What Is the Difference Between Product Experience and Customer Experience?
by Averi Easley | Last Updated: Aug 8, 2023
Chances are you have likely interacted with numerous product experiences without even realizing it.
A positive experience you had with a product experience may have even led you to purchase another product from the same brand again or maybe even tell your friends about your experience.
So what exactly is a product experience? Let’s take a closer look.
What Is the Product Experience?
The product experience meaning refers to the customer’s experience with a product. This typically includes both the physical product and any digital experiences related to the product that provide product information. Think about a recent product you purchased. This could be a new fridge and the digital aspect could be the QR code that came within the product packaging and directed you to register your product online.
The overall product experience includes a customer’s entire journey with the product from the initial awareness phase, all the way through the long-term usage of the product. This could be from when you first saw the product at the store, to your continued usage years later.
It is important for a company to consider creating a product experience strategy. A product experience strategy will define all aspects of the interaction points a customer has with a product. A good product experience strategy will analyze the data you currently have and understand what will bring value to your customers at these different interaction points. Once you have developed your initial strategy, be prepared to make changes. This will be an iterative process and what works one time, might not work the next time. As you receive feedback from your customers, you will likely need to make adjustments to your strategy.
What Is an Example of a Product Experience?
There are numerous use cases for the different types of product experiences that a company can create. Some companies may choose to target the long-term usage of their products, while others may focus on the initial awareness stage.
Here are some of the most common product experience examples:
Product Catalogs - By creating product catalogs, your customers can easily see all of the products your company offers and learn more about each one.
QR Codes on Products - QR codes placed on products will allow customers to easily access product manuals, information on related parts, etc.
Trade Show Booth Experiences - By creating a trade show booth experience, your customers can learn more about your company’s product and share the information with other team members not at the trade show.
Product Registration - A digital product registration form can help your customers easily register their products by providing a simple registration process. The information provided can also go into your system of record.
Maintenance Tracking - Provide an option for your customers to track their usage of a product they purchased.
Product Recommendations - Provide an interactive quiz within a product experience that helps provide a product recommendation.
By using a platform like Lumavate, you can quickly create a digital experience for each one of these examples, plus many more!
How Do You Create a Product Experience?
As we discussed above, a product experience is any interaction a customer has with your product. This means that there are a lot of different ways to create a product experience. These range from product packaging, in-aisle messaging, user guides, website content, product functionality, and more.
There are numerous tools that are on the market that can help with creating product experiences. A great example is a PXM platform. PXM stands for product experience management and involves creating visually appealing and accurate product experiences for your customers.
Lumavate is a product experience management (PXM) platform that allows you to store all of your products and their related assets, message your customers and quickly create digital experiences.
What Is the Difference Between Product Experience and Customer Experience?
Before we can really understand what the difference between product experience and customer experience is, let's define each one.
According to Pendo, “product experience (PX) is the customer’s journey within a product. PX is similar to user experience, however, product experience refers to the customer’s overall experience with the product, from beginning to end.” In short, product experience is all about how a customer views a product and its features.
According to Gartner, customer experience is defined “as the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.” Basically, customer experience is all about how a customer views the overall company.
The two are interconnected and overall work together towards driving ROI for your business.
Get Started Creating a Connected Customer and Product Experience
With all of this in mind, a company can optimize its customer experience by offering a great product experience. If your customers have a positive product experience, they are more likely to have an overall positive customer experience as well.
Schedule a demo with one of our product experts to see how easy it is to use Lumavate’s PXM.