Sue Carter. I'm a customer experience specialist and I work with oomph agency. And today I'm joined perhaps by our first global guest. So first of all, I'd like to welcome Sunali Aggarwal, who is a user experience specialist, Sunali. Perhaps you could give us a quick introduction please?

Sunali Aggarwal: 0:39

Sure. Yeah, pleasure to be here Sue. And I am Sunali. And I'm a user experience design consultant. I've been in this field for last 20 years now. And I'm also a serial entrepreneur because i've had, like, four startups and I'm on my third startup at the moment. And all of them were design led, like, you know, we have a problem, and then we go and solve it. And in the end, the major contribution there is UX. So how do you look at design problems from a UX perspective? So yeah, so I've been practising design in SaaS, in b2c,in d2c, you know, in fields like insurance, in CRM, and all of that. So, so I've worked with over 100 companies in my career. So yeah, I have quite an extensive experience.

Sue Carter: 1:30

I look forward to hearing more about it. And you join us from just north of Delhi?

Sunali Aggarwal: 1:36

Yes, we are. I'm in a place called Chandigarh, that's close Fabulous. Back to Abergavenny, also to introduce Stephen

Sue Carter: 1:39

Thanks, so great to be here again, and welcome, Priestnall, who's the founder and chief planner at oomph. Stephen today, we've got an interesting one, comparing or discussing UX and CX and the crossover and the difference, and how they complement each other. So tell me what you're Sunali. Thanks for joining us in our on our podcast. looking forward to today in this podcast.

Sunali Aggarwal: 2:04

Thank you

Stephen Priestnall: 2:10

I think this is a really interesting and very practical territory for us to explore today Sue. You know, the world of user experience has developed a lot since the the first websites were developed back in the 90s, where we have Nielsen talking about the principles of UX. And some really kind of hard rules that got adopted in the digital industry at the turn of the millennium. And now we're in a space where the channels available through the digital world are expanding all the time. We've got the introduction of the likes of Chat GPT through AI, we've got web 3.0 taking place. And all this is happening in parallel with an evolution and thinking around customer experience and what customer experience means. And I know we find we found out ourselves Sunali in projects we've done together, a client doesn't know when you say CX, whether you mean UX. And sometimes when you say UX, I'm not sure whether you mean CX. And I think we'd really like to explore, you know, some of the nuances and the connections that link those two terms. Yeah, maybe provide some clarity to listeners?

Sunali Aggarwal: 3:23

Sure. I mean, the way I see it, I mean, CX is a larger umbrella under which UX is covered. And when we talk about CX, you know, we've always spoken about CX as a as a strategic involvement, you know, it's, it's like, you know, looking at all the different touch points, all the different customer touch points. And then, and then making sure that every touch point is optimised for user or customer satisfaction. And one of those touch points now is digital, right? Whether whether it's an app or a website, or it's a system that we're dealing with. Now, when we come to a more digital kind of a touch point, then then we then we give more importance to UX, but UX is deriving all its values, all its directions from CX, I mean, the ultimate goal is that customer should be should feel happy and satisfied when they go through a particular touch point, right? Be a digital, physical, you know, whatever. But when it comes to digital, you have to deal with certain nuances, which are very digital specific. Right? So when you're talking about an app, there are certain considerations, there are certain principles that you use when you're talking about a website. Again, you know, we need to take a factor in these considerations and principles. And hence the hence UX takes let's say more, more, let's say more focus there. But in like I said, you know, CX is more strategic and UX is more tactile. So in my opinion, it works. UX has to look at even though the smallest thing in a system where CX, you know, defines the larger goals for you. What should be the outcome? How do you make your customers happy? And that is by or, you know, do they need less training, less support? I mean, these are the broader goals that we kind of have, always for both, for both the CX and UX.

Sue Carter: 5:24

Thanks Sunali. I feel like you've kind of answered the question and we can all go home as the title of this podcast was 'CX and UX, a match made in heaven' question mark. And you really well explained and articulated how they complement each other. And CX should lead to and support the UX.

Sunali Aggarwal: 5:47

Absolutely.

Sue Carter: 5:48

Stephen, in your experience, does that always happen?

