A focus on experience: The relationship between CX, UX and market research

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

In business, as the saying goes, the customer is king. Customer experience (CX), user experience (UX) and market research all focus on, in various forms, serving the customer. However, after a year of a worldwide pandemic tearing up old models of business, and as technological changes help flatten company structures, can – or should – the three disciplines be brought closer together?

Like three siblings, CX, UX and market research have much in common, but also have their own distinct approaches. Broadly, UX is centred more on the product and how customers interact with it, while customer experience deals with the public’s interactions with the company, often focusing on removing friction in the customer journey. Market research tends to be broader, and more strategically focused.

Tools for the job

Charlotte Burgess, managing director of customer research agency C Space, says it can be useful to think of UX, CX and market research as being part of the same broad industry, but coming at customer service from different angles. “Where they do come together is in the service of creating a better experience or product for the end customer,” she says. “They all have a common goal and have different origins, and often bring a different perspective. They are complementary, but are not the same.”

Burgess feels that, in some ways, the three disciplines are converging, with CX and UX growing rapidly. She puts their increasing popularity down to their roots in the tech industry, and the exponential expansion of data – as well as its democratisation – in businesses such as food-delivery company Deliveroo, where the focus has been on increasing internal access to insight within a less hierarchical structure. “The challenge of the insight function is to tell a common story across that data, and to try to help organisations make sense of it,” she says.

Sarah Jousiffe, head of qualitative, closeness and insight engagement at Sky, praises the rigour and long-term thinking of traditional market research, while appreciating the benefits of agile and fast insights garnered from CX and UX work. Sky’s work on its ‘customer promise’ strategy is a case in point – the project originated from CX, but needed market research support to provide the marketing, product and content required.

“It is about having the right tools for the right job,” she says. “If you are going to be spending multimillions on a new advertising campaign, you wouldn’t just test it on 10 people, and I do not think any UX researcher would say that was the right idea either. It is doing the right thing for the right purpose. We are all here to make sure that every decision is based on what customers are saying, doing and thinking.”

Long term vs short term

Some are more critical of CX and UX and their perceived focus on short-term benefits to customers ahead of long-term strategy and emotional heft in brand and advertising. Dom Boyd, managing director, UK (insights and offer) at Kantar, cites Ikea as one brand that has got the right balance, with a “beating heart” that runs through the business on issues such as sustainability. However, he worries others have it wrong.

“CX and UX are missing the opportunity to drive sustainable growth and value creation, as they are not baking in enough consistency in terms of brand value and memorability,” Boyd says. “In a world where emotions shape behaviours, experience makes memories, and memories make brands, they are missing the opportunity to be evocative. There is a festishisation of seamlessness and easiness at the expense of what drives sustainable long-term value – creating emotional reactions and memories.”

As Covid-19 speeds up a flattening of organisations and, in some cases, forces CX, UX and market research to co-exist within departments, Jousiffe argues that might not necessarily be a bad thing.

“A centralised market research function cannot do everything, but it could work out the relationship between all of those areas. You are all driving in the same direction rather than running your own races separately,” she says.

“Being a Jack-of-all-trades is not a good thing. There needs to be different disciplines that are separate, but they must work together as a community. We are all making customer-led informed decisions, and we need to be telling a joined-up story. The more contradiction there is internally, the harder it is for people to believe any of us.”

Burgess is also an advocate of using the different skills each of the three disciplines has to offer and allowing each to play to their strengths. “If you bring them all together, I don’t think you will get the benefit of all three of them, so you are missing out on whatever the advantages are in isolation,” she explains. “They operate on very different levels and are complementary. The risk is you have a team that specialises in only one area and has the disadvantage of only bringing that lens.”

The biggest impact of the pandemic might be in creating the space for people to reimagine how organisations are structured, suggests Boyd, with potential ramifications for UX, CX and market research. “As ecosystems become more complicated, there is a desire to simplify,” he says. “There is a strong cross-pollination between CX, UX and brands.”

Ikea is, again, a good example – the company has plans in place for long-term transformational change up until 2030. “There is always a role for optimisation, and there is value – but to do that at the expense of a transformational agenda is a huge, missed opportunity,” Boyd explains, adding that the pandemic has provided “permission to think freely and ask questions people wouldn’t have thought to have asked, or were scared to ask”.

“Data in itself is meaningless,” he muses. “Turning that into insight is an art that requires distillation, storytelling nous and strategic acumen. That is a rare and precious commodity.”

This article was first published in the April 2021 issue of Impact.