The BIGGER Challenge - UX / CX?
Given a product which one of these is primary & which of these needs to be prioritized? Is it the user experience (UX) or the customer experience (CX)?
As a part of living in urban jungles am sure many of you are pretty familiar with this underlying page. Yes, the post-ride rating of the Uber App where riders & drivers are invited to assign a rating for the trip that they just completed:
Now consider a scenario where an Uber driver attracts a 1-STAR rating.
And the interesting thing about the rating here (as with any other similar ride hauling apps) would be to delve deeper into the issue so as to understand more about what went wrong (the stub / main reason) as soon as someone comes up with a rating below 5-STAR? And what if the driver got that low rating:
not because of rash driving
not because he failed to keep up with time
not because of poor navigation
but because "he spoke too much"
What might have wrong really? The permutations are endless.
It could be anything that’s grossly correlative to the attitude of the driver pissing the rider off not discounting the possibility of the rider also attracting a low-rating from the driver in that scenario.
When the exact reasons for the verbal tiff / dispute may be aplenty, a million things and everything under the sun which isn’t our focus here. The occurrence of such an event does point to some friction area somewhere, and does not appear that straightforward to tackle given the lack of feasibility of defining metrics / KPIs upfront to unambiguously pin on a problem feeding one’s endeavor to offer a great CX.
UX & CX Parlance
Extending the previous narrative:
the overall design of the App inclusive of usability
ease of access & the robustness over the rider getting on the App
keying in all the required information (source, destination)
choosing the vehicle, placing a ride request
the algorithms kicking in & searching for the vehicle that meets all the parameters to finally finding a ride and booking it for him
pertains to the user experience (UX), not discounting something a similar sort of an interface with a few steps at the drivers end for accepting the booking.
The other touchpoints riders / drivers could have with Uber right from:
discovering the App
onboarding with the possibility of not being entirely aware of its working
the apprehensions over getting to use the App on a regular basis
the major / minor issues that could crop up out of nowhere in the workflow
needing support to kick in and resolve them helping retention by more than a shot in the arm does pertain to customer experience (CX).
When UX chiefly governs product usage and largely the solution offered to the problems the user groups are facing CX focuses on the relationship the users have with the organization and its long-term health.
But, what does one prioritize?
Is it the UX over the App being offered or CX over the support needed to draw the users onto the App and keep them there?
Reinstating Order
It is very obvious that the marketing may start off campaigning about the product at a pretty early stage to build awareness that could foster and smoothen out the path to product adoption which obviously is a given that the product ought to be built at first and whether one is talking of building a full-fledged product with a grand ornate release or going LEAN over the MVP and improving the product offering by iterating on continuous feedback, it is imperative teams think of and prioritize UX which governs all of these:
UXR - User experience research
UED - User experience design
IxD – Interaction design
IA – Information architecture
UI - User interface
Visual design
Usability testing
The resultant ought to be a robustly built & smooth functioning product that doesn’t only stop at merely solving for a problem the user is facing, but does it in such an elegant fashion that draws them on and gets them totally addicted (UX STICKINESS).
Now, here’s a visual depicting the crucial touchpoints an average user may have all the internal teams of an organization across the PLC extending into the growth funnel post the product’s build & release.
When some of these are regular interfaces / interaction as initiated by the users, some may be enforced by the product teams to get a holistic understanding of things going / that may go haywire so as to be proactive and address them all removing any friction whatsoever before the users experience and report it via raising tickets. This largely constitutes Customer Experience (CX) which is to refer to the overall experience the user has with the product including all the other interfaces with market-fronted teams like marketing, sales, support, CS and not just limited to the usage of an App or a webpage.
Why is CX challenging?
Rolling back to the Uber narrative over the beginning of the article, the driver perhaps didn't understand & wasn't trained enough to keep a sharp unwavering focus on delivering a great experience to the user which obviously starts off from the time the user boards the cab until such time that the trip is completed. I mean, practically the number of times the driver has made a thank you gesture and greeted with something on the lines of “hope this ride was a total pleasure and please do visit again” is near ZERO. But many have had experiences where drivers very promptly & openly demand that they be given a 5-star rating.
But why?
Why is this aspect so neglected across some growth stage startups & surprisingly even amongst some unicorns?
“Onboarding third parties so as incorporate them entities to steer outcomes and contribute massively across the value chain is imperative over some business models, but to onboard them onto a training process so as to help them understand and then align with the vision of the organization is NOT - which is incomprehensible”.
[Can’t imagine one of those tuk-tuk / rickshaw / taxi owners or drivers attending a corporate training session, can you?]
Here’s a bird’ eye view of the basic level of trainings and the relevant topics to cover mandatorily, of course for internal teams just as much as the external ones or the third-party teams if one is even looking to move the needle by a wee bit over hitting that threshold on offering some good customer experience (CX).
The driver is signed up to Uber as a partner and quite obviously Uber’s business would be in no shape to run if not for them drivers. When a third-party is being onboarded to playing an integral part in your workflow and a seminal role too, it only makes sense to impart some more training, have more clearer metrics in place to help identify congestion early and work towards removing them all by:
setting clear-cut goals
going over those business objectives repeatedly
defining relevant metrics
installing a process of continuous tracking targeting improvement
so that everyone who is playing their part in whatever capacity can align better. After all there is a huge reputation at stake here.
To summarize:
It is pretty evident how CX & UX are crucial in their own way & also it is not a choice on offer as there’s no choosing between the two & both are imperative to steer a product towards prolonged success, although given the parlance of digital products UX applies to all the digital interactions the users could have when CX encompasses all other interfaces the users could have with the internal teams post-launch, predominantly the market-fronted ones.