Prospective customers are becoming product users much earlier in the customer journey. As a result, teams and tools are overlapping more than ever.

I originally posted this on Medium (UX Collective), here.

Nowhere is this change more dramatic than in SaaS companies, where most of the customer experience used to take place outside of the product:

Yet today, more of the customer journey takes place inside the product:

Previously, UX and CX were not particularly aligned

• The CX category — predominantly the domain of marketing, sales, and success — is about understanding and optimizing the customer journey, from pre to post-purchase. Most of that journey used to take place outside of the product, and CX was about seamlessly transitioning between journey touchpoints to increase customer satisfaction.
• UX — the domain of user research, design, and product — is about making the core product valuable, useful, and usable.

Now that more of the customer journey is taking place inside the product, the objectives of CX and UX are, well, mingling.

Part of the reason for this change is simply because there’s no substitute for hands-on experience:

What technologies are fueling this change?

Product Led Growth — where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion —is the term that best reflects this industry change. A few months ago, Open View Partners published The Product Led Growth Market Map. It’s a great resource if you’re looking for PLG strategies and the companies employing them (many of which have been doing so long before the term was coined). But one area of the map that feels incomplete is, “Companies That Enable Product Led Growth.”

Read the rest of the post at UX Collective: Is User Experience (UX) taking over Customer Experience (CX)?