Business-Centric User Experience Vs. Customer-Centric User Experience

Updated on :February 17, 2025
By :Hailey Stewart

In this competitive business world, "business-centric user experience" (UX) and "customer-centric user experience" (UX) are the most important brand differentiators for any business, regardless of its type and size.

Indeed, following customer-centric user experience (UX) principles that lead to offering delightful customer experiences has become the core mantra for organizations. It can actually lead to competitive success by providing feasible solutions to valuable customers. But, at the same time, business-centric user experience (UX) strategies help businesses to launch innovative products & services and become trendsetters within their industry.

The key to unlocking success is to understand what matters today in this digital world. This is the reason many businesses consider hiring top web design companies who understand customer-centricity and value business propositions at the same time. 

This article walks you through complete information on business-centric UX and customer-centric UX and an in-depth comparison between both these terms, ultimately helping you to select and implement the right UX strategies for your business.

What is User Experience (UX)?

A well-designed and effective user experience (UX) can help a company offer customers a pleasant experience while purchasing or dealing with them. A user experience (UX) strategy is a detailed plan that can help improve the quality of user experience (UX) and align it across sites, products, and services, helping achieve predetermined goals. A UX strategy is primarily about the strategic business planning process to create excellent experiences across various customer touch points.

Basic UX components in terms of website or mobile app include -

User Experience Components

As per a recent survey, 90% of users stop using an app due to its poor performance. Thus, delivering a better user experience is extremely important, which can be done with the help of a strong UX strategy that aligns with business-centric and customer-centric UX approaches. Let's have detailed information about these terms and the difference between them.

What is Business-Centric User Experience?

Business-centric user experience revolves around adding value to the products and services that help meet business goals and objectives. Here, businesses follow the approach of making products and services that align with sustainable business objectives, are cost-effective, and can be churned quickly. All the business processes and strategies are planned around the products & services delivered to work accordingly for the advancements. With a basic understanding of the business and its value proposition, you can craft an experience that can lead to the success of your business. 

Steve Jobs said, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." 

So, what are the measures to follow for business-centric UX strategies?

To implement the right business-centric UX measures, you need answers to questions like-

Business Centricity

Now, let's have a look at how businesses create excellent business-centric UX and gain from this approach.

How do Businesses Create Excellent Business-Centric User Experiences? 
 

Streamlining the Workflow

To create a business-centric UX; it is vital to streamline the workflow. It ensures that the process runs smoothly at the right time. It also removes the unnecessary steps that hamper productivity and diverts from achieving the business objectives. When you take out time to streamline the workflow, the chances of errors occurring reduce, thereby creating an excellent business-centric user experience. 

Automating the Tasks 

If you want to produce an exceptional business-centric user experience, then automating the tasks is the key. Having the right set of tools for automating the tasks can reap major benefits in terms of saving time and money and thus curating the business-centric user experience. Automating the tasks will tap into the smart work mode and improve overall efficiency in decision-making, which can help you in achieving your business goals seamlessly.

Delivering Better Products and Services

A business-centric approach to UX helps build high-quality products and services by aligning user requirements with business objectives. This approach results in building products and services that go with brand power.

Let us have a look at the pros and cons of following a business-centric UX approach-

Pros and Cons of Business-Centric User Experience

Business Centric UX Pros and Cons

When Should You Use Business-Centric Approach in Your UX Design?

Business-centric approach is the designing approach in which the business goals and objectives drive the design. Following a business-centric UX approach can be beneficial only if you are sure that your digital product is highly demanded by your users. For example, the ads on Youtube can be irritating for the viewers, but they still don't stop watching videos on that platform. This is because viewers find the information on Youtube valuable enough to ignore the inconvenience caused by the ads. At the same time, Youtube is a free-to-use application and needs to monetize through ads to survive.

Similarly, the below-mentioned scenarios need to be considered while following a business-centric UX approach to meet your goals.

  • You are selling best-in-class products or services in your niche.
  • You have gained a reputation as the most customer-friendly organization in your industry.
  • Customers are addicted to your product or service and are already engaged and loyal to your brand. 

Only under these circumstances, you can follow a business-centric UX approach to gain success.

Examples of Business Centric UX Approach
 

Apple

Apple has been well-known for following a business-centric UX approach. Since the 1980s, this company has been launching innovative products in the market over and over again. This company first introduces robust, attractive products that work and then generates demand for those products among the users, unlike many of their competitors. 

