In the race to win customers, satisfaction is the finish line. But how you get there matters. Customer service and customer experience may seem similar, but their impact on your business couldn’t be more different. Let’s explore how both shape your customer relationships.
It is essential to understand the difference between the two to define a complete strategy which is not only up to the mark, but far above customer expectations.
In this article, let’s dive into the differences between customer service and customer experience and why both are important to your business success.
Customer Service: The Reactive Problem Solver
Customer service is the direct interaction between a company and its customers for the purpose of solving problems, answering questions or addressing customer concerns. It’s often a reactive step, and usually over email or phone, or even in person, when a customer hits up for help.
Fundamentally, customer service is about effectively and timely solving problems and making sure a customer has the support and satisfaction he or she needs while using a product or service.
Key Aspects of Customer Service:
- Issue Resolution: Complaints, product defects, returns, and technical problems are all handled by customer service.
- Direct Interaction: Typically, it’s one-on-one communication by phone, email or in store.
- Transactional Nature: Events drive customer service—it happens when a customer needs help.
- Goal-Oriented: The goal is to fix things that the customer doesn’t know the answers to, and to leave them satisfied with the result.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the total of every interaction a customer has with a brand, from its first encounter with the brand to the final purchase and beyond. While customer service may be concentrated on single moments or points, customer experience is the entire experience a customer has with your brand as a whole.
Consider CX to be anything from website navigation and product discovery to customer service interactions, follow up communication and post purchase engagement. It looks into creating positive and memorable experiences that will delight customers at every touch point and it’s proactive.
Key Aspects of Customer Experience:
- End-to-End Interaction: Customer experience includes every interaction a customer has with the organization — on the web, via mobile, through email, and whether in person or in store.
- Emotional Connection: CX strives to deliver a positive emotion that helps in creating the faithfulness of customer.
- Proactive Engagement: They give the attention back to the customer; how will your brand anticipate customer needs, deliver personalized experiences that make them feel valued?
- Holistic Approach: It is cross functional teams such as marketing, sales, support, product development etc. working together to create seamless experience.
Solving a problem is not enough to create a great customer experience, it must also be delightful, in ways that might even inspire a customer to return and promote your brand. If the CX strategy is strong, brands can build long term relationships with customers and increase lifetime value for customers (LTV), and it differentiates a brand in the market.
What is the difference between customer service and customer experience?
Customer Service | Customer Experience |
Reactive—deals with problems when they arise | Proactive—focuses on delighting customers throughout their journey |
Specific to a single interaction or issue | Involves all touchpoints a customer has with a brand |
Typically handled by support teams | Cross-functional, involving marketing, product, and support teams |
Transactional—solving problems and answering questions | Emotional—creating positive, lasting impressions |
Short-term focus—aimed at fixing the problem at hand | Long-term focus—building lasting relationships and loyalty |
How can a BPO company help differentiate between CX and Customer Service?
By analyzing interactions, a BPO company can help differentiate customer service from customer experience. Customer service is about resolving discrete issues, customer experience is the whole journey, the whole emotional connection with the brand. BPOs can therefore pinpoint gaps where they can improve both aspects, to make for a smooth, good customer experience.
Why both are crucial for the success of business
A thriving business definitely needs both customer service and customer experience. Customer service is vital to ensure customers’ immediate needs are met, however, customer experience is the creation of an overall impression about your brand, and therefore customer experience is of notable importance when thinking about whether the customer will come back. Even if they don’t feel emotionally connected to your brand, they will resolve issues, because you’ll have a strong customer service, but your overall experience will be poor.
Yet, good customer service is useless without a positive customer experience — if customers have a good time but have a hard time when problems arise, it’s easy to negate the benefits of a great journey.
Companies who want to create a truly customer-centric business will need to bring both elements together seamlessly. If you make an investment in customer service, then you can address immediate customer needs, but if you consider the customer experience, then customers know that they are valued and engaged throughout the whole journey.
Conclusion
Customer experience and customer service go hand in hand but are not the same. Though customer service at Abacus Outsourcing involves quickly and effectively solving problems that arise, customer experience involves shaping every touchpoint of the experience to be one that leaves a lasting impression and an emotional bond of some sort with your customer.
We optimize both, and help you exceed customer expectations, leading you to a more loyal, satisfied, and growing business. When customer service and experience are tuned in together, your brand can establish long term relationships with customers that will stick with them forever.
Let Abacus Outsourcing help elevate your customer service and experience — contact us today to get started!
