Customer Experience Design, Demystified (By a UX Agency That Actually Builds It)

Many of our clients come to us thinking they need UX help, so we dive in. We audit their interface, map their user flows, and analyze their design patterns. And yeah, sometimes the UX does need work. 

But the deeper we go, the clearer it becomes: the problem isn't the product — it's the entire experience around it. And that's where customer experience design comes in. 

When someone can navigate your app perfectly but still churns after their trial? When your interface is beautiful, but users feel frustrated by your support process? When your onboarding flow is smooth, but your welcome emails confuse people? You're not dealing with a UX problem. You're facing a customer experience gap that no amount of interface polish can fix. 

And in a world where switching costs are low and alternatives are a Google search away, the brands that nail the full experience don't just win customers – they create advocates who do the selling for them.

In this guide, we will talk about how customer experience design shapes loyalty (and churn), and why brands that ignore it lose more than users. They lose trust. With Reddit wisdom, real SaaS examples, and insights from a UX agency that lives this work daily, we'll make customer experience design practical, emotional, and actionable for your team!

What is customer experience design?

Let’s start with the basics. 

Customer experience design (CX) is the practice of shaping all interactions a customer has with your business, product, or service to create a positive and memorable experience. 

Unlike UX design, which focuses on product usability, CX design covers every touchpoint a user has with a business: marketing, onboarding, product usage, support, billing, and beyond. 

CX design focuses on the complete customer journey, ensuring each interaction builds trust and moves people toward long-term engagement with your business.

To really get how this translates into results, let's break down the four essential characteristics that make CX design effective.

Key characteristics of customer experience design

Customer experience design comes down to a few core characteristics: 

1. It's omnichannel. Your customer doesn't care that marketing owns the ads, product owns the app, and support owns the help desk. To them, it's all one experience. Good CX design makes sure your brand feels consistent whether someone's reading your blog, using your product, or talking to your support team.
   
   
2. It's emotionally intelligent. We're not just solving functional problems — we're managing how people feel at every step. Did that error message make them panic, or did it reassure them? Does your pricing page feel transparent or sketchy? CX designers think about emotions as much as workflows.
   
   
3. It's cross-functional. This isn't something you can design in isolation. CX requires marketing, product, support, and even sales to work together. It's messy, requires constant coordination, and is absolutely necessary.
   
   
4. It's outcome-focused. While UX might measure task completion rates, CX tracks bigger things: loyalty, retention, and advocacy. Did this experience make someone more likely to recommend you? That's the real test.
   
   

What are the 5 C's of customer experience?

Every great customer experience is built on five foundational elements. Think of them as the pillars that hold up your entire customer experience strategy. Miss one, and the whole thing starts to wobble.

1. Compensation

Fair value exchange. People need to feel they're getting what they paid for and often more. This isn't just about pricing; it's about perceived value at every touchpoint. Does your free trial actually let them test meaningful features? Do they feel like they're getting insider knowledge from your content? Compensation is about making sure the relationship feels balanced.

2. Culture

Your company's personality should shine through consistently. Are you the helpful neighbor who always has time to chat, or the efficient expert who gets straight to the point? Whatever you choose, stick to it across every interaction. Your app's error messages, support team responses, and marketing emails should all feel like they're coming from the same thoughtful person.

3. Communication

Engage customers with clear, timely, and relevant messaging — knowing when to talk, when to listen, and when to hold back makes all the difference. It's proactively telling someone their trial expires in three days, not surprising them after it's already over. It's explaining why you need their credit card for a free trial instead of being sneaky about it.

4. Compassion

Understanding that your customers are real humans with real problems, time constraints, and emotions. Sometimes they're stressed about a deadline. Sometimes they're frustrated because this is the third tool they've tried this month. Sometimes they just need someone to acknowledge that learning new software is genuinely hard.

5. Care

Going beyond the minimum required effort. It's the follow-up email checking if their problem was actually solved. It's a proactive notification with helpful next steps. It's designed for the edge cases and frustrated users, not just the happy path scenarios.

When these five C's work together, something interesting happens. Existing customers stop seeing individual touchpoints and start experiencing your brand as a cohesive, trustworthy whole. And that's when they stick around, upgrade, and tell their friends.

What is the difference between CX and UX?

Well, the straightforward answer is: UX design focuses on how people interact with your product, while CX design focuses on how people feel about your entire brand across all touchpoints.

UX is about making your app, website, or software easy and enjoyable to use. Think navigation, button placement, user flows, and interface design. It's the science of removing friction from digital interactions. 

