What a contact form taught me about CX and UX?
Being a digital marketing professional, I have heard the phrase “User Experience” being paraded across the industry for years. User Experience, or UX as it is more fondly referred to, is considered to be an attribute of any interface that interacts with a human user.
The User Interface (UI) is a functional component of any system, whether it is hardware or software. The UI focuses on achieving the functional goal of the application. For example, the UI of a calculator requires there to be 10 buttons for each numeric digit and a host of supplementary buttons for the mathematical operators. Therefore, as long as a calculator has these buttons, it is functional.
However, imagine if the numeric keys of the calculator were to be randomly placed or simply reversed. Immediately, you will find that users begin to make mistakes when using the calculator – mistakes like pressing 1 when they meant to press 7. Keeping the keys of a calculator in a standardised order in order to improve the accuracy of the user is where UX comes into play.
What then is CX? CX or Customer Experience focuses on the overall experience that is created for the user from using the product. According to UXPin, CX encompasses both UI and UX within it. To continue the calculator analogy, whenever we needed to purchase a calculator during my school years, the most widely recommended brand was Casio. The accuracy, durability and reliability of a Casio calculator had left a mark in the minds of their customers which let them confidently recommend the brand and its products.
Therefore, the questions I was pondering over was where should your focus be when building a software or product? The UI, UX, CX or all three? The most obvious and easiest answer would be to say “all three”, but how easy is that to do. Attempting to make a UI adequately fool-proof by having the best UX can be a daunting task.
As Einstein said "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former"
Until very recently, I never realised how much of a role that CX could play in customer engagement than UI or UX. This was a lesson I learnt from a simple contact us form.
While browsing through the web, I came across a website whose business development team I wanted to contact. I was directed to the most simplistic contact us form. The form had only 3 fields and a button – name, email, country and the submit button. Assuming I would get added into some CRM mailing list, and that my inquiry would be added to a long queue with a response at least a day away, I submitted the form with little expectations.
Within a few minutes, I received an email from an actual human being asking me for information about my company and my requirement? The email only had 4 lines: a salutation, the request for my company information and requirement, a thank you and his sign off (which was his name - David).
The brand had instantly established a human connection with me. It was not trying to sell me on their product or service, but simply trying to understand what I wanted. I could not help but feel that the brand actually cared about their customers and wanted to help them out.
David continued to respond in a timely manner – answering my questions, directing me to relevant information and generally helping me to make a decision about whether I should purchase their product or not.
As I reflected on the entire experience, I realised that while brands continue to try automate as much of the customer journey, customers still look for care and attention from the brand. Therefore, even the most evolved digital solution will not be able to survive without a strong customer experience to back it up.
We should stop trying to rely on our digital channels to build our brand, educate our customers, sell and maintain the relationships with them for the business (while we sit back and smoke cigars) – but begin to take back these relationships into human hands.