Stephen Priestnall: 5:53

Well, no, is the short answer to that. I think that that that's not necessarily because there's a conflict, I think that, you know, there can be design projects of that materialise from a very functional user experience perspective. So we we want as an organisation, a user of this tool, website, app, to successfully achieve a goal in their digital journey. And, that then drives in the end the organization's mind and sponsors mind, okay, it's really important, we get the user experience, right and this, and that can be that conversation can be happening at the same time that somebody in product or marketing is considering whether that journey should should exist at all, whether the goal of maximising that conversion is really in the interest of the customer experience, or whether the user entering that journey is informed enough in order to complete it. And so I think that there are there are times Sue when you can feel an organisational kind of dissonance between a UX goal and a CX goal. And, and you know, what we try and do is put them in the room together. So we can, we can evaluate.

Sue Carter: 7:15

Yeah, we used to, I think it used to be called or summarised as perhaps 'build it and they will come' you know, someone would come up with a feature idea and yeah, that's a great idea. Let's go and build build it without thinking about the customer. So this is almost like the new wave, the new phase for that more nuanced version of that, isn't it? It's like, we know, we would like, we think we would like this for the customer, we need to build the functionality that matches it. Sunali, in your experience more recently. Are you beginning to see that tide? Of No, actually, let's go back and think about what the customer wants, rather than just a brilliantly working product for the sake of the product itself?

Sunali Aggarwal: 7:58

Absolutely. Because, you know, without making anything useful, you're not making anything experiential, either. Right. So utility comes first. And, you know, the very thing that you solve the problem for the for the user, is, is more important than how do you solve it now, you know, and then because there are many ways of solving it, and you pick one, that does not mean that is the only way. So you have to constantly review it, whether other methodologies apply, or whether other ways of solving the problem apply. So So I mean, you're constantly going back and forth on that, because there is so much research can help you, the research can help you understand. Like I said, you know, CX can help you understand what your user looks like, or your customer looks like. But when you get into the the tactile part of it, you have to do things to understand, you know, so. So that's where you know, you need to, and thankfully, now, technology can help us a lot, evaluating pretty early on whether you're on the right track or not, you know. So what I'm also seeing now is we integrate a lot of tools at the beginning of the project, rather than thinking about it later, you have a lot of integrations at the beginning, because you know, you're tracking, you're auditing, you are revising, you revisiting a lot of things. So that keeps on happening.

Sue Carter: 9:22

And what sort of tools are you talking about there? What do you use? or what have you seen used?

Sunali Aggarwal: 9:27

So as simple as using Google Analytics, to as complex or let's say, using like a screen recording software, you know, heat maps, all of those things, where you can at least understand whether the user understands what you're trying to tell them, you know. So that's the gap that we're always trying to close people understanding what we're trying to tell them, you know, so, and because we're not sitting with them, we're sitting at a different location and they're using the product in isolation, so that's that's the challenge, basically, that everyone's trying to close.

Stephen Priestnall: 10:04

And I think Sue just to add to Sunali's answer to the integration piece that you touched right at the right at the top of this podcast on changing technology, you know, and the acceleration of that over the last really few few months, and AI and less so web 3.0, but we're seeing things like customer orchestration platforms. And I'll talk about what that is in a second. Becoming more and more infrastructure, more of an important part of clients infrastructure. So their acknowledging before they embark on a journey of developing UX, CX, that actually, they need to be able to measure what interactions are happening through different channels at different times and bringing that back to guide the decision making. I also thought that Sunali made a really interesting point when she touched on problem identification, I think this has kind of gone back to old school, Jakob Nielsen a little bit as well. But it's, it's been a really useful tool for us to, to challenge the development of UX and CX and okay, what problem are we actually solving. So coming back to the example I talked about before, which is helping a customer get through to a customer journey to perhaps buy a product. Perhaps that's not the problem that the customers got, perhaps the problem that the customer has is understanding the range of options they have open to them. And from the best way of solving the problem is to give them the research tools in the first instance, to make a confident decision to then come back and complete a journey to purchase at a different point. And I think that that technique that Sunali outlined about being really clear and problem identification, which requires some research, they require some insight, it probably requires some data in there to help understand it. That can be a nice and relatively inexpensive because it's a dry run process. There's no tech involved in that necessarily. It's it's just a proper evaluation, what problem are we trying to solve?

