These days it seems like you're hearing buzzwords and acronyms for pretty much anything. It's hard to keep track of them all so if you've wondering what does DX actually mean, then we got your answer.
Some of these acronyms may already be familiar to you but apparently there are many people that they are still looking for answers on these popular acronyms. Here's a brief summary of each.
DX - Digital Experience
Also known as Digital Transformation, is the practice of converting various aspects of a business to new ways of working via digital means. For example, a company that users a lot of paper for invoicing and statements may decide to go paperless and begin using electronic invoices. There would be an investment in new technology to support this change but also a large saving in costs incurred for paper, printing and postage. DX also applies to IoT (Internet of Things), where it may make sense to connect lots of things (trucks, packaging, products, manufacturing lines, etc) so that data can be accessed at numerous points across a supply chain for the purpose of providing transparency, increasing accuracy of lead times and stock levels, and improving efficiency. In a third example, DX would be relevant for a brick-and-mortar business that wants to introduce online sales (via a website, an app, Facebook, eBay, or similar). Lastly, DX may also imply modernisation of computer systems to newer, potentially cloud based, systems. DX is often referred to merely as Digital.
UX - User Experience
User Experience is the practice of designing products and systems that provide the most ergonomic, most natural, most rewarding experience for the users of those systems. Using Facebook as an example, a UX designer would consider where the settings option is located for a logged-in user, or where high-frequency features (such as notifications) are placed so that they are both easy to see and easy to access (with the fewest clicks or scrolls, for example). UX designers also need to consider different forms of interaction such as via a browser, a mobile site or an app, with the intention of creating a standard but comfortable experience for the user across all channels of system interaction. In enterprise systems, hiding and removing fields or tabs from screens as part of a configuration process, so that only the essential information gets displayed for particular users, also forms part of UX. For a tangible product example, iPhone designers apply UX design principles to consider which features and gestures would make the newer devices and newer versions of IOS more rewarding for the user. The same applies to the UX design of furniture, kitchen appliances, bathroom fittings, bicycles, vehicles, etc.
CX - Customer Experience
Customer Experience is the practice of defining and refining a series of journeys that lead your customer through numerous engagements with your brand. Some of these involve access to systems (such as buying something via a website or talking to a customer service chat bot), in which case there is an overlap with Digital or UX, but many of them don't. Advertising, brand appeal, social media sentiment, influences that drive repeat purchases, email campaigns, walk-in returns and complaints, and debt collection are all examples of touch points that affect the overall customer's experience but do not need the customer to access a system you have built. For this reason, CX practitioners bridge various departmental silos (and systems) within a company, using insights gathered from transaction and interaction histories, with a view to improve the lead times to fulfill customer requests and increase the frequency and value of their purchases in the process. CX metrics to measure brand performance usually include CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score - how willing they are to promote the brand), ATV (Average Transaction Value) and CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), as well as the trends these metrics follow over time.
EX - Employee Experience
Employee Experience is the practice of focusing on an 'internal customer' - the employee - and their overall 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. Companies that suffer high employee churn will understand the emotional and financial investment incurred in sourcing and hiring an employee, only to lose them within six months. Having to start the entire process over again causes huge delays to productivity of the affected team, especially if there are inefficient systems or processes in place. This is why EX is becoming a new wave of innovation within companies to improve organisational culture, to become more relevant to the individual within the company, to provide convenient ways of working, and to provide systems that make information and actions that are important to the employee more context based, more readily available and more easily accessible.
JX - Job Experience
Also known as Job Transformation, is a career evolution approach that will become more dominant in the next decade. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) into more mainstream deployments, job augmentation will become more common. Augmentation implies that employees would use AI to help them work - better and smarter. For example, instead of manually searching a water pipe for defects, a maintenance technician could use computer vision to easily identify defects with a particular level of accuracy and reduce the time it takes to complete a repair job. The ripple effect is that they spend more time on the higher value-add tasks than on the mundane, time-wasting tasks, making them more productive over the course of the day or week. While AI solutions would negate specific jobs (the mundane ones, especially) they would also create new jobs. In the water pipe maintenance example, new jobs could include the trainers needed to teach technicians how to use AI to augment their roles, an expanded workforce to cater for higher demand due to customer growth or repair type diversification, managers to cater for a larger workforce, and analysts to interpret the defect data provide by AI solutions to identify where potential issues will occur (in an attempt to move from reactive to predictive maintenance scenarios).
Next time you read that DX or JX acronym, you'll know what it really means. Hope this short intro helps sort things out.