If you want a deeper dive into what makes great UX work in practice, check out our YouTube video on UX design.

CX is bigger. It's about the complete relationship someone has with your company, from the first ad they see to the support call they make six months later. It includes your product experience, but also your marketing, onboarding, customer service, billing, and everything in between.

A simple way to think about it:

• UX asks: "Can they complete this task easily?"
• CX asks: "Do they trust us and want to stick around?"

Where CX design and UX design overlap in real projects

In practice, the line between CX and UX blurs constantly.

Take our work with MyInterview, a video interviewing platform. They came to us with what seemed like a classic UX problem: 90% of job candidates were dropping out mid-interview. The interface was confusing, input patterns were broken, and the whole flow felt clunky.

But as we dug deeper, we realized this wasn't just a UX issue. Those candidates weren't just frustrated with the interface — they were losing trust in the entire hiring process. A confusing application experience made them question whether this was a legitimate company worth working for.

So we didn't just fix the UI patterns and add smoother animations (though we did that too). We also tackled the broader experience: consistent branding across the candidate journey, clear communication about what to expect, and design elements that built confidence rather than confusion.

The result? We weren't just improving task completion rates — we were rebuilding trust in the entire recruitment process. That's CX and UX working together.

Why both matter (and why you shouldn't pick sides)

Some Reddit users debate whether CX designers are "just UXers with bigger job titles". Others argue UX is becoming irrelevant as CX takes over. Both camps are missing the point.

In reality, great products need both perspectives. UX ensures your product actually works. CX ensures people want to keep using it — and recommending it to others.

Your app can have perfect usability but still create frustrated customers if your onboarding emails are confusing, your support is slow, or your pricing feels sneaky. Conversely, you can have the world's best customer service, but if your product is hard to use, people won't stick around long enough to experience it.

As one Reddit user explained, “Ah, the evolving world of design roles! Customer experience (CX) designers and user experience (UX) designers share a common goal to create delightful and seamless experiences- but they often focus on different aspects of the user journey…”

The companies that win combine both: they create products that work beautifully and experiences that build lasting relationships.

What CX designers actually do (and how it's changing)

If you're wondering whether "CX Designer" is just a fancy way to say "UX Designer with a bigger scope," you're not the only one. So, here's what customer experience designers really get up to every day and why their job is evolving at lightning speed.

Core activities of CX designers

A customer experience designer focuses on a set of core activities:

• Journey mapping

CX designers develop customer journey maps of every step a customer takes with your company. Not just the app flow, but the entire relationship — from first hearing about you to becoming a long-term advocate. Customer journey map examples reveal gaps, friction points, and opportunities that individual teams might miss.

• Stakeholder interviews

They talk to everyone. Marketing, sales, support, product teams, and actual customers. CX designers are professional dot-connectors, finding patterns across departments that no single team would see on their own.

• Cross-functional collaboration 

Unlike UX designers who primarily work with product teams, CX designers spend significant time with marketing (messaging consistency), support (pain point identification), and sales (understand and exceed customer expectations). It's part designer, part diplomat.

• CX metrics analysis 

They track the numbers that matter for long-term business health, such as:

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): Measures how likely customers are to recommend you.
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): Tracks satisfaction with specific interactions.
• CES (Customer Effort Score): Measures how easy it is to get things done.

Tools of the trade

CX designers work with a much broader toolkit than traditional UXers. They spend time in CRM systems like HubSpot or Salesforce, tracking how customers move through different stages of their journey. 

Analytics dashboards help them spot patterns — like where people drop off during onboarding or which support topics generate the most frustration. And customer journey mapping tools let them visualize the entire customer experience to identify improvement opportunities.

However, the most important "tool" isn't software at all. To create customer journey maps, CX designers rely heavily on direct customer feedback — surveys, interviews, support ticket analysis, and user session recordings. They're constantly gathering insights from real people to understand not just what customers do, but how they feel about doing it. This combination of customer data and empathy is what separates CX design from pure analytics or traditional UX work.

How the role is evolving

The CX design field is exploding, and job titles are getting creative. You'll see postings for "CX Strategist," "Head of Experience," "Director of Journey Operations," and "Experience Design Manager." Companies are realizing that great products need someone thinking about the bigger picture.

Even at agencies like ours, where we don't brand ourselves as "CX specialists," our product designers constantly apply CX principles. When we're redesigning a SaaS dashboard, we're not just thinking about usability — we're considering how this change affects trial conversion, feature adoption, and increases customer retention.