Sunali Aggarwal: 12:13

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And a lot of startups that I mentor, I tell them one thing is don't automate right away, you know, do it manually. If you have a manual solution, and people buy that, then you automate you automating for scale. You never automating because automation is required. But you automate scale. So identify the problem, solve it, make sure and if you can make money, make sure people will pay for that, and then automate what you need to automate. Today, we fortunately, unfortunately, we think automation first, which is a good thing, because this generation is growing up in an automated, conditioned environment. But but when you come to problem solving, you have to actually see whether what is the value that you're adding? What is the value creation, from your end, when you solve that problem? So is it convenience? Is it cheaper? Is it faster? Is it new? So you need to evaluate all of those things before you get into your UX journey.

Sue Carter: 13:21

Thank you both. I'd like to I think, step back a bit. We've quite quickly gone into the nitty gritty of UX, and CX, which is brilliant is what's what it's what we're here to discuss, I think let's step back a bit, particularly for our listeners who may need support on bringing this work into the business on helping stakeholders understand CX and UX and the crossover. Sunali, I'll start with you first. Because you you are many, many years in the UX field. Do you find that clients confuse UX and CX? And if so, how do you support them to really understand and value the difference?

Sunali Aggarwal: 14:07

So a lot of clients who have digital products, they're clearly looking for UX people, because all their digital, all the touch points are digital, right? From sales, to conversion, to support to training, to feedback, everything is digital, right? So it makes more sense for them to be UX first. But a lot of people even when they have digital products have goals they don't have missions, they don't have values. They don't understand brand, you know, and for that, I think having a customer view on you know, what is the perception going to be if they go ahead with a certain kind of product, and what is the perception that they need to build? And I think that becomes a CX challenge, you know, and I always ask them these questions, how to... very simple question, what is, how are you differentiating yourself because, you know, any product in the market would have competition, and you have multiples of the same product? Who are you targeting? Are you targeting a different audience? Are you targeting with a different mindset? Are you targeting? are you solving a specific thing? So all of this thinking should rather come from a CX person? And say, Okay, let me let me look at it. Let me get a holistic picture and see who the user is, who the customer is, and then look at it from their perspective, and then have UX people also participate in actually implementing that strategy. So I see CX is a very strategic role. And that becomes very important for UX people also, because not all decisions can be taken by a UX person, you know. So there has to be some sort of guidelines to follow. So that's, that's where a CX, a strong CX role.

Sue Carter: 15:54

And Stephen does that resonate with the conversations that you are having with people that you work with, with organisations working with CX or UX or one or the other?

Stephen Priestnall: 16:03

Yeah, and absolutely recognise the scenario that Sunali's outlined, and, you know, we have, we have some, what are increasingly quite practical ways of helping clients and organisations kind of understand that difference. And, and we try and work on the thought when we get into CX strategy, we try and work on understanding the needs as a as an a specific idea, the needs of the customers who use it all, or members. And we use a methodology around need states that allows us to recognise that different audiences defined within different conventional segments might actually have overlapping needs, at certain points in time. And so, if we tease out those need states for an organisation or a company building a product, then those become the constant, those become the things that define the problems that we're trying to solve, because we're satisfying a need. We've then got a different conversation about which groups of potential prospects or customers have the strongest need at a particular point in time. And that can define campaign development. It can define product rollout, it can define prioritisation. But yeah, as Sunali says, those conversations around needs, drive the problems that establish what the customer experience strategy is that then is executed through a through a UX centred route.

Sue Carter: 17:30

And what happens if an organisation decides not to do that strategic CX part. So they dive straight into the UX, you know, they're in Sunali's camp straightaway.

Sunali Aggarwal: 17:46

So they'll be, they won't be lost in my camp for sure, but

Sue Carter: 17:51

obviously never lost with you Sunali, never.

Sunali Aggarwal: 17:54

They wouldn't be lost. But you know, there's a lot of, I think, when you bring CX people you bring, bring a different kind of perception, you know, you and all of these help the business, right. Like I said, you know, from a UX standpoint, we're not just looking at the product, but we're also looking at the business. And we would have specific questions around the business, and mostly around the customer, because it's very user centric, who is a customer? Right? So if you don't know your customer, that well, what you're doing is you're doing more and more research into understanding that customer. And you, you're trying to gather all the data that you can. And all of this can very well be done by a CX person, and you know, hand it over to a UX person saying that, you know, we've done this inside, we understand the customer, we understand the need, we understand the problems now. And we also know the differentiator. Right? So, so you, you were saving a lot of UX person's time when you already done that with a CX person. Not saying that, in the absence of one or the other, this can't be done. Right? You can see that, in today's time, a lot of roles are overlapping. As long as we know what problem you're, you're kind of going for. And how do you solve it? And do you solve it with better advice? You know, because otherwise, you're just, you know, you're making your own mistakes. And maybe you don't have to this with better advice.

