UX for Great Customer Experience

User Experience (UX) describes all the ways your customers interact with your organization. Typically, we think of UX as being primarily aesthetic, and certainly, that’s a critical element, but it’s not just about how nice your interfaces look. It’s about how easy your organization is to discover and interact with.

woman smiles at phone after receiving omni-channel CX

Today, almost all customer journeys have a digital element. The internet is many people’s primary tool for discovering new products and engaging with organizations. Even if the phone remains the communication channel of choice, customers often go to the internet to find contact numbers. More than ever, the customer journey begins online. In the digital world, UX is essential to Customer Experience.

Your UX, then, relates to the customer journey. It covers all the touchpoints at which the customer interacts with the business, from discovery to the sales process, to post-sales support. Your UX is interwoven with your Customer Experience at every stage. You can’t afford to neglect it.

To discover more, read on.

UX defines Customer Experience

User Experience (UX) relates to every point of contact that the customer (user) has with your organization. That might mean your website, an app if you have one, but also your social media channels, your webchat, and even your telephony. These are all forms of user interface, and they offer a critical first impression to customers.

And first impressions count. People typically make their judgments of a person within the first second of meeting them. The situation is similar for businesses. Customers will decide whether or not they want to buy from you within the first few seconds of the encounter.

Your UX, then, sets the tone for your CX. The customer journey begins with user experience, and there’s a lot you can do to streamline that.

An accessible web presence – Your website should accord with accepted accessibility standards, such as WCAG 2.2, to ensure that all your customers can access your services, depending on their particular accessibility needs.
Visible contact information – When your customer wants to reach out, you need to ensure that they’re able to. That means making your channels of contact visible and accessible from a single location; webchats and phone numbers of the home page, for instance.
Streamlined customer journeys – UX doesn’t stop at what’s visible. Every channel of contact is an experience for your users. That includes telephony; voice conversations, as well as text conversations. How well you route your customers to their preferred outcomes; how long your customers have to wait in queues; how seamless your ID&V processes are; all of this factors into your User Experience.
AI-Powered UX – Today, customers expect to see AI as part of your UX estate. AI-powered chatbots, conversational Machine Agents, and more are commonplace tools for customer engagement.
UX for employee experience – Organizations have two kinds of customer; the external, and the internal. Your employees have to use your communications solution also have accessibility needs, and also benefit from a streamlined UX. Sharpening your internal user experience is one of the most reliable ways to improve productivity.

UX then, is relevant to every element of business functionality; from customer interactions, to ongoing support, to employee experience. Sharpening your UX is a guaranteed way to improve your Customer Experience.

The Importance of Accessibility

Accessibility matters. Almost everyone has, or will have, accessibility needs. If your customers can’t understand your website, that’s going to cause confusion, frustration, and loss of business, not to mention regulatory penalties. Accessibility is more than a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s a need.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of technical standards, that aim to make web content as accessible as possible to the broadest range of people. In the contact center, this involves making sure that your cloud contact center solution meets this regulatory standard. In short, the interface your agents use to answer contacts must be WCAG 2.2 compliant.

WCAG 2.2 is built around four principles. A website has to be:

Perceivable,
Operable,
Understandable,
Robust.

Each of these principles is supported by thirteen guidelines, with each broken down into success criteria that a given service must meet. That might seem like a lot, but luckily, there’s no need to grapple with every success criterion right here and now. To give you an idea of what kind of measures WCAG compliance entails, here a just a few examples:

To make a service perceivable, you need to ensure that users can recognize your online services with their available senses. This involves ensuring every image has descriptive alt-text, or using text colors that show up against their background, to make your website accessible to people with visual impairments.
To make a service operable, your users must be able to interact with your content through any interface. This could be making sure users can navigate your website using the keyboard only, letting users disable animations, or making your interactive elements obvious and convenient.
To make a service understandable, you need to make it clear to all your users how your service works. For instance, you need your content and features to behave in consistent, predictable ways, and make errors easy to identify.
To make a service robust, you need to ensure that your website is compatible with a range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers. That means making sure your website components can be interpreted by assistive technologies, including their current state, and if that state will change.

And once you’ve achieved baseline compliance for your UX, you can start looking to the future.

smartphone displays omnichannel contacts

Customer Experience AI for UX

At its most basic level, UX deals with making things intelligible. Once you’ve met the minimum standards, you can start working on making things enjoyable. From here, we move from the realm of User Experience to Customer Experience. It’s not just about how functional your customer contact systems are, but about how they make your customers feel.