Why CX designers matter more now

Because customers have more choices than ever, and switching costs are lower than ever. A confusing onboarding experience or frustrating support interaction can send someone to a competitor in seconds. CX designers exist to prevent that from happening.

They're the people asking uncomfortable questions like "Why do we make customers repeat their information three times?" and "What happens to users who don't fit our happy path scenarios?"

It's strategic work disguised as design work. And as more companies realize that customer experience directly impacts revenue, CX designers are moving from nice-to-have roles to essential team members.

Principles of great CX design

You can have all the latest tools and processes in place, but that doesn't guarantee a good customer experience. It's really about getting four fundamental things right - and when you do, you'll see real improvements in your business numbers. But if you miss even one of these basics, customers will get frustrated no matter how polished your product looks.

Empathy: Personas + emotional journeys

If you want to design a better customer experience, you need to really understand what your customers are going through at every step - and building that insight often starts with user interviews that uncover not just what people do, but how they feel. 

The thing is, you can't just guess how they feel. You need to actually talk to them and look at what the data tells you.

Zendesk builds customer personas from actual support problems, not just surveys

While most companies create personas based on demographic data or interviews, Zendesk digs into their support ticket analytics and behavioral data to see what customers actually struggle with. They track which features confuse people, what questions get asked repeatedly, and where users get stuck in workflows.

Their "Triple Diamond" process is an evolved version of the standard design thinking approach. Instead of the typical "discover, define, develop, deliver" framework, they use three diamonds that represent: Problem Discovery → Solution Design → Implementation & Refinement. Each diamond has specific milestones and involves continuous testing with real users rather than handing off designs to engineers and hoping for the best.

The result? When they repositioned a simple "Get Help" button based on actual user behavior data, clicks increased by 300%. 

Pro tip: Include emotional context in your personas. Not just "what they do," but "what they fear or hope" during key journey points.

Consistency: Across digital, physical, and human touchpoints

Customers don't care about your internal org chart. They don't know that marketing owns the ads, product owns the app, and support owns the help desk. To them, it's all one experience with your brand. And when those experiences feel disconnected — when your marketing promises one thing but your product delivers another, or when your chatbot sounds friendly but your support emails are cold and formal — customers notice immediately.

Consistency is about creating a unified voice, tone, and approach that makes every interaction feel like it's coming from the same thoughtful company.

Robinhood's unified brand promise

Robinhood built their entire customer experience around one core promise: making investing simple and accessible. This wasn't just a marketing slogan — it shaped every touchpoint. Their pre-launch waitlist emails were conversational and excitement-building, not stuffed with financial jargon. The app interface used plain English instead of industry terms. Even their referral program was straightforward: "Give a stock, get a stock."

When users had questions, the support responses maintained that same approachable tone. No sudden shift to corporate-speak or complex explanations. The consistency made users feel like they were dealing with a friend who happened to know about investing, not an intimidating financial institution.

From Reddit: "CX is usually the user’s journey across a full brand experience (or maybe just something like an app)... So like if you worked for a bank, as a CXer, you might be concerned about how your customer moves between the site and the app... Or a CXer will be figuring out how all parts of the app work together (like how does the checking account section relate to the credit report section)." — totallyspicey

Ease: Frictionless UX is a component of frictionless CX

The truth is, your customers don't distinguish between "product friction" and "experience friction." If something is hard to do, it's hard to do. Whether that difficulty comes from a confusing interface or an unhelpful support interaction doesn't matter — it all feels like your brand is making their life more difficult.

Good CX design recognizes that every barrier adds up. Each friction point is an opportunity for customers to give up and go somewhere else.

Eleken x DataLexing — Making complex analytics accessible

We worked with DataLexing, a platform that helps companies make sense of their data through advanced analytics. The challenge? Their users weren't data scientists — they were marketers and business owners who needed insights but didn't want to learn a complex tool to get them.

Our redesign focused on removing friction at every level. Dynamic breadcrumbs kept users oriented in complex workflows. Customizable dashboards showed only relevant metrics, eliminating cognitive overload. Smart notifications guided users through multi-step processes instead of leaving them to figure things out alone.

The key was understanding that ease isn't just about individual features, but about the entire user’s journey. We simplified onboarding to get users to their first "aha moment" faster. We made error messages helpful rather than technical. We adjusted the visual hierarchy so important actions were always obvious.

And as a result, users started completing more complex analyses because the platform no longer felt like an obstacle to their work. That's the difference between fixing UX problems and solving for customer experience — you're making the entire relationship feel effortless, not just individual interactions.