Sue Carter: 19:19

I think it's really interesting point about the overlapping roles. Stephen Sorry, I was just gonna.

Stephen Priestnall: 19:23

Yeah go for it,

Sue Carter: 19:24

Yeah just to ask you about that. Do you think that's dangerous to start overlapping the to like this? Should these be seen separately one leads to the other? Is that just a natural progression to help them work together and more often and merge?

Stephen Priestnall: 19:39

No, I think there's there's a comfortable grey area, to be honest, Sue that borrows from each other. As, you know, I actually I'll come back to an answer to your previous question in a second because I have something in my head around around that as well. But I think that the idea that you can rapidly prototype with customer needs development in mind could be argued to be a UX centred way of developing your CX. Now, it may be that the commercial investor driven environment for, for a tech product launch actually puts you in that space, which is a very rapid, agile project management testing process. And you run that through kind of research study. So I think, I think it's, I think there's, you know, there's a comfortable grey area. I think that that one area, perhaps for more mature companies, but it can happen for kind of passionate, entrepreneur driven entities that that are very, very product focused, which I definitely wouldn't put Sunali in that territory. Sunali is very UX centred. And her design of, of her entrepreneurship but where you might have a very passionate entrepreneur with an interest in a domain, or you've got an established organisation with a with a way of doing things, the lack of a CX strategy can end up with a very, we use the term an'inside out' approach to things. So you end up looking at the inside of an organisation for how it does things, and you amplify the way in which the organisation already does things. And that becomes the language of UX then, which can be really flawed. And sometimes you just need to be able to take that outside in approach which is to look outside, look at the customer's needs, and bring that into the inside. So that is, I think that's, that's, we've seen evidence of that across all types of organisations.

Sue Carter: 21:43

I'd like to then move on with a segway of thinking about perhaps the outside world, and something which you touched on Stephen at the beginning. And I know you've been doing a fair amount of research and thinking about this. And it's something we haven't really touched on in these podcasts yet. So it'd be good to get the conversation started. And that is AI, next generation Web. How do you see that fitting in with CX and UX and this, this kind of merging this combination that we've been talking about and Sunali, I'll be coming to you next for this one.

Stephen Priestnall: 22:15

Sue you won't be suprised to hear this isn't going to be a 'here's the answer' this is a this is a conversation that we're having, you know, we're exploring AI in all sorts of ways. We're we're building, we're getting it to help us build personas, we're looking at it to devise first draft research scripts, surveys, we're looking at it as a as a way of even drafting, scripting for promotional videos. But the principles are where we believe that doesn't challenge the creative imperative for an organisation like us to make sure that we think through what the implications are. We're treating it as another research tool. It's just a hugely accelerated piece of research that ends up in a conversation back to you as opposed to a set of facts you then got to you've got to unpack, we're very mindful of source. For ChatGPT were very as an example AI source, we're very mindful of it of the of the calendar for it, that currently only works up to 2021. And we're very mindful of the fact that it's an opinion. And then we need to re judge that. So how does that come into our CX and UX? Well, well, the things I've just described are all components of developing CX strategy. So you can you can see it happening there. I think there will be some interesting ways of it, providing alternative research, data and insight into how CX is currently working, how customer experiences are working. And I think, you know, I was at a research conference last week, and I would say 75% of the people in the room were more worried than excited by what was coming, but I'm definitely in the other camp. But the 25% of us that were more excited might be less than that, if I'm really honest, are working with each other to build into how does this make this thing better? How does it make this thing faster? How do we look at it on behalf of clients? So it's an it's an exploration right now I think Sue as opposed to a definitive'here's what's happening' but we can already see the some of the implications for different, different ways of working.

Sue Carter: 24:43

Perhaps if you didn't have the final answer, you'd be a millionaire or billionaire. So probably a bit harsh to ask for the final answer. So not only what's your view and where do you sit on that spectrum of excited versus slightly worried?

