A comprehensive overview of customer experience design

In today's competitive market landscape, customer experience (CX) can be a key differentiator between brands that thrive versus those that barely survive. That's because good CX nurtures positive customer relationships, helps organizations get word-of-mouth referrals, and supports a strong brand reputation. However, designing positive, frictionless customer journeys at scale is easier said than done.

This article unpacks what customer experience design is, key metrics to measure it, and proven CX design strategies that will get you actionable insights.

Understanding customer experience design

One of the most critical aspects of providing a positive experience to customers is customer experience (CX) design. It brings together multiple disciplines, including user experience (UX) design, service design, and customer relationship management, to create complete, valuable customer journeys.

What is customer experience design?

“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” – Kevin Stirtz, author of More Loyal Customers: 21 Real World Lessons To Keep Your Customers Coming Back"

Customer experience design is intentionally creating customer interactions that meet or exceed expectations. At its core, CX design focuses on understanding customer motivations, emotions, and values to design appropriate solutions for them. The goal is to satisfy customers at each touchpoint by removing friction and providing delightful experiences.

CX design requires understanding both the rational and emotional needs of customers. Design teams use quantitative data and qualitative insights to walk in their customers' shoes as they use the product or service. Designers identify pain points in the current experience and re-design touchpoints to remove frustrations and inefficiencies.

The key focus areas in CX design include:

• Mapping out the customer journey across channels
• Gathering customer feedback through surveys, interviews, and user research
• Understanding customer needs and pain points
• Designing easy-to-use, frictionless interactions
• Providing helpful and empathetic customer service
• Creating personalized engagements across touchpoints
• Testing and improving the customer experience through iteration

If done right, CX design creates seamless, high-quality interactions that result in happiness, trust, and brand loyalty.

How customer experience design differs from user experience design

While UX design and CX design are complementary, there are some key differences:

• UX design focuses on designing user-friendly digital products and interfaces. CX design works at the ecosystem level to connect experiences across channels.
• UX designers draw insights from usability studies, customer feedback, and analytics. CX designers leverage all of these plus ethnographic research to understand emotional needs.
• UX design principles apply primarily to software products and mobile apps. CX design extends the principles to physical spaces, customer service, marketing, and more.
• UX designers optimize interfaces for ease of use. CX designers orchestrate end-to-end experiences with the customer at the center.

So, UX design serves as an input to customer experience design. While user experience design focuses on individual touchpoints, CX design connects the dots across channels. The integrated approach of CX creates a complete product and brand experience that persuades users to purchase and return.

Why does customer experience design matter?

Having just a functional product is no longer enough; the experience matters just as much. Here are some of the benefits organizations can gain from quality CX design:

• Customer loyalty: Organizations can boost satisfaction by designing great customer experiences and removing pain points. Happier customers mean improved customer retention and brand loyalty. Rather than chasing new customers, organizations can retain existing ones for longer.
• Repeat business: Seamless CX encourages customers to reuse products and services. Whether booking another cab ride or purchasing from an e-commerce store again, good customer experience design fosters habit-forming behaviors.
• Word of mouth: Customers talk about their good or bad experiences with products and services. CX design helps ensure they spread positive words about a brand, driving referrals and organic growth.
• Competitive advantage: When done right, customer experience design makes a brand stand out from competitors. This is especially true in markets where there's not much variety between products—in this case, CX emerges as the key differentiator. 
• Differentiation: CX design allows organizations to customize offerings for each customer segment. For example, a business may realize it can cater to the advanced needs of one of its segments by offering premium plans with exclusive services.
• Online reputation: In the age of social media, customer experiences directly impact brands' online reputation. CX disasters can go viral and severely dent hard-earned reputations. Meanwhile, proactive CX design prevents reputational damage.
• Emotional connection: CX design focuses heavily on crafting emotional connections with customers. The deeper the connection, the higher the loyalty. Emotions drive decisions more than logic, and CX design leans into this fact.
• Building trust: An organization can build customer trust by being transparent and delivering consistent experiences. CX design reassures customers that a brand understands them and will meet their expectations.
• Adaptation to expectations: As technology evolves, so do customer expectations for good customer interaction and customer experience management. Prioritizing CX design ensures an organization can continually adapt and exceed these expectations.