Dyson

Dyson is known for following a scientific and engineering research approach while designing its various products like vacuums, fans, and other products based on air movement. They have always focused on the quality and performance of the products and thus have been successful in carving out a niche for the customers looking for premium products without worrying about the cost.

Sonos

When Sonos launched its wireless streaming audio systems, most customers were not aware of the benefits of playing any song in any room of the house. They realized the value of these audio products after the hassle of dealing with complicated wires and components of their traditional home theater systems. Sonos created a demand for smart speakers that didn't exist before, and very soon, the sales figure for their products accelerated.

Now, looking into the other side of the coin, let's have in-depth information about customer-centric user experience to understand which UX approach would work best for your business.

What is Customer-Centric User Experience?

A customer-centric UX approach requires putting your customers' priorities at the core of the business. Being customer-centric means understanding consumer requirements and challenges and eventually building a solution to sell them. Organizations that follow a customer-centric approach develop and deliver products that align with their present and future customer needs.

Apart from delivering brilliant services, customer-centric UX also transforms from customer journey to building customer loyalty. When businesses turn every customer into a profitable asset, it increases the valuation of the company. Further, it also influences the investors to invest in your firm. 

Today, the customer-centric user experience is crucial for companies. It will enable maximizing revenue and generating profit. It also means offering more than just good service and support. 

Customer-centric UX strategies follow an approach that allows for creating experiences that are -

User Centricity

Considering the above approach at an initial stage helps deliver excellent user experiences, eventually improving customer retention and generating higher business revenue.

Now, let's look at the steps to follow to create customer-centric user experiences.

How to Create a Successful Customer-Centric Strategy for your Business? 

Hiring Talent for Customer Success

Employees help in bridging the gap between user demands and business objectives. Organizations should hire the right set of people or design companies that understand customers well and strive to deliver them excellent experiences with your brand. 

Prioritizing Customer Relationships

Maintaining good relationships with customers can benefit your business to a great extent. Having good relations with your customers can help you gain brand popularity resulting in increased sales. Use the right methods and technology to nurture your present customers, as they can be your brand advocates. 

Centralizing Customer Data

Centralizing customer data ensures minimum mistakes while dealing with the customers. Following up with irrelevant issues with the customers can lead to bad user experiences. Thus, centralizing customer data becomes important to ensure that your employees are approaching the right customers at the right time. 

Conducting In-Depth Research

Researching what your customers require and prefer is important to design customer-centric solutions. You can find out what your customers' needs are through surveys and feedback forms and design your customer-centric UX strategies accordingly.

Let us have a look at the pros and cons of following a customer-centric UX approach.

Pros and Cons of Customer-Centric UX Approach

Customer Centric UX Pros and Cons

When Should You Use Customer-Centric Approach in Your UX Design?

Following a customer-centric approach requires availing of user-friendly web design services. Besides that, it is also about examining how people use your product and making it more effective for your target users. Consider having a customer-centric approach in your UX design when -

  • You have strong consumer insights and the capability of attracting relevant customers immediately. 
  • You are open to customer feedback and can incorporate it into the products for a better user experience. 
  • You have a high investment budget allowing you to handle the customers' changing preferences. 

Let's have a look at some successful examples of customer-centric UX approaches. 

Examples of Customer-Centric Approach
 

Nike

Nike's mobile app offers personalized recommendations through its chat facility and communicates with its customers about new store openings, events, and discount offers. These personalized recommendations delight customers to a great extent, and thus Nike has been successful in benefitting from this customer-centric approach.

Starbucks

Starbucks has implemented an innovative Deep Brew AI system that allows streamlining operations enabling employees to better serve customers through their drive-through, delivery offerings, and rewards program.

McDonald's

McDonald's is growing its brand by adopting robust digital products that offer customers quick and personalized services, including innovative mobile applications for online orders and kiosks for in-store deliveries. During the pandemic, McDonald's hired around 2,60,000 employees to serve their customers in a better way.

After gaining complete information about business-centric and customer-centric user experiences, let's look at the key differences between them.

Key Differences between Business-Centric User Experience and Customer-Centric User Experience 
 

Business Goal

Business Centric UX - The organization's final goal is to deliver the best products and services to the customers and generate more revenue. Business-centric companies invest in the best resources, including technology and skilled resources, that help them enhance the quality of their products and services.

Customer Centric UX - Customer-centric companies aim to deliver products and services considering the quality and price their customers prefer. Delighting customers and gaining their loyalty is the main objective here.

