What’s the Difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience?
A deep dive into the Customer Journey and Lifecycle
2 min read
To better understand the difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience, let’s first take a look at the Customer Lifecycle:
As illustrated above, Customer Service is just one piece of the puzzle, assisting your customer in times of need, usually when an issue arises.
CX on the other hand - Short for Customer Experience - takes a more holistic, all encompassing approach to the various touch points alongside your customer’s journey, specifically what your customer thinks and feels about your brand.
So why the recent shift in focus from Customer Service to Customer Experience?
Until recently, most organizations only measured their customer’s satisfaction by conducting a survey - usually via phone, email, or chat - after an interaction with an employee, such as a contact center agent or an in-store sales associate.
The limitation of that method is that you’re only capturing feedback from customers who interacted with you, and you’re only gaining their insights based on that one transaction.
But how do customers feel about your brand when they’re not talking to you?
Are they confident in finding the information they need on your website?
Do they trust the technician you dispatched to their house for a repair job?
Is the bill that you sent them accurate and easy to understand?
Getting to the bottom of what your customers think and how they feel throughout the entire journey is what CX is attempting to capture.
To summarize: Customer Service is reactive, fixing what needs to be fixed, whereas CX means being proactive, identifying & eliminating pain points for your customers, therefore preventing negative experiences altogether.
In a way, Customer Service is a one-time transaction; one that CX is trying to avoid.
To find out more, please watch this short video on the topic I published on my YouTube channel:
