Deciphering X: Cracking the Codes of CX, UX, EX, HX, DX, and JX

Date: October 16, 2019

You're in good company if you’ve been using CX and UX interchangeably. Until these acronyms are embedded in office cultures and become as commonplace as HR, IT and PC, there will still be misunderstandings and a lack of clarity about how these domains overlap. Here's a summary to help you crack the codes.

eXperience: The perceptions and feelings resulting from interactions.

User eXperience (UX): UX is concerned with human experiences when interacting with digital products and services: phones, websites, online services, video games or any kind of digital platform. User Interface design is key here as it focuses on aesthetics and usability. Keep in mind that it is expected that both UX and UI always work together. You don’t want to have a nice looking, accessible app (good UI) but complex flows (bad UX) that in the end create poor experiences.

Customer eXperience (CX): CX is not only concerned about digital interactions, but about everything that the customer touches on when interacting with a service, either physical or digital. Touchpoints that involve access to systems overlap UX, but many of them don't. Conferences, e-mail campaigns, social media sentiment, help desks and employees are all examples of touchpoints that affect the customer's experience but do not have a digital component. In an age where online reviews and customer feedback is more accessible than ever, a good CX means every step of the consumer journey needs to be positive. This is also where trust and reputation come into play.

Employee eXperience (EX): EX is the practice of focusing on an 'internal customer' - the employee - and their experience during various stages of employment. This starts during the brand exposure and job application stages and is vital during the recruitment and onboarding stages, but is also critical during the continuous learning, performance review and talent management stages. A focus on culture and the EX is critical to a successful CX, as they are inextricably linked. Engaged employees create engaged customers. (STAY TUNED: There is more to come in the next blog.)

Human eXperience (HX): HX is the evolution of UX and CX to a more personalized interaction; it’s the shift in focus from profit to purpose or IT-centric to customer-centric.

Digital transformation (DX): DX is the practice of converting various aspects of a business to new ways of working through digital means. Examples vary from conversion from a paper to digital process to employing emerging technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) or modernizing to software as a service (SaaS).

Job eXperience (JX): JX is a career evolution approach that will become more dominant in the next decade as the rise in artificial intelligence (AI) to improve CX takes place. Employees would use AI to help them work - better and smarter.

Hopefully this summary provides enough context to explain the key differences and where they overlap or intersect. If you cracked the code then you found the common thread running through each of these eXperiences – the common goal to make something useful that improves people's lives and fulfills human needs.

Check out the Federal Financial Management Self-Assessment to better understand the maturity of your eXperiences: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/fit/fm-self-assessment.html and https://fmvision.fiscal.treasury.gov/cfo-develops-winning-plays.html