It’s all about customer experience in 2024. Marketers, website owners, business leaders – we’re all obsessed with incrementally improving our customers’ experience to attract and retain customers and grow our business.

It’s no surprise that 74% of companies increased customer experience spending in 2023 and 70% of companies increased dedicated customer experience staff.

That last part? It’s often overlooked.

Investing in CX vs UX also means hiring staff to support your initiatives and providing the right systems, tools, training, and culture to ensure their success.

That means, investing in the employee experience (EX) to deliver more positive customer experiences.

Today, we’re revealing the difference between ex and UX, and why your employee experience is a hugely important part of getting the overall customer experience right.  

We're Covering:

1. What is the meaning behind EX?
2. What is EX in design?
3. What is EX in marketing?
4. What is UX and CX and EX?
5. How is service design different than EX or UX?

Employee Experience? What is the Meaning Behind EX?

EX means employee experience and is a measurement of employees’ perception and satisfaction working for a business.

Employee experience design looks at the tools, processes, workflows, training, and other factors influencing how successfully employees do their jobs.

It considers all touchpoints with an employer from the initial onboarding to the eventual exit interview, seeking to improve and optimize key points of the employee journey.

What is EX in Design?

EX takes a design-centered approach to better meeting employees’ fundamental needs, frequently centered on designing better systems and workflows to help employees be more engaged and productive.

Similar to companies providing UX design as a service, EX designers analyze and optimize the employee experience to seek areas for improvement, like increased tool adoption, quicker resolution times, or longer employee retention.

Improving EX starts with:

• understanding your user (EX user meaning your team members and employees)
• digging into your data (like churn rates, tech adoption, employee lifetime value, exit interview themes, etc.)
• analyzing touchpoints or interactions
• building an optimization plan
• improving technology and workflows
• training and change management
• continuously optimizing every part of the employee experience.

EX design realizes meaningful value by removing friction and improving experience flows, ultimately helping employees achieve more, enjoy their work more, and deliver more value for the business.

What is EX in Marketing?

In many ways, customer experience is the new marketing. Ultimately, today’s marketers seek better ways to connect with their customers and drive increasing levels of brand loyalty, and that comes down to the experiences they deliver.

Whether it’s your marketing team sending hyper personalized automation campaigns or your customer service representative soothing a frustrated customer, your employees' experience directly correlates to how well they do their job. The processes and systems employees use, the quality of their training, their connection to your company’s mission, and more, all influence success.

• An unhappy marketer using outdated automation tools may make more mistakes, skip through QA, and not care to optimize the campaign for better performance.
• The unhappy customer service rep using three software’s to complete simple tasks is more prone to mistakes and a whole lot less empathetic to the complaining customer on the line.

Your team members use your systems and follow your processes to engage customers. Their job satisfaction impacts the thoroughness and compassion demonstrated in daily tasks, as well as their motivation to consistently achieve better outcomes.

Investing in EX is investing in better marketing, faster customer service, fewer frictions across customer experiences, and more opportunities for your business to grow and gain revenue.  

Wait - What is UX and CX and EX – Digital Experience Glossary

We have a lot of acronyms in the experience industry (or perhaps that’s just the technology industry altogether).

Let’s compare UX, CX, EX, and Service Design to see how they are similar and different.

User experience (UX) design focuses on how successfully a person can use a website or other digital product (like a portal or mobile app) without any issues. It’s more focused on a single platform or touchpoint, versus looking at every touchpoint across the entire customer journey.

Customer experience design covers all the touchpoints a person may encounter throughout their experience with a brand. From ordering to receiving shipments, visiting the website to paying with a credit card, to calling customer service – all of these touchpoints fall under CX.

Employee experience (ex), on the other hand, looks at tools, culture, processes, and more from employees’ perspective. It acknowledges that empowered team members, armed with the right systems, workflows, clear directions, clarity of mission, and trust are more loyal, efficient, and set up for success.

It also looks at factors like technology adoption and workflows to measure whether employees are successfully following processes and using tools to their full potential, or if lacking efficiency is negatively impacting employees’ ability to quickly meet customer demands.

How is Service Design Different than EX or UX?

Wait, there’s more -- what about EX vs service design vs UX design?

Service design is internally focused – looking across people, process, assets, and culture – at everything and everyone that influences service delivery.

Unlike UX design, focused on singular components of a digital experience, service design combines the best of UX, CX, and EX, looking at both internal systems and cross-channel customer experiences to understand –

• How was the customers’ experience on the website?
• How responsive was the service representative?
• What tools did they have to create a more valuable conversation with a customer?
• Did they effectively capture data from that call and is it accessible to other areas of the business to inform improvements?
• Where are their leaks in productivity or CX?
• How could training improve?

Ultimately, these different viewpoints help team members understand how customers’ experience their business and support, whether it’s through a website, digital products, or a customer service team.

It acknowledges that customers won’t receive an excellent CX, if team members aren’t armed with the right tools, strategies, and data to consistently uplevel their approach to marketing and servicing their customers.

Service design examples? We helped a leading global hotel chain create and improve their call center’s customer service platform. For an agent to have a smooth user experience and be successful, they must be able to follow a task from start to finish, without getting lost in the system, and exit workflows as customers requested changes.

We focused on making platform language human and easy to understand to let agents know what to expect from every click. This enabled call center agents to work more efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction scores, decreasing both training by 80% and onboarding costs.

The Takeaway

Experience design – whether it’s UX, CX, EX, or other variations – is centered on understanding people’s expectations and needs. It looks at what is getting in their way and creates strategies to smooth their pathway to success.

At Whereoware, we have extensive past performance helping clients take a strategic, data-driven approach to improving their total business experience – from improving internal tools to empower team members to obsessively elevating customers’ experience, we can help.