Somewhere along the way, “experience” got divided up. Teams started talking about user experience on one side and customer experience on the other as if they were different worlds, owned by different people, with different goals.

In truth, they’re two halves of the same story.

UX and CX: Two Views of the Same Landscape

In most organisations, user experience (UX) sits close to the product and digital teams. It’s about usability, flow, accessibility, and interface design. The experience of using something. The focus is often on the screen and the moment.

Customer experience (CX) lives elsewhere. It’s the end-to-end journey, across touchpoints, channels, and emotions. It’s how a person feels when they interact with an organisation, not just how they navigate an app. CX looks at the whole relationship.

Both matter. But too often, they operate as separate universes, with different metrics, tools, and sometimes even language. UX talks about wireframes, personas, and prototypes. CX talks about journeys, satisfaction, and service recovery. Each believes they own “the experience.”

When They Drift Apart

When these disciplines drift apart, the results are predictable. You get digital products that work beautifully but feel disconnected from the rest of the service. Or, conversely, you get well-intentioned customer experience initiatives that ignore the practical realities of how people actually interact with technology.

The organisation starts optimising for parts, not the whole. The person on the receiving end just sees the join.

When They Work Together

The most human organisations don’t separate them, they weave them. The UX designer and the service designer sit at the same table, looking at the same journey. They recognise that the “user” of a product is also a “customer” of a service and that both perspectives matter.

Service design brings the system view.
UX brings the detail of interaction and flow.
Together, they make experiences that both work and feel right.

Why It Matters for Transformation

In transformation, this distinction isn’t academic, it’s practical. Teams that build without understanding the service context end up solving for moments, not outcomes. Teams that design journeys without engaging the product realities end up with great concepts that never quite land.

Transformation sticks when people feel consistency, when the digital, human, and operational elements tell the same story. That’s not UX or CX. That’s experience design, full stop.

A Simple Test

Next time someone asks, “Is this a UX or a CX issue?” Ask instead, “Where does the experience begin and end and who’s holding the thread?”

In the real world, customers don’t see the silos.They just see the experience.

About the Author

Lisa Woodall is the author of Whatever Next? Making Transformation More Human, More Honest, and More Likely to Stick.
She works at the intersection of enterprise architecture, transformation strategy, and service design — helping organisations connect logic with emotion, systems with stories, and plans with people.

Read more or join the conversation at whatevernextbook.com.