Innovation

Business-Centric UX - Business-centric companies curate their growth strategies based on elevating products to another stage based on their R&D and technology awareness. It's a continuous process of evolving the product and services with better features and innovation.

Customer Centric UX - Customer-centric companies collect customer insights, and based on the real data, they build and innovate their products and services. Identifying the customers' necessities drives innovation in their products and services. 

Methodology

Business Centric UX - The companies following a business-centric UX approach rely on the product for self-promotion. These types of companies are usually early leaders with a risk-taking attitude.

Customer-Centric UX - The companies following a customer-centric UX approach depend on customer preferences and needs. These types of companies make decisions keeping their customers in mind. They never create or deliver products and services that don't improve customer experience.

Let's look at the difference between business-centric UX and customer-centric UX approaches at a glance.

Difference Between Business Centric UX and Customer Centric UX

After looking into the comparison, the question remains: Which approach - business-centric UX or customer-centric UX- suits your business goals, structure, and environment?

To deliver the best user experiences, aligning customer-centric user experiences with business objectives is essential, as both these methodologies have their own merits. Let's look at how to balance business-centric UX and customer-centric UX to achieve business goals.

How to Balance Business-Centric UX with Customer-Centric UX?

Aligning customer user experience (UX) with business goals is challenging. If you get too engrossed in customer-centric UX, you might lose focus on your business objectives. On the contrary, if you focus too much on your business goals and profitability, you might displease your clients. 

As a business, it is obvious that you want your customers to be thrilled with the experience while interacting with you through your website or mobile app, but at the same time, you need to ensure that business profitability is not being compromised. Prioritizing your customer needs is a good strategy. But, businesses cannot afford to overlook the financial rewards, too, because of which they are surviving. Below-mentioned tactics can help in aligning your customer-centric UX with business goals.

Be clear about your goals and objectives 

Most of the time, the product fails for two reasons. Firstly there's no strong process behind the service. Second, there's a lack of communication among the team. It's good to let your team understand the business goals and objectives before availing web development services or mobile app development services.

Understand the Customers 

We cannot stop emphasizing the importance of understanding the customers—customer behavior shifts with emerging technologies, increasing awareness due to social media and new entrants in the market. By availing services of big data and analytics companies, you can understand the customers and their changing relationship with the product and align it with your business goals.

Basically, you need to get answers to the below-mentioned questions to design the right UX strategy for your business: 

Business Centric UX or Customer Centric UX

Business-Centric UX or Customer-Centric UX: Which Is the Winner?

Customer-centric companies keep customers as the center point in every strategy they form and every innovation they make. Customers' preferences are considered when making every decision and action. Changing customers' needs brings a significant level of new pressure to the companies, creating a more substantial need to make a difference in the market. Starbucks is one company that keeps innovating to accommodate the demands of its customers. The company is known for being customer-centric.

Business-centric companies expand their productivity, transactional, and operational efficiency to create less cost, agile processes, and high productivity that can yield high customer flow. The process is to re-engineer to adapt to the upcoming technologies. Several businesses that were never online created their presence online during the Covid-19 Pandemic. These companies stand as the best examples of business-centric companies.

So, should you be customer-centric or business-centric? The answer is to follow a 70/30 rule. Here, 70% is to be customer-centric, and the remaining 30% is to be business-centric. Both are required for business growth.

Before finding or settling on any approach, it is essential to understand what your business offerings are. If you are planning to build a unique service that has not been in the marketplace yet, then going for a business-centric user experience might be beneficial. 

Whereas, if you are into delivering highly competitive products and services, going for the customer-centric user experience can be beneficial.

If you opt for customer centricity doesn't mean that you ignore product success. It still lies at the core of your business. The difference here is that the company's vast experience will be towards customer-centric strategies. Similarly, following a business-centric approach doesn't mean that you totally ignore customer experiences. 

Whichever approach you follow, creating excellent user experiences will always remain a priority for businesses that need to sustain and gain success in this cut-throat competitive environment. So, make sure to choose the best UX design company that is an expert at aligning customer preferences with your business objectives.

Also, if you are looking for region-specific web design services, you can select from the list of 500+ best web design companies in Canada or web design companies in Australia and make the right outsourcing decisions.

Hailey Stewart
Hailey Stewart

Hailey Stewart is a computer science graduate working as a content writer with GoodFirms - an excellent platform providing IT Companies and software reviews. She has 4+ years of experience in content writing, social media, and marketing. Hailey loves to write about cutting-edge technologies and the latest trends in the digital space. To connect or learn more about the information, get in touch with her at - [email protected]

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