We attract new customers and keep their loyalty and repeat business over time by delivering the best possible customer experience (CX).

Businesses are getting it and investing in improving CX at every turn, with 80% of leaders planning to increase customer service budgets in 2024.

CX is vital, but at the same time, it’s an industry rife with acronyms and overall confusion (cx vs ux vs ui - where do you start?). To properly invest your budget and time, you need to understand the many flavors of customer experience, and how each might advance your business goals.

To help, we’re simplifying this complicated “experience” industry terminology, metrics, benefits, and differences in our Ultimate Customer Experience Glossary.

Table of Contents:

1. Experience glossary
2. What is the difference between CX and UX?
3. Why is UX important for CX?
4. What is the difference between CX metrics and UX metrics?
5. What is UI?
6. What is CX vs. UI vs. UX?
7. What is the difference between user experience and usability?
8. What is the difference between EX and UX?
9. What is the difference between UX and voice of the customer?
10. What is CX transformation?

Quick Recap – Experience Glossary At-A-Glance

Let’s level set with some quick experience definitions, before diving in more deeply.

• Customer experience (CX) is the impression a customer has with a brand or business throughout the total sum of their interactions (across channels, online and offline, marketing, sales, customer support – the whole nine yards). This means every engagement fuels that impression and determines whether the customer thinks positively about the entire business.
• Digital experience (DX) is the impression customers have of a brand or business based on online interactions. Digital experience might encompass interactions on a company’s website or social media page, but excludes in-person experiences, like visiting a retail store.
• User experience (UX), similarly, describes how users interact with a product, business, mobile app, or website. UX is more focused, encompassing factors like a website’s usability, accessibility, and efficiency.
• User interface (UI) describes interactions between a user and a computer or device. The display screen, keyboard inputs, and appearance of visual and interactive elements make up the user interface.
• Employee experience (EX) describes team members’ impression of their company, inclusive of team fit, technology, trainings, support, empowerment, and company culture. In today’s article, we’re focused specifically on how empowering employees with the right tools (technology and software) makes them more productive and helps them deliver better customer service.
• Voice of the customer (VOC) is a practice of collecting customer feedback and analyzing response data to better understand customer needs, wants, preferences, motivations, and pain points.
• Total experience (TX) blends user experience, customer experience, and employee experience together, representing the total of delivering holistic, high-quality experiences for users, customers, and employees.

Let’s dig deeper into different experience types, and the competitive advantage of investing in improving experience for users, customers, and employees.

What Is the Difference Between CX and UX?

We get it – it sounds like we’re splitting hairs with all this nuanced terminology. Truthfully, CX vs. UX means looking at different sides of a similar coin, and you can’t risk getting either one wrong.

CX looks at the entirety of customers’ experience with a business. It reflects the full customer journey, from awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase stages.

Remember, customer journeys are non-linear and unexpected, hopping from channel to channel, online and offline, and back again. Improving CX means making each of these interactions simple, seamless, and satisfying.

User experience, on the other hand, is specifically focused on user interactions with a website, mobile app, or digital product.

UX designers aim to understand:

• How customers use their products
• What they’re trying to achieve
• Where they get stuck

With this information in-hand and more, businesses improve every step of UX to make interactions easier, more intuitive, and more enjoyable.

In doing so, brands improve overall customer satisfaction, while paving the way for customers to more easily convert – download, contact, or buy.

User experience is a key component of overall customer experience, but looks at it from a more focused, fine-grained lens. Let’s look at UX and why it’s such an important component of CX.

Why Is UX important for CX?

Both B2C and B2B buyers have increasingly more channels to choose from and interact with businesses online, offline, and back again in complicated multi-channel journeys.

These many touchpoints create one overall impression. For example:

• A customer may use an online calculator to see how much a bank would approve for an auto loan.
• With this information in-hand, they might visit a bank for personal advice to understand the fine print.
• From there, they might ultimately convert all kinds of ways: on a third-party auto website, on the bank website, or in-person, with a clerk.

This twisty and interconnected journey is why UX and CX work closely together.

From the online calculator to the auto website, if each of these digital touchpoints is positive, the customer gains a positive impression of the bank.

User experience strategy invests in customers’ overall business perception and incrementally better CX, which turns into customer loyalty, repeat business, and brand advocacy.

What Is the Difference Between CX Metrics and UX Metrics?

Getting both CX and UX right is centered in direct feedback, data, and measurement. Without these three factors, you’re largely guessing about the changes to make to your product, website, service process, and more.

With clear metrics, you can determine the most impactful ways to improve your customers’ experience. Data objectively reveals where customers experience friction or frustration and how to make that experience incrementally better.

Though there’s plenty of overlap, let’s look at different metrics used for both experience types and what they tell us.

