UX Glossary · C
Customer experience
Also: CX
The whole relationship a person has with an organisation, of which the product is one part.
Customer experience covers every interaction a person has with an organisation: marketing, sales, the product, billing, support, returns, and how it feels to leave.
The distinction from user experience is scope. UX is the experience of using the thing. CX is the experience of dealing with the company, and it includes people who never use the product at all.
Why the distinction has consequences
Most of the moments that decide whether someone stays are outside the product. An excellent application attached to billing that cannot issue a correct invoice produces an unhappy customer, and no amount of interface work fixes it.
These failures are usually organisational rather than design failures. The product team owns the product, support owns support, finance owns invoicing, and nobody owns the sequence the customer actually experiences. A journey map mostly earns its keep by making that ownership gap visible.
In practice
If you can only measure a few things, measure the moments where responsibility changes hands. Handoffs between departments are reliably where the experience breaks, because they are the only points no single team is accountable for.