UX, CX, EX - They All Matter If You Want Your Business To Thrive
UX - User Experience. CX - Customer Experience. EX - Employee Experience.
All 3 of these matter if you want your business to thrive, evolve and maintain healthy profit margins.
User Experience (UX)
The User Experience is the experience your visitors, potential customers and customers have when using your online experience. Is it intuitive, confusing, enjoyable, broken, seamless? You need to understand these in order to do something about it.
Customer Experience (CX)
The Customer Experience is the experience your customers have through their entire engagement with your business. This includes your advertising, marketing campaigns, customer service, email marketing, post-purchase experience, logged in user experience, text message communications. You need to identify where there are weak points in your customer experience in order to address them, otherwise you risk leaving your customers with a bad impression of your brand.
Employee Experience (EX)
The Employee Experience is the experience your team have working for and within your business. Are they demotivated, frustrated, going through the motions? Or are they energised, passionate and helping drive the business forward? No matter how good your product or service may be, no matter how good your user experience may be - if your employee experience isn’t good, this is going to adversely affect your customer experience.
From Top-Down Decision Making to Employee & Customer-Led Decision Making
Most businesses make decisions top-down. Dependent on the culture of the business, this can stifle the efforts and passion of the employees lower down the seniority ladder, as they don’t get chance to share their ideas and see them listened to.
In this short video I did recently, I share the crucial importance of giving employees a genuine voice in helping to improve the customer experience your business provides.
Out With The Old HiPPO, In With The New HiPPO
5 years I co-created with a colleague Dante Naylor “the re-invented HiPPO”. It was going to be a key part of an important presentation I was due to give shortly. I published this article on Econsultancy on July 14th 2016.
The article provided the foundation of this post by Adobe on It’s Time for a New HiPPO in Data-Driven Marketing on July 28th 2016.
The Old HiPPO
The old HiPPO in business is the thing that so often is seen as the opposite of progress, engagement, leadership, inspiration, collaboration and humility.
The HiPPO (meaning Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) usually stirs perceptions from the wider team of egotism and short-sightedness, whilst generating frustration for everyone underneath them within an organisation.
If you have never worked within a company where you’ve had a HiPPO running the show, you’re one of the lucky ones.
The reality is this…
Every business will always have a HiPPO, but do we have to accept and work in businesses where the typical negative influences on company culture are driven from the top down?
Do we have to accept these types of leadership traits?
Egotistical – “I have all the answers”
Arrogance – “I’m experienced enough”
Cowardice – “I don’t need to quantify this”
Blinkered – “But this is the way I’ve always done it”
Apprehension – “It’s easier to keep things the way they are”
The New HiPPO
The new, reinvented HiPPO, turns on its head the negative connotations of the old HiPPO.
H for Humility - know that you will never have all the answers, truly respect the thoughts and ideas of others, and listen more than you talk to give people in your presence the opportunity to share their very best (often buried away) ideas for improving experiences and our world.
I for Integrity - having integrity (especially in business) will garner you more respect and provide you with a platform that more people will want to share with you.
P for Passion - being passionate about what you do will demonstrate how much your work means to you, and your enthusiasm will be infectious.
P for Positivity - have determination to reach your goals, keep pushing forward, fight back against those negative thoughts in your mind, and know that positive thoughts bring positive experiences.
O for Openmindedness - whether you’re at the top of the chain and worried about change, or anywhere in the business, if you take one thing away from reading this article, it is this: open your mind to the possibility of facing up to some of your biggest fears.
So How Is Your UX, CX and EX?
This is the question. Each of them is important in their own right, but together they become a crucial driving force for any business when the experiences are being evaluated and improved.
We have both worked for the last 20 years in the digital industry, helping businesses improve each of these crucial experiences. You will find on the website information on the following services which you may want to explore:
We also provide other services, some working alongside trusted associates, including:
National and International 1-1 User Research
Multi-channel Customer Experience Research
UX and CX Evaluations
UX and CX Design
Full User-Centered Redesigns
Experimentation Programme Set-up Consultancy
Please take a look at our other resources for further insights and inspiration for your business.
God bless you,
Paul