The bottom line is that CX creates living assets through loyal customer relationships that compound over time. Organizations need to catch up in CX design to thrive in competitive markets. Thus, the actual ROI of CX investments is immense.

Key metrics and KPIs for CX design

CX design relies heavily on quantifiable data, metrics, and KPIs to improve experiences continually. These actionable metrics connect CX with broader organizational results. Some key metrics include:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Measures satisfaction levels across service interactions. It provides a quantitative gauge for happiness and emotional connection. The goal is to bump up the average CSAT continually.
• Net promoter score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend a brand. Having more promoters than detractors indicates that an organization is doing well. But as expectations rise, CX design must push NPS higher.
• Customer effort score (CES): CES indicates the amount of ease and friction in customer interactions. Lower effort correlates with higher satisfaction. CX design must continually reduce customer effort across journeys.
• Customer churn rate (CCR): CCR quantifies customer defections over time and should be as low as possible. CX design boosts retention and lowers churn. Analyzing reasons for churn also reveals experience gaps.
• Average handle time (AHT): AHT measures the average time it takes to resolve customer issues. The lower, the better. A good CX design approach aims to solve issues quickly and effectively the first time without transfers.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV indicates the average revenue generated per customer relationship. Quality CX design boosts repeat purchases and CLV.

The customer experience design process

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of Women in CX

Delivering great customer experience requires a structured design process focused on the customer. While variations exist, a general CX design workflow has four key phases.

Research phase

This phase focuses on understanding target users and their motivations using data and insights. Activities include:

• Conducting user interviews to gather pain points
• Distributing surveys to quantify needs
• Analyzing past customer interactions at key touchpoints
• Identifying moments of truth that delight or frustrate
• Observing the customer journey across channels
• Documenting emotional expectations and values

Essentially, the research phase frames the problem that CX design will then aim to solve.

Analysis and synthesis phase

Next, designers combine all the qualitative and quantitative data to derive key insights. This phase involves:

• Mapping out detailed customer journey flows
• Prioritizing pain points that offer the greatest gains
• Converting proto-personas into detailed personas
• Outlining moments of truth that shape perceptions
• Detailing customer expectations across the journey
• Defining metrics to quantify experience

These insights shape the CX solution and inform conceptual design.

Concept phase

In this divergent phase, teams may propose many CX design concepts to address previously found gaps and opportunities. This phase involves the following:

• Rapid ideation of creative solutions
• Brainstorming sessions with stakeholders
• Storyboarding new customer journey flows
• Proposing improvements to pain points
• Ideating innovations to wow customers
• Evaluating ideas against expectations 
• Prioritizing solutions with maximum impact

The ideas shortlisted here are then entered into the prototyping and test phase.

Prototype and test phase

Finally, teams prototype and iterate the shortlisted solutions using the agile approach. A few key activities in this phase include:

• Translating ideas into wireframes or prototypes
• Getting user feedback through testing
• Identifying issues and enhancements
• Iterating prototypes based on insights
• Testing with a wider sample size
• Finalizing designs 

Ultimately, the outcome is an improved CX design that's ready to be implemented across customer touchpoints.

10 effective CX design strategies

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell, author of Inside Your Customer's Imagination

CX design teams must leverage several strategies to optimize interactions at scale. Here are 10 proven CX design strategies you can use to optimize results.

1. Map out the customer journey

Customer journey mapping visualizes end-to-end customer experience across channels. For example, an e-commerce customer's journey may start with clicking an online ad and researching products onsite. Then, they may add products to their cart, make a purchase, unbox their delivery, and get post-purchase service.

Design teams should storyboard key personas' journeys, identifying emotions, questions, and barriers at each stage. Also, they must highlight key moments of truth that may frustrate the customer, such as shipping delays, and outline cross-channel steps customers take to achieve goals.

This exercise reveals broken links in the chain to address via CX innovations. Journey analytics also provides a baseline to measure optimizations. For example, an apparel brand may seek a better app interface as a high-impact area to boost customer satisfaction. Addressing it could directly bump NPS.

2. Gather customer feedback

Rather than second-guessing, brands must proactively ask customers about pain points and ideas for improvements in the following ways:

• Setting up longitudinal panels for periodic customer feedback via in-depth interviews 
• Deploying relationship NPS programs to map satisfaction trends
• Intercepting the customer journey to get context-specific comments

For example, a hotel may ask guests about their stay experience, staff interactions, amenity usage, and suggested upgrades upon check-out. Such a closed-loop approach collects granular insights to inform CX design iterations. 

