A UX designer rows a boat, a CX designer sails a ship
I have seen a lot of designers putting their feet into CX design because they think they have to design merely touchpoints.
I have been a product designer in the past and let me tell you one thing about being a product designer: A Product designer rows a boat in a river and just because someone can row a boat in a river does not mean he can sail a ship in the ocean.
Designing CX is like sailing a ship. To be able to design CX from designing UX, you got to be a captain from being an oarsman. It requires an entirely different temperament and perspective to design CX.
The biggest challenge for a CX designer is to design such an experience for which people are willing to pay and it is very difficult to take out money from someone’s pocket!
UX is a function of a product while CX is the function of the brand. This makes UX a subset of CX. Definitely, for a successful CX design, a successful UX design is required but along with that, all the non-UX touchpoints are also needed to align with customer friendliness. These touchpoints can be marketing, sales process, delivery, pricing, after-sales service, etc.
The user may or may not be the payer of a product/service but the customer is always the payer. For instance, K-12 Ed-tech products are used by kids but their customers are the parents. In such cases, you have to have clarity on who is the user and who is the customer. To switch your career from UX design to CX design, you need to have a solid understanding of the following things:
- The relationship between pricing and the market: It is not the brand, but rather the market that decides the price of a commodity. The interesting thing about the free market is there is an “invisible hand” regulating the demand-supply and price point of a certain commodity. If you sell street foods at restaurant prices, you will end up disappearing from the market. To sell something on street, the price point needs to match the competition i.e the nearby street food vendors.
- Customer psychology as a function of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs: It is difficult to sell a Netflix subscription to someone who is unemployed i.e struggles with safety needs but it is very easy to sell the same person the hope of employment by selling him a skill-based course. Since there will be competition over here too, the first point should be also considered.
3. Brand building principles Branding is way more than designing the logo, and taglines, defining the brand guidelines, having a cool differentiating outlook, interesting ad campaigns, etc. These things are merely the brief interaction of your potential customers with your product or service. They create an impression of your brand inside the head of the masses but once there is a misalignment between what you communicate and what you deliver, your product/service will be exposed. It is always better to have a proportionate relationship between what you sell and how you communicate about it to people.
4. Operational challenges Say your business does the onsite repairs of cars and bikes in a certain area. Your team is really great at delivering the service and everything is going fine. You are a profitable business and now you want to expand to a nearby area. This new area is infested by thugs, drug peddlers, and mafias. Will you be able to deal with such a location? Even if you can, there is a fair probability that the customer experience will be altered at such locations. This is a classic example of external events risk. There are five categories of operation risks you need to understand while delivering a product or a service: people risk, process risk, systems risk, external events risk, and legal and compliance risk.