CX metrics are looking at the totality of customer impressions across interactions. Typical CX metrics are:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Churn rate

UX metrics, meanwhile, look at more granular, user-focused metrics like:

• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• User satisfaction scores

Plus, UX strategists look at customer activity on the website. Using tools like Mouseflow, our strategists at Whereoware analyze heatmaps and watch hours of user session recordings to see how real people are interacting with the website.

They follow users scrolling and moving the mouse, getting a clear picture of where they click, navigate to next, and eventually drop off the page. Collectively, this data reveals where users are getting stuck or where they’re searching the site next to fulfil their goals.

Our designers then optimize those journey paths to make it easier and more enjoyable for users on the site.

“CX metrics are much larger,” says Whereoware’s Creative Director, Tim Frost. “They impact the whole business.”

But, Wait - What Is UI?

Frequently confused with UX, UI (user interface) makes up the visual elements and design of a product or website’s interface.

The UI is where a user inputs text, clicks buttons, and figures out how to navigate the experience.

Think of UI as the face of a digital product or site. It’s made up of buttons, menus, icons, layout, colors, typography, and other aesthetics.

Now, let’s look at how UI, UX, and CX come together.

What Is CX vs. UI vs. UX?

While CX refers to the entire experience the buyer has with the brand, UX has a tighter definition. It’s specific to how an end-user interacts with a company product, like a website or software.

Getting narrower, UI is the point at which human users interact with a computer, website, or application. Think of UI as a subset of UX, and UX as a subset of CX.

Let’s consider a hypothetical example. Creative Chocolates is the business and Steven is the customer on a sample journey.

• Steven sees an ad online for delicious chocolates. This would be the first customer experience touchpoint.
• Steven clicks the ad, and it takes him to creativechocolates.com where he browses the site for a few minutes. Navigating with his mouse and seeing it on his laptop are examples of him engaging with a user interface.
• As he clicks through the website’s menus and evaluates their offerings and prices, this is all part of his user experience. If he can easily find his favorite chocolate and checkout, it reflects good site UX.
• Steven doesn’t buy any chocolates today, but he does sign up for the company’s newsletter, which will alert him to new flavors, holiday sales, and more. Those emails, his browsing on day one, and every interaction he’ll have going forward with Creative Chocolates are all part of his overall customer experience.

Does experience have too many acronyms? Probably, but each is focused on different aspects that make up the whole, all to attract, delight, convert, and retain customers. And, we’re not done yet.

What Is the Difference Between User Experience and Usability?

To simplify the difference between user experience and usability, let's think pizza. If user experience is the whole pizza pie, usability is just one slice.

• Usability is all about how efficiently someone can use a digital product to accomplish a specific goal.
• User experience encompasses all aspects of a person's interaction with a company’s digital products – could they find what they need and take action, without frustration?

“Usability is a crucial part of UX design,” says Nate Ginesi, Director of Experience Architecture at Whereoware. “Along with accessibility, visual design, information architecture, and interaction design.”

Up next, a critical part of CX and UX that’s woefully underinvested.

What Is the Difference Between EX and UX?

Employee experience and user experience are quite different, yet also intertwined.

• EX refers to employees of a company and their impression of their employer, including team fit, technology, trainings, support, empowerment, and company culture.
• UX refers to how users interact with a website, mobile app, or digital product. UX encompasses factors like a website’s usability, accessibility, and efficiency.

When team members have poor training or outdated technology to do their job, they frequently are powerless to improve customers’ UX. They definitely can’t go the extra mile to enhance customer experience or service over time.

Safe to say, a company’s EX often needs to be satisfying if it expects to deliver a satisfying UX as well.

What Is the Difference Between UX and Voice of the Customer?

The voice of the customer reveals how customers’ feel about your digital UX, but the two are entirely separate entities.

• VOC is a practice of collecting customer feedback and analyzing response data to better understand customer needs, wants, preferences, motivations, and pain points.

VOC is an important tool for UX designers to understand how customers truly feel when using your website.

A good UX designer uses the VOC research to eliminate friction, prioritize key webpages for improvement, and decide how to make the experience more valuable and enjoyable for customers.

All of these disciplines – UX, CX, VOC, and our other experience acronyms – are increasingly important areas businesses invest in improving, as part of an overall digital transformation.

What Is CX Transformation?

CX transformation is the complete overhaul of an organization’s “values, structures, operations, technology, and culture to mature its CX capabilities by creating an environment able to operate with a focus on the customer and deliver high-quality CX at scale,” according to Nielsen Norman Group.

Put simply, it’s streamlining brand experiences (like websites), sales, and service processes to improve customers’ interactions with your brand.

With a successful CX transformation, your business can expect to see improved performance, increased adaptability, higher retention, better efficiency, and of course, a more satisfied clientele!

We’ll Help You Improve Your Customer Experience

Whereoware has more than two decades of experience helping businesses create frictionless and valuable customer experiences.

With designers, digital strategists, marketing experts, developers, and transformation consultants on-staff, we can help you improve everything from your website’s UX, to your employee experience, and everything in-between.