Sunali Aggarwal: 24:56

I'm actually excited because you know, there are a lot of these repetative tasks, when you actually get down to building something, you know, so I know that they'll be out of the way, and we can build things faster, then there are a lot of these testing tasks that we do on a regular basis. And I think even those are very, can get repetative, mundane, for people, and those can be automated, and you can do things faster. So I'm actually very excited about these things, because it is cutting down on research time is cutting down the implementation time. And what you can do is you can go to the market faster, you can test your product, come back and do you know, you can redesign or re-work on it. And some of those things are already happening, you know, so give you a very small example, you will, you will, an application, and and one click, you can just build the design system for it. And it's such an easy thing to do. And otherwise, it could take a few days for you to do that. Now you can do it in hours for maybe an hour or so. And that, that works for us. So I think I do see AI as a threat at all. You know, I see, you know how we progress from a calculator to computer, now we progress into AI. It's just that it'd be a way of life and we just need to adapt to it. And it's only helping us, I think so because it's still dependent on our problems. Right? The more creative prompts you give the more creative outputs you get. So it's still dependent on us.

Sue Carter: 26:28

It's like, if you put gold dust in, you might get gold dust out. But if you put coal in, you might get cold out type of thing. Yeah, that's what someone said to me earlier. That's not my brilliant analogy. So I think we'll finish up today by again, coming back to the title of our podcast, which is'CX and UX a match made in heaven'. And kind of a quick thought from both of you. I was thinking that in any match, relationship, marriage, whatever it might be, there are highs and lows. As always, there's always going to be your good days and your bad days. So Stephen, I'm interested to hear from you. First, when you're thinking about CX and UX, what are the challenges of the two? And then working together? But what are the real high points? And if we could finish with the high points that will be more cheerful when we had the podcast, so I'll start with you, Stephen. And then then come to And Sunali your your challenges your relationship Sunali.

Stephen Priestnall: 27:20

Yeah, I think that the challenges are bringing the functional thinking of an organisation which can be really compelling and really driven by deadlines in to a place where there is a degree of comfort for standing back and thinking about the reason why that are compelling that that functional requirement is. And I think that can sometimes be difficult, there's an urgency to get things done. And UX allows you to do that with a degree of confidence because you think you're doing it in the interest of the user. And then sometimes you need to mitigate that urgency with a, is it the right thing that we're doing. And that requires a little bit of thought, a lot of thought, but I guess building on what we've just talked about, the future, is the the exciting way of bringing that together as perhaps we can make that process quicker now, perhaps we can be more efficient. And I'll just be one example to bear because it's very current for us, we've been working over a number of years, with the idea of mass qual research where we take a lot of qualitative data and process it in parallel to the quantitative data, we've got a particular tool that allows us to do that, we're now finding with the way in which semantic word processing can be done and analysed using AI and machine learning that mass qual is becoming as as rich and as volumetric as quant and we can now do those things more quickly and more effectively. So, you know, hopefully Sue there's a world where actually we can close that gap more quickly. So the tension gets released for for clients in line with what their business objectives are. challenges for UX and CX and your, your highs. What are the

Sunali Aggarwal: 29:12

Well, like I said, you know, it's always good days? complimentary. And you know, you derive your values and goals from CX. The only challenge sometimes is that sometimes it gets too strategic and you struggle with implementing it? And, you know, basically the sum amount of learning that needs to go back to the CX team, where they need to understand the functional part of it, the implementation part of UX, and that, that could get a little, you know, tough but it's achievable. But the highest like I said, you know, the you get a clear understanding of your customer, which is excellent. Right, you you go with a lot of confidence into a UX journey for a customer when you have a good understanding of what they what they're looking at your your content or your UX copy has a tone which is set by CX, you know, and depending upon like what was even said, depending upon the need state, then you're talking to your customers like that. So you, you gain a lot of confidence in these domains, which are the small but play a major role when somebody is going through a set of screens, you know, so when you have CX people working with you these kind of things become really easy and they're all they're softer aspects, more experiential aspects of UX, which are covered. So those are the those are the typical highs when it comes to working with people

Sue Carter: 30:37

Like Stephen! Always a hightlight working with Stephen. Well, thank you both. Thank you for a great discussion today. So thank you as always to Stephen. Thank you to Sunali for making this our first global podcast, obviously for your contribution. Thank you very much. Thank you to our listeners for listening and join us next time - The Joy of CX.