Additionally, qualitative feedback may reveal true emotional needs. For example, guests may request healthier in-room dining options, a sign of changing lifestyle needs and an opportunity for adaptation.

3. Prioritize addressing pain points

With hundreds of customer inputs, CX teams need to be selective in where to focus on their limited resources—plot feedback on a 2x2 matrix with consolidation on one axis and impact on another. Initiatives may differ in input effort versus customer delight payoff.

For example, a recurring complaint for a food delivery app may be about difficulties contacting driver support. This problem impacts many users severely when orders get stuck. Though complex, revamping driver assistance has manifold benefits, including increased customer satisfaction and enhanced efficiency. On the other hand, adding niche cuisine options that please only a few customers should not be a top priority. Taking a data-backed approach, CX leaders can focus on fixes that deliver more ROI first.

4. Set clear goals and metrics

To track progress, CX initiatives must tie back to quantitative KPIs. Establish a baseline for NPS, CSAT, or customer churn rates. Set measurable targets for improvement over time. For instance, you may seek a 20% increase in NPS or a 15% lower customer churn rate over the next six months.

These goals signal cross-functional teams to come together and identify solutions. For example, an onboarding checklist may reduce service call volume by 50% in six months, or self-help options may answer 20% of customers' queries, lowering human handling needs. Such well-defined criteria help focus team efforts on moving metrics that enhance the CX design process.

5. Use tools to enhance insights

While quantitative feedback is crucial, it has sampling limitations. That's why it can be useful to integrate user testing tools. Developed human insight platforms allow brands to discover usability issues they may not have identified. 

For instance, catching navigation problems early in the design process ensures smooth customer interaction upon launch. Rather than aimlessly discussing solutions in conference rooms, design teams can get hard evidence on enhancing excellent customer experience by testing with diverse participants. Videos of customers interacting with app prototypes or website flows can illuminate common user issues. The additional data helps make informed CX decisions and expedite solutions.

6. Focus on ease of use

What good is superior product or service functionality when customers struggle to access it? Complexity is the enemy of great customer experience design. In such scenarios, a team can use journey mapping to reveal where users struggle or abandon.

For example, booking a vacation rental may involve toggling across listings, room details, guest details, pricing, and policies across tabs. Such complex UX demanding a high customer cognitive load increases anxiety and dropout likelihood. In this case, CX improvement should simplify flows and reduce the steps required for a customer to complete their booking. 

7. Provide exceptional service

Interactions with customer service teams make or break perceptions of brands. Smooth issue resolution and personalized customer engagement boost NPS. To make this happen, brands must invest in thorough customer service training for frontline staff handling calls or chats. Empowering agents with customer data tools gives them the context to personalize responses. 

For example, imagine a customer starting a shipment delay inquiry. If the customer service agent can pull up lifetime order value data, they can make customized gestures like expedited delivery for high-value shoppers. Going beyond transactional service creates emotional connections, driving loyalty.

8. Personalize engagements

Today's consumers expect tailored communication aligned to their preferences and needs. Generic mass messaging signals tone-deaf brands. CX design must incorporate personalized triggers across channels, whether website experiences, mobile notifications, or customer care interactions.

For example, an auto servicing brand may set up a gentle email or SMS reminder for recommended maintenance checks based on a customer's mileage. Or, a retail company could send an email about a recently viewed product to those who abandoned their carts. Event and time-based triggers fueled by intelligent analytics boost relevance.

Buyer journey stage-specific offers also hit the mark. For example, a person scouting Australian vacation packages should receive special deals before making the purchase rather than days after completing the booking. Welcome campaigns after sign-up or win-backs for dormant users work similarly.

9. Omnichannel integration

In the past, organizations used siloed models. But now, leading brands seamlessly integrate customer experiences across web, mobile, and in-store touchpoints. A unified content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) system, and data layer helps deliver that. For example, customers can purchase online and easily return products at physical outlets, automatically triggering refunds.

Such omnichannel flexibility matches rising customer expectations. However, enabling consistent hand-offs across channels requires more than superficial tweaks. That's why it's crucial to fundamentally upgrade legacy systems, invest in employee retraining for digital behavior, and instill a customer-first culture across your organization.