Adaptability: Evolving based on customer feedback, context, and culture

Your customers' expectations change constantly - based on world events, cultural shifts, and what your competitors are doing. The companies that succeed are the ones that notice these changes quickly and adapt, sometimes in days rather than months.

This doesn't mean chasing every trend or completely overhauling everything. It means paying attention to what your customers actually need right now and being ready to adjust when necessary. Maybe that's changing how you communicate during a crisis, or reworking a process because users keep complaining about it. Sometimes it just means accepting that what worked great last year might not work today.

Allbirds responds to pandemic needs

When COVID hit, Allbirds quickly pivoted with their "We're Better Together" campaign. They dropped the price of their Wool Runners from $95 to $60 and let customers donate a second pair to healthcare workers with each purchase. Instead of sticking to business as usual, they gave people a way to help frontline workers while still getting the shoes they wanted.

This is a perfect example of adapting to what customers actually cared about during the pandemic. People wanted to support healthcare workers, so Allbirds built that right into their buying experience. They didn't just change their marketing - they changed their whole approach to match what mattered to people at that moment.

From Reddit:

“UX = the experience users have using your product CX = the total experience of your brand CS = the customer service experience… UX and CS will influence CX but they are both not the whole experience...” — xoes

How to start building a customer experience strategy

Reading about CX principles is one thing. Actually implementing them in your organization is another. The good news? You don't need a massive budget or a complete organizational restructure to start improving your customer experience. You just need to be systematic about it.

Here's a practical, step-by-step approach that works whether you're a startup or an established company looking to take customer experience design seriously, retain existing customers, and develop user engagement strategies.

Step 1: Collect multi-channel user feedback

Start by gathering data from everywhere your customers interact with you. This means surveys, yes, but also support ticket themes, sales call recordings, social media mentions, app store reviews, and website behavior data. The goal here is to get a complete picture of what customers actually experience, not just what you think they experience.

Set up simple feedback collection at key moments: after purchases, following support customer interactions, and at the end of free trials. But don't stop there. Look at the unsolicited feedback too — the angry tweets, the frustrated support emails, the feature requests buried in your help desk system.

Step 2: Build personas with emotional context

Most personas focus on demographics and job titles. That's not enough for CX design. You need to understand what your customers are feeling during different parts of their journey with you.

When someone signs up for your free trial, are they excited about the possibilities or anxious about learning another new tool? When they contact support, are they frustrated because this is blocking their work, or are they just curious about a feature? Include these emotional states and aha moment examples in your personas because they directly impact how you should design interactions.

Step 3: Map the customer journey across departments

This is where most companies get stuck. Your SaaS customer journey doesn't end when someone signs up or makes their first purchase — that's often where the real experience begins.

Map out every touchpoint from awareness to advocacy, including the moments that happen between different departments. What happens after someone downloads your white paper but before they book a demo? How do customers move from your marketing site to your product onboarding? What's the experience like when they need to upgrade their plan six months later?

Pro tip: If your customer journey map ends at conversion, you're missing 70% of CX.

Step 4: Identify friction points

Look for the moments where customers get confused, frustrated, or drop off entirely. These often happen at handoffs between departments — marketing to sales, sales to onboarding, product to support.

Pay special attention to the gaps: What happens when someone doesn't fit your "happy path" scenario? What if they need to change their plan mid-trial? What if they have a question that doesn't fit neatly into your FAQ categories? These moments are where a strong customer feedback loop can reveal the fixes that matter most.

Step 5: Propose cross-functional fixes

Most friction points can't be solved by any single department. Fixing a confusing onboarding experience might require changes to marketing messaging, product flows, and support documentation all at once.

Start small with fixes that have a clear business impact. Maybe it's aligning the language between your marketing site and your product interface. Maybe it's creating a better handoff process between sales and customer success. Pick battles you can win, measure the results, and use those wins to build momentum for bigger changes.

The key is to think like your customer. They don't care which team owns which part of their experience — they just want it to work smoothly from start to finish.

The Future of CX design: Unified experience teams

Most companies organize customer experience work in silos, with UX designers handling the product, marketing teams managing brand experience, customer success running onboarding, and support dealing with problems. This means each team optimizes their part while customers move between these different experiences that often feel disconnected from each other. 

That's why companies are starting to reorganize around the customer journey instead of internal departments. They're recognizing that customers experience the brand as one continuous interaction, not as separate customer touchpoints managed by different teams.

