Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: A Key Differentiator

In many, but not all, organizations, customer service is treated as part of the customer experience. Although both are interested in driving customer satisfaction, they focus on different parts of the customer journey to achieve this. So what are the key differences between customer service and customer experience? And why are both important to your business?

Customer experience (CX) is a holistic description of a customer’s perception that arises from every interaction with a business or brand, whether online or in-store. Customer experience includes customer experience management (CXM), which refers to the strategies, technologies, and practices for improving business outcomes by providing an ideal experience for everyone who interacts with a company. The overall customer experience focuses on meeting customer expectations and influencing the customer’s overall perception of your products and solutions, no matter where they occur in the customer journey.

Alternatively, customer service refers to the actions taken by an organization to ensure that customers are satisfied with the product after purchase. Customer service, also known as customer support or customer care, is much more customer-facing than many other parts of the customer experience. Delivering great customer service requires making