Customer Service versus Customer Experience

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another live edition of Talking Points. I'm Jason S. Bradshaw, and today I kick off a new series in the Daily Workday videos where I'm going to explore, I'm going to explore with you the most asked questions on the Internet about customer service, customer experience, employee experience, product experience, experience management in general, and how that fuels business growth. And we'll tackle topics like marketing as well, because obviously marketing has a impact on the customer's experience and dare I say it, the employees experience as well. Each day I'll focus on just one question, and the questions that I'm going to be using are coming from a service that I subscribe called Answer the Public, which provides data on how many people are searching every month for particular terms from across the globe. I'm going to be using the US Search and Australian search as my starting point and we'll look to do between five and 10 questions for each category, all designed to help get clarity, help you get clarity around the terms and to help you move forward and achieve your goals in your business. So this question that we're going to tackle today is actually one that as a customer experience and growth practitioner, I get asked quite a lot, from businesses of all sizes, from seasoned executives to new ones. And it comes down to this. What is the difference between customer service and customer experience? And aren't they just the same thing? Well, let's get into it. They're not the same thing. First and foremost, customer service and customer experience are not the same thing. Customer service does add to the customer experience and in many instances might even be the glue that keeps the customer committed to buying from you. But customer service is not customer experience. Customer service is part of the overall customer experience. So with that being said, what is customer service? Well, there's a number of definitions around this and I was actually looking at a, looking after my site here because I was looking at a course that I did back in 19, in the late 1990s, around customer service accreditation. And their definition of customer service actually encapsulates a lot of things that are part of the customer's experience. And then I was looking at other, other resources as well. And of course, my own work and what I've, I've led people in the past around. And for me, customer service is the transaction of serving a customer or a potential customer through their purchase and ownership journey. The key here is it's the transactions. So customer makes an inquiry. That's a sales service inquiry. Customer purchases the item, the interaction at the checkout, if You're a physical store or an online store. That is the customer service transaction happening again. The post sales support that they get, that too can be a customer service customer doesn't ring up the customer experience department necessarily. They ring up unless you worked where I have. And I always end up calling the contacts in our customer experience in some way or the other. But I digress. They ring the customer service department, they want service, they want a transaction to help them through a problem. Now a lot of what I just said sounds like customer experience, right? But the key here is it's the transaction, it's the individual transaction without necessarily any cause or relation to any other part of the journey. And quite often each of those transactions are actually performed by by different parts of the organization. So it's not like the customer service department is necessarily everything to everyone. Sales inquiry probably goes to our sales team to service that transaction, that sales inquiry. A post purchase inquiry goes to a customer care team or a warranty team potentially from to service the transaction of dealing with that issue. Customer service is the transaction, the support, if you will, that you offer customers and potential customers both before and after they buy your products. So what is customer experience? Customer experience is the intentional focus on every touch point that a customer has with your business to ensure that it delivers a memorable positive experience that makes them want to buy, buy again, and to tell their friends and family to buy from you. It is the intentional focus on making things easy, for example, for the customer to achieve success. It's the intentional focus on how the website is designed from a customer led point of view as opposed to a business led point of view. You know, if a website was built from a internal business point of view, there'd be probably some tabs up the top, finance, sales service, warranty, the, you know, each of the divisions or the silos within the business. But of course we don't do that from a customer centric point of view, a customer experience point of view. We build the website to mimic the customer's journey, the most likely customer journey, to make it easy for them to achieve what they want to do. And then we connect that with how we operate as a business at each touch point with the customer. So the customer service that we deliver is, is designed around the customer experience we want to consistently achieve. So in a non customer centric business, in a business that's not focused on customer experience, you'd have the sales team servicing those sales inquiries and they would get the sale no matter what. And then you'd have the service team trying to fix whatever promise was made that couldn't actually be delivered in a customer experience focused sales team, the marketing team, the service team, the warranty team, all of the teams are coming from the same point of view that when we acquire a customer, we want that customer's experience to be one that is positive, that makes us distinct from our competitors and ultimately makes the customer not only want to buy once, but to buy from us again and tell their friends and family. So the marketing team and the sales team don't make promises that the business can't deliver on. And the customer service, the warranty teams, they understand that when something goes wrong, their number one job is to get it right, make it right for the customers as quickly as possible so that the transactional experience doesn't overpower, overshadow the overall experience, the memory of the company, of the brand, of the product. Simple way. Customer service is a transaction of support. Customer experience is about creating memories that build lifetime owners and advocates. I'm Jason S. Bretra and I hope that this has helped you understand the difference between customer service and customer experience. We're going to be tackling another question that's often asked of professionals, CX professionals and on the web and I look forward to seeing you on that video, but until next time, I wish you great success.