Without revamping outdated processes and siloed data, the omnichannel experience fails. Brands must connect customer experiences across touchpoints to provide complete, consistent journeys.

10. Leverage automation

Automation allows brands to scale customer interactions that would be cumbersome for humans to handle manually. Software robots can take care of repetitive tasks to optimize customer experiences. For example, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot on an e-commerce website may resolve frequently asked pre-sales questions on shipping times and return policies around the clock.

Optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) parse volumes of forms automatically to route them correctly. Event-based confirmations on orders, appointments, or renewals eliminate the need to send individual notifications. This means agents can focus on more complex customer issues.

Identify high-frequency tasks that lend themselves to automation rather than force-fitting them everywhere. Blend smart algorithms and human oversight for the right balance.

Pitfalls to avoid in CX design

While focusing on CX best practices, organizations must actively dodge common downfalls that degrade experiences:

Not having a dedicated CX strategy

Without a well-defined roadmap, CX innovations can become fragmented across marketing, service, IT, and other departments. Success hinges on a centralized customer experience strategy that outlines a clear vision for optimizing the customer journey.

Strategic pillars should cover key focus areas such as measurement frameworks, customer insights engines, process improvements, and required technology transformations. For example, a retailer's CX strategy may define an investment roadmap for in-store digitization, mobile apps, cloud migration, and analytics.

A comprehensive strategy supports buy-in from senior management, which then ensures continued funding for multi-year initiatives. Likewise, appointing a central CX leadership role minimizes inter-departmental friction. 

Failing to understand the context of use

Customers engage with brands in varied settings, on different devices, and for various reasons. Failing to map diverse use contexts limits experience quality. For example, if you don't know that most of your customers view your website on their smartphones, you may not be adequately prioritizing mobile optimization.

Additionally, usage backdrop differs across customer segments. Young, single shoppers have different needs than retired couples. In this case, persona-based context mapping allows relevant customization.

The key is to observe contexts firsthand rather than make assumptions during design. Customer journey flows tailored to usage environments delight customers.

Not continuously testing and iterating

Don't treat CX design as a one-time project. Adopt an agile approach with continuous rapid testing and user feedback loops. For instance, an e-commerce retailer revamping its website must first prototype a few key landing pages with alternative layouts. By gathering qualitative feedback from a diverse group of existing customers through usability testing, they can quickly identify navigation and visibility issues before the final build. Such iterative experimentation prevents bad ideas from scaling up while directing resources to truly impactful areas.

Tools like UserTesting facilitate easy mass sampling without logistical hassles. They provide videos and emotional sentiment analysis on top of behavior data. Such quick iterations with consumer input prevent big budget flops. Over time, prioritizing continuous testing and iterations across touchpoints fosters customer-centric focus and drives CX maturity.

Enhance your CX design with UserTesting

CX design is a structured approach to boosting customer loyalty and brand differentiation. However, orchestrating contextual customer journeys at scale is complex for most organizations. Luckily, UserTesting can help accelerate your impact.

UserTesting enables you to gather customer feedback on digital interfaces and content via remote unmoderated tests. With the Human Insight platform, you can understand customers' pain points, make informed decisions, and continuously test across devices to address CX issues.

Don't base your customer experience decisions on blind guesses. Boost your CX design process with UserTesting. Book a consultation today.

Frequently asked questions

How can CX design help lower customer churn?

CX design fosters increased loyalty and retention by removing pain points and boosting customer satisfaction across customer journeys. Eliminating friction, delivering streamlined service, and crafting emotional connections make happy customers stay longer, refer your product or service, and spend more.

What role does customer feedback play in the customer experience design process?

Customer feedback forms the foundation of the CX design process. It helps identify emotional pain points and improvement areas through interviews, surveys, usability testing, and analysis of past interactions.

How can organizations effectively measure and track customer satisfaction?

Key metrics collected in surveys, including CSAT, NPS, and CES, provide quantifiable data on satisfaction. Additionally, techniques like customer interviews, focus groups, and usability testing gather qualitative feedback on emotions and frustration to supplement metrics.

What are some common challenges faced in implementing a customer experience design strategy?

Lack of centralized ownership, legacy systems, data silos, organizational resistance to change, and a failure to test and implement customer feedback are some hurdles. Maintaining consistency across regions and communication channels also proves challenging at scale.