Considering the confusion prevalent in today’s world, Service Design and Customer Experience (or User Experience) are often used interchangeably in the wrong way. Though an untrained eye might feel that both terms are similar, there is a huge difference in their meanings and what they comprise of. The main difference between the two, is the presence of a Customer in the process and the objective. CX (or UX) comprises of the entire process where the customer interacts with the company. This includes the mobile app, website, kiosks, mailers, etc. Every tool that a company uses for interacting with the customer comes under CX. Service Design, on the other hand, is the entire process that goes on in the backend, to make the entire process smooth and fast.
Here is how our Saransh experts explain the difference between the two.
What is Customer Experience (CX)
In layman terms, Customer Experience is concerned with the experience that users and customers have, with digital devices and physical entities, when they interact with a business. This is largely based on factors like usability, accessibility and aesthetics of the interactions, which determine good or poor experiences. User Interface designing (or UI Designing), thus becomes a major part of Customer Experience. However, one has to be careful of a mismatch between UI and UX for the digital products.
In addition, interaction points like kiosks, customer support centers, ticket counters, etc. also become part of CX. As most CX or UX Designers work closely with the flow of buyer journey, they are expected to have a background of graphic designing, interaction designing, or even industrial designing.
What is Service Design
Service Design is concerned with everything that is related to the interactions that take place between the customer and company, and how that interaction can be simplified. This includes co-ordination of people, processes and technologies involved within the system, to work together in order for seamless delivery of services. This means that when a customer interacts with any digital or physical touch-point of the business for a service, then Service Design ensures that everything involved in that interaction is choreographed so that the customer receives faster service.
Service Design is multidisciplinary in nature and goes above the visible designs. The background of a Service Designer need not be limited to designing, but include psychologists, engineers, researchers and so on.
Identifying the difference between CX and Service Design
It is easy for a person to confuse between CX and Service Design, due to the huge overlap between the two. Though they can be called as two sides of the same coin, here are a few basic distinctions between them that will make it easier to draw the line:
- While the main role of CX specialists is to focus on individual touchpoints, digital as well as physical, Service Designers focus on the broader aspect of everything involved from the time a customer begins the interaction with the business, till the time he stops his interaction. This involves the infrastructure, different departments and channel flow.
- UX design usually includes creating tools like Wireframes, Personas and Prototypes. Service designers, on the other hand, develop Service Blueprints, Affinity Maps and Customer Journey Maps, to plan and organise the available resources in a human-centric manner.
- Service Design is more about co-creation of solutions majorly on an organizational level, that go beyond an individual product. CX or UX is typically focused on a single product to optimize its experience.
The differences between CX and Service Design are subtle, but very important. In the end, all fields of Design are aimed at understanding human behavior and creating better experiences for all stakeholders through the use of Designs. The difference lies in which particular experience is improved and its influence on a particular user. This is what is also referred to as the Design Thinking mindset.