The rise of experience-led organizations

Job titles are getting weird, and that's actually a good sign. Instead of traditional "UX Designer" or "Customer Success Manager" roles, you're seeing postings for "Experience Ops Manager” or "Head of Digital Transformation". And this shift isn't just about changing job titles - it's about completely rethinking how companies approach customer experience.

These roles exist because someone finally asked the obvious question: "Who's responsible for the experience between our touchpoints?" The answer used to be "nobody", which explains why so many customer journeys feel disjointed.

One team, one experience

Here's our prediction: within the next few years, UX, CX, and Service Design will merge under the umbrella of "Experience Design”. Why? Because the boundaries between digital and human touchpoints are disappearing. Your chatbot needs to hand off seamlessly to a human agent. Your product onboarding needs to connect to your email campaigns. Your support interactions need to inform your product roadmap.

Companies that figure this out first will have a massive advantage. Imagine if every interaction loyal customers had with your brand felt like it was designed by the same thoughtful team — because it actually was.

CX trends to watch for 

AI-powered personalization is making it possible to deliver truly individualized experiences at scale. But it only works if all your systems talk to each other. AI can't personalize an email if it doesn't know what someone did in your app yesterday. The companies getting this right are breaking down data silos between marketing automation, product analytics, and customer support systems. When done well, customers start feeling like the brand actually knows them instead of treating every interaction like the first one.

Journey orchestration platforms are emerging that let companies design and manage entire customer experiences across multiple channels. Instead of having separate tools for email marketing, in-app messaging, SMS, and push notifications, these platforms let you design one cohesive experience that adapts based on customer behavior. If someone abandons their cart, the system can automatically trigger a personalized email, followed by a targeted in-app message when they return, all without manual intervention.

X moving to the C-suite. More companies are hiring Chief Experience Officers and putting customer experience management at the center of strategic planning. When the CEO starts asking "How does this decision affect the customer journey?" instead of just "How does this impact our quarterly numbers?", you know things are changing. 

The reality is that customer expectations are rising faster than most companies can adapt. People now expect Netflix-level personalization, Amazon-level convenience, and Apple-level design quality from every brand they interact with. The companies that survive this shift won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest technology. They'll be the ones bold enough to reorganize around their customer' needs instead of their own operational convenience.

Why CX design is everyone's job

Customer experience is a responsibility shared by everyone in an organization, not just one team. Every single person, whether they're aware of it or not, influences how customers feel about the brand.

The customer journey starts long before a purchase is made and continues long after. A developer's code can impact website speed, while a customer support team's response can shape a customer's feelings when a problem arises. Even executive policy decisions play a huge role, determining whether customers feel valued or frustrated.

If you’re a designer: Look beyond the interface

Your beautiful interfaces matter, but they're just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Even the most elegant checkout flow won't save a customer experience when confirmation emails are confusing or shipping updates don't work. Start asking questions about what happens before and after someone uses what you've designed. For example:

• How do people discover your product? 
• What happens when they need help?
• How do they feel three months after signing up?

Push for broader involvement in customer research. Sit in on support calls. Read through user feedback. Understanding the full context helps you see how your design decisions ripple through the entire customer relationship.

If you're a leader: Fund experience transformation

CX transformation requires more than hiring a customer experience manager; it also means building an experience maturity model that aligns teams on what a great customer experience looks like at every stage. You need investment in better data integration, cross-team collaboration tools, training programs, and the time for teams to actually work together instead of just throwing deliverables over the wall.

But the payoff makes it worthwhile. Companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above their market. This happens when they make experience a strategic priority that touches every part of their business.

If you're part of a team: Map journeys together

The most valuable CX work happens when different departments sit in the same room and map out what customers actually experience. Marketing learns what promises the product can actually keep. Product teams understand what customers expect based on the messaging. Support discovers why certain questions keep coming up.

Schedule regular "customer journey sessions" where different teams walk through real customer scenarios together. You'll discover how many assumptions get challenged and how many quick wins emerge when people see the full picture.

The bottom line

Good customer experience is becoming the minimum expectation, not something special. Companies that treat it like an optional extra are going to get left behind. The winners will be those where everyone, from the CEO to the newest intern, thinks like a customer advocate.

Your customers don't care about your internal politics, your tight budget, or your quarterly goals. They just want to know: Are you making my life easier or harder? And that answer gets decided by hundreds of tiny choices your whole team makes every day.

Ready to create experiences that build customer loyalty and advocacy? Let's talk about how Eleken can help you make it happen!