Bridging the Gap: The Essential Collaboration Between CX and UX, Part 1

Conversely, because User Experience is often more focused on specific product interactions or systemic interactions between products, it helps to think of User Experience from a bottom-up perspective. Both CX and UX professionals can and should meet at the critical Journey Level, where they can apply their skills and best practices through meaningful collaboration. We’ll get to this later on.

Moreover, it is useful to think of CX and UX artifacts as operating at different altitudes—or levels of resolution—through which we can view and design experiences. As shown in Figure 2, these altitudes can range from high-level, strategic perspectives that are tied to business goals down to detailed, interaction-level views such as the exact wording of a button’s label or the steps that are necessary to complete a task such as setting up an account.

Being explicit about the altitude at which you’re working helps ensure clearer communication across diverse stakeholders. Executives and business strategists often benefit more from high-level or mid-level perspectives, while product and engineering teams often need to dive into fine-grained, executional details. Knowing when to zoom in or out enables teams to align more effectively and ensures that design decisions are grounded in both users’ needs and organizational priorities.

This altitude-based lens also clarifies how various experience-design artifacts relate to one another. Without a shared understanding of the level of abstraction that each artifact represents, teams risk comparing mismatched elements. Recognizing and articulating these levels helps bridge strategy and execution, making the overall design process more coherent, collaborative, and impactful.

Exploring the Evolution and Divergence Between Customer Experience and User Experience

Even though both disciplines share similar goals, methods, and motivations, these capabilities often reside in and function as separate organizations. This separation between Customer Experience and User Experience didn’t happen by accident—it emerged as organizations grew more complex and digital touchpoints proliferated. What started as a singular focus on experience naturally differentiated itself into specialized practices that address different aspects of customer interactions.

While this specialization brought depth and rigor to both practices, it also created new challenges. As companies built dedicated CX and UX teams, they often structured them in ways that unintentionally created barriers between them. For example, CX teams typically report to Marketing or Customer Success, while UX teams often live under Product Management or Engineering. These teams use different vocabularies, track different metrics, and rarely share the same physical or virtual spaces.

The result? Critical insights sometimes fall through the cracks between these disciplines, duplicate research efforts proliferate, and occasionally, contradictory priorities emerge.

Proposing Collaborative Methods

We do a disservice to our customers and users when we allow our internal silos and organizational barriers to manifest in the product and service experiences that we design. Doing so ultimately passes the burden of a less-than-seamless experience onto our paying customers and users, whose expectations for seamless experiences have only increased in recent years. Next, we’ll touch on the following:

• outcomes of collaboration
• connecting through shared methods

Outcomes of Collaboration

By bringing cross-functional teams together around critical activities such as journey mapping, persona creation, voice-of-the-customer (VoC), and design-thinking workshops, CX and UX professionals may reveal insights that couldn’t have emerged from either discipline working in isolation. Thanks to collaboration, cross-functional teams can achieve outcomes such as the following:

• providing deep customer insights across an entire experience
• bridging different altitudes of the experience together—both
  
  • horizontally—User Experience can better understand what is happening before and after an in-product interaction.
  • vertically—Customer Experience can translate CX strategy into tangible, implementable solutions.
• aligning cross-functional teams around a shared understanding
• identifying specific areas for innovation and improvement
• providing consumable artifacts for different levels of the organization, catering to executives, managers, and hands-on users
• taking into consideration nondigital business processes that are necessary to make the holistic experience work

At Rockwell Automation, we must design experiences that work within complex contexts and environments. Safety and security are paramount given the sensitive nature of many of our customers’ operations, and several of our solutions must effectively marry hardware with software. These aspects of the experience are merely table stakes, and adding to the complexities are the various purchasing and distribution models that customers might use in acquiring our solutions. In short, it’s not always Rockwell Automation that is making the final sale, and the process through which customers buy our solutions from distributors and integrate them into their systems, potentially through a third-party systems integrator, can be difficult to map out in a way that effectively smooths those edges.

As Figure 3 shows, we’ve overlaid a plausible Rockwell Automation workflow over the CX-to-UX interaction levels shown in Figure 1. As you can see, the interactions at the upper relationship level have a cascading effect, all the way down to the interaction level, reinforcing the reality that these customer touchpoints do not happen in isolation.

Therefore, we cannot responsibly design the Customer Experience and User Experience in isolation either. Fortunately, we’ve found some success through building meaningful partnerships between our CX and UX teams that have helped address these complexities. According to Greg Keller, Senior UX Researcher at Rockwell Automation, partnering with our CX team in our Global Customer Experience organization helped us cultivate a net-new product vision in 2024 that tied together capabilities from different parts of the organization.

“Partnering UX-led research with CX-driven insights, we conducted multiple rounds of interviews, facilitated hands-on workshops, and mapped the end-to-end customer journey to uncover significant opportunities for streamlining hardware and software procurement under a single purchase order. Our UX team drove the interview execution, workshop facilitation, and usage and optimization phases of the customer journey, while the CX team shaped the awareness, purchasing, and onboarding stages. Together, we executed a holistic research approach that delivered a vision for seamless purchasing experiences.”—Greg Keller

Connecting Through Shared Methods

How do we achieve productive outcomes through CX and UX collaborations? Several methods can serve as connective tissues between these disciplines. The following are some practical approaches that we’ve used to strengthen those connections:

• journey mapping—Customer Experience brings the big-picture view of customer interactions and strategic painpoints. User Experience contributes detailed design insights about specific touchpoints. Together, they create something neither could accomplish alone: a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey—the proverbial forest and the trees—something that product-specific teams struggle to do despite their best intentions.
• persona creation—While CX and UX teams might develop slightly different personas, aligning on core user archetypes ensures that everyone designs for the same humans.
• voice of the customer (VoC) programs—Structured approaches to gathering and analyzing customer feedback can serve both disciplines, provided that we design data collection with both in mind.
• design-thinking workshops—Collaborative ideation sessions bring together different perspectives to solve experience challenges holistically.

Conclusion

The oft-used parlance “better together,” whether in day-to-day life or the corporate world, rings true when creating customer experiences that must deliver meaningful outcomes. User Experience alone cannot account for the vast sweep of customers’ touchpoints with a company’s products or services. Plus, their touchpoints are becoming increasingly frequent and continuous.

Conversely, Customer Experience alone cannot drive to the depth necessary within a specific product, service, or a system of products or services. This is especially true within a large organization such as Rockwell Automation, which offers numerous software applications, hardware systems, and hybrid solutions that combine both. We need both disciplines to paint a holistic picture. This lets us fortify the connective tissues of a customer’s experience—a journey that can take unknown or unpredictable twists and turns, demanding thoughtful and intentional design solutions that foster resiliency.

Further, the boundaries between Customer Experience and User Experience are growing ever fuzzier when we consider their interplay along this shared journey. “Current experiences easily blur what it means to be a customer and a user,” concludes Ericsson. “Collaboration between UX and CX is a critical driver to deliver seamless, useful, and usable experiences for any human interacting with a company’s myriad touchpoints.”

Next, in Part 2, we’ll cover the collaboration between Customer Experience and User Experience within the context of the triple-diamond method and potential organizational structures, delve more deeply into some tactical approaches that organizations can take to ensure strong collaboration between Customer Experience and User Experience, and consider how to resolve conflicts that could potentially arise between these disciplines. Do you have examples of fruitful engagements between these two disciplines? If so, please share them in the comments!