- Olga Wolska-Płonka
Harmony in Action: The Dynamic Duo of UX and CX Collaboration
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the seamless fusion of Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) has become paramount for businesses striving to deliver exceptional products and services. This article explores the symbiotic relationship between CX and UX teams, highlighting how their collaboration fosters user-centric design, drives customer satisfaction, and ultimately cultivates long-term success. Through effective coordination, these two disciplines create a holistic approach that optimizes both the customer journey and the interface design, ensuring a delightful user experience at every touchpoint.
Who does what?
Let’s start by clarifying the roles of a Customer Experience manager and a User Experience designer. The CX manager is responsible for managing the entire customer journey, ensuring that every interaction with the product or service is positive and meets the customer’s needs. On the other hand, the UX designer focuses on creating an optimal user experience when interacting with the product or service, whether it’s digital or physical.
Cooperation is the key
In larger companies, teams tend to work in silos without much communication with others. They prioritize doing their job well and may view outside interference as having a negative impact on their work. However, effective and consistent communication between CX and UX teams can significantly improve their work and lead to even better product development.
It is possible for those roles to operate independently, a customer may enjoy using a product with great UX but still experience customer support problems. Alternatively, they may find the product difficult to use but receive excellent guidance from support. It is critical for businesses to deliver exceptional service at all levels to establish robust and enduring customer relationships. Hence, collaboration is essential to achieve optimal outcomes.
Here are some ways that CX and UX teams can collaborate effectively:
Share user feedback:
CX teams communicate with users daily and have access to vast amounts of customer data. In contrast, UX teams mainly do so during research before design work, and their knowledge can sometimes be limited. Access to user feedback gathered by the customer experience team is a valuable resource for designers, as it allows them to identify problems and seek opportunities instantly.
Research together:
Since CX teams regularly communicate with users, designers can collaborate with them to actively gather the insights they’re looking for. They can prepare research scenarios and suggest to the CX team how can they inject it into their daily work to gather the knowledge UX team needs. This will not only help with performing research for the UX team but also will gain new knowledge for the CX team they wouldn’t usually gather.
Deliver customer journey together:
Designers often work in their own environments, only focusing on user interactions, which may lead to a need for more understanding of the bigger picture of the product and the company’s strategy. Involving UXers in building a complete customer journey can help them see the entire business area and focus on the element they might not be aware of before. This will open entirely new paths of exploration.
Solve problems together:
CX and UX teams often use similar methods of working to address everyday challenges, each with its own specialization. Collaborating can bring valuable insights and skills to solve problems. CX teams can bring their research skills and ability to define a problem, while UX teams can contribute their creativity, ability to tackle complex issues, and design skills for the experimentation phase.
Conclusion
In summary, when CX and UX teams collaborate effectively, it can lead to improved product development and an enhanced customer experience. It's important for businesses to acknowledge the unique roles of CX managers and UX designers and utilize their expertise to establish lasting relationships with customers. Through sharing feedback, conducting research, mapping the customer journey, and problem-solving together, CX and UX teams can work towards a shared objective and foster innovation. Ultimately, by prioritizing collaboration and communication between these teams, businesses can deliver outstanding customer experiences that surpass expectations.
Learn more on how to boost team collaboration:
Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams
Collaboration in the workplace: 11 ways to boost your team’s performance