Your User Experience researchers and designers and your Customer Experience team have a lot to offer each other. It’s easy, however, for UX and CX teams to work in silos. When UX and CX teams fail to collaborate, challenges can arise. These issues not only affect team efficiency but also impact the overall user experience. Consider the following scenarios:
- Unaddressed onboarding issues can force CX teams to focus on teaching customers how to do basic tasks, limiting time for strategic customer needs.
- Overlooked product areas may require CX attention, but constant troubleshooting prevents deeper analysis.
- Lack of UX-CX collaboration prevents sharing valuable user insights, limiting both teams’ understanding of customer needs.
CX can teach UX about common product pain points, and they are deeply familiar with how their users operate. At the same time, good product UX can directly reduce user problems and support tickets, allowing CX to shift their priorities from putting out fires to focusing on larger, more productive efforts. Through design and research, UX can also create more opportunities to make users feel connected to the product.
Building a healthy exchange between teams benefits the organization and the users.
Rely on CX to Help with Onboarding and Research
Often, an organization’s CX team has deep and specialized knowledge about users. This makes them a useful resource for getting broad and preliminary pictures of the user population. They can also help UX researchers and designers who need to prioritize their own product onboarding and learning process.
CX can report user pain points and metrics
With a vast amount of market and user knowledge, along with familiarity with products and features, CX team members can also easily help identify common pain points. Working with CX can generate easily quantified metrics, as well. For example, CX can help track the number of support tickets related to a target area or feature of the product.
CX can test ideas early
CX partners are also a good resource for concept testing and early usability testing. The CX team itself can serve as a forum and sounding board for review, testing, and feedback. If a UX team brings CX colleagues into the design process early, this can help build a rapport between teams and create a stronger foundation for the design process based on deep user insights.
CX can help recruit users for testing
Recruiting for usability testing can be a challenge. CX team members often have direct lines to existing users. They also have the benefit of knowing more about individual user profiles (academic discipline, size of their product adoption, level of expertise, etc.) in advance. When a UX team collaborates with a CX team to build testing cohorts, research initiatives can have more robust and intentional results.
Free up CX’s Time to Focus on More Impactful Customer Work
Reduce low-level repetition, increase impactful time spent
UX designers and researchers’ jobs are to improve the product, creating happier users and reducing support tickets. Their goal is not to diminish the impact of CX, but instead to build them up and allow them to focus on larger issues. Effective UX research and design can lessen the repetitive fixes that CX professionals sometimes have to do for users. Instead, the CX team can work on jobs at a bigger scale.
For example, a CX team might regularly spend time on step-by-step course setup walk-throughs for instructors. Maybe they are even doing the setup for the users. If time spent on that kind of task could be reduced, CX could then spend their time studying and surfacing other problems in the product. They could also study and work on user support items that are in their backlog.
Related Case Study: WileyPLUS Student Registration
Diagnosis of user pain points reveals quick wins that help reduce the burden on Wiley’s CX team by 80%.
Our work with Wiley is an example of how UX and CX teams can collaborate to achieve meaningful improvements. Prior to working with their CX team, they had to staff up each term to meet a swell in student support requests caused by a problematic registration process. Among the pain points experienced by their users were difficulty finding where to enter registration codes and trouble accessing a free trial. Wiley initially believed a complete redesign would be required, but by talking with their CX team and conducting user research, we identified a much more streamlined set of improvements that achieved results more quickly and cost-effectively.
UX/CX Partnerships Foster Increased User Involvement
Coordinating user touchpoints builds investment
A UX/CX partnership can improve users’ overall experience with your organization. Multiple touchpoints with the CX and UX teams helps users feel like they are contributing to the product’s ecosystem. It can also make their experience working with the product feel more cohesive, and increase their feeling of personal investment.
Users enjoy contributing to product improvements
It also feels good for users to be asked for their opinions! When they are given opportunities to weigh in on potential new features or improvements, users feel valued. If they see changes or additions to the product that feels connected to their contributions, users can feel like they have a stake in the product’s evolution. CX can help build these kinds of user relationships, and user delight and excitement can make CX teams’ jobs easier.
How You Can Nurture the UX/CX Partnership
Where to get started? The best way for UX to connect with CX is usually through product partners. Asking for the product teams’ help in setting up a kick off with CX can work well.
Kick off the partnership
UX can run this kind of meeting like a workshop:
- Focus on collecting user pain points. CX can help demonstrate these, as they are deeply familiar with them, while UX takes notes on the user flows.
- Make sure to ask about the support ticket system. Can the UX team access them? What are the most common types of support tickets?
Follow up with design reviews
After the first meeting, it can be helpful to share new design iterations with CX that are related to the covered pain points. CX teams understand the users, so having them review designs is a great exercise in getting early user-focused feedback. This is especially helpful if designs are not ready for direct user feedback yet.
Collaborate for Increased Efficiency, Speed, and Quality
CX teams and UX researchers and designers can help each other work faster, more efficiently, and with better results. Additionally, CX and UX partnerships can lead to stronger and more holistic user involvement. A seasoned UX team knows the power of this kind of collaboration, and leverages it accordingly.
Use your UX team’s connections, or bring in a UX partner like Openfield, to work with your organization’s CX team to learn new things about your users and increase your problem-solving capabilities.