The last few years have shown us just how powerful AI can be in the CX space. From generative AI chatbots to conversational personas, to Natural Language Processing, these technologies have transformed the way businesses interact with their customers. It would be a mistake not to view these technologies as potential UX tools, also.

The online chatbot has become a mainstay of UX. Nearly 80% of businesses have some form of a chatbot on their website. The way your webchat fits into your broader web presence (e.g. is it intrusive? Does it obstruct the customer?) matters, but so does the tonal fit. Does the Chatbot’s persona match the voice of your business? Is it too casual or too formal? How does the audience react?
UX is primarily about interfaces, but in the AI-powered world, your AI is an interface in and of itself. This ‘conversational interface’ aims to achieve the same goals and create the same outcomes for the customer, but rather than buttons and links, it operates through seamless conversation.
For your AI to become a truly conversational interface, it has to actually get the customer to where they need to go. There are two ways to approach this: fixed or unstructured pathways.
- A fixed pathway is simple, speedy, and consistent. Use this for customer routing; when a customer says they need support with a specific service, direct them straight to the agent who can help with that specific service. No need for bells and whistles.
- An unstructured pathway is creative but opens you up to risk. A conversational system, such as an LLM, can provide a flexible experience, unique to the customer. It can even undertake some problem-solving. When a customer’s problem is more complex, unstructured pathways offer more options.
The quality of AI then, is as much a factor of your UX as how you present it on the page. AI is a form of interface and has to be as accessible, effective, and consistent as all your other interfaces.

Often, the customer is the primary focus of UX. But your customers aren’t your only users. The contact center is an ecosystem; customers work together with agents to solve problems. That means, if your agent interfaces aren’t up to scratch, it doesn’t matter how seamless your customer-facing UX is; friction on the agent side will still be passed on to the customer.

UX for Employee Experience

In the early twentieth century, husband and wife duo Frank and Lilian Gilbreth pioneered the study of time and motion in the workplace. Through rigorous experimentation, they designed new machines and processes for factory workers that would incorporate ergonomic principles; speeding up individual tasks whilst reducing strain on the bodies of workers. The result was a doubling of productivity – workers became more efficient and suffered fewer lifetime injuries. Thinking carefully about the ergonomics of each individual motion led to massive efficiency improvements.

In the modern world, fewer tasks require precise manual labor, and most are carried out on a computer screen. The principles remain the same, however.

Employee Experience matters just as much as Customer Experience. It’s a simple piece of mathematics; if an agent has to spend time switching between different systems and navigating a clumsy and poorly designed UI, that’s time not spent supporting the customer. It’s also contributing to employee stress and dissatisfaction; an unusable UI is just one more blocker between the employee and their work. If they can’t get their work done with you, they’re going to go somewhere they can.

This isn’t the only reason that paying attention to employee-side UX is critical:

Today, accessibility is a legal requirement. Across both the EU and the US, employees must ensure that the interfaces their employees use comply with the WCAG 2.2. standard, or something similar. If your interfaces aren’t usable for someone with color blindness, for instance, that could be classified as a form of workplace discrimination.
Beyond the legal minimum, employees who enjoy their work are likely to pass that on to the customer. No one likes picking up the phone and being answered by a gruff, impatient voice. You should be creating an environment in which agents can be their best selves and show those selves to your customers.
The more time you can save on every process, from launching an interaction to finding relevant data to post-call wrap-up, the more time you can give back to your customers. The quicker an agent resolves an inquiry, the quicker they can move on to the next, and the less time that customer has to wait in a queue. Simplifying and streamlining your UX has direct, measurable impacts on your CX.

It’s clear then, that a CX solution with an accessible interface is an absolute necessity. If you don’t have one already, we know a great place to start.

UX for Customer Experience with storm®

When investing in UX for Customer Experience, it’s important to consider every aspect of the contact center ecosystem. That means your customers, interacting with your business from the outside. It means your agents, working hard to deliver outstanding customer experience. It means your supervisors, coordinating people and tech to ensure a smooth operation. At every level, the quality of your UX translates to the quality of your CX.

Content Guru’s cloud-based contact center solution, storm®, provides seamless Customer Experience, delivered through WCAG 2.2. compliant cloud interfaces, to support every facet of life in the contact center.

storm is used by over 1000 enterprise-scale public and private organizations in over 50 countries, and is trusted by leading global brands to deliver UX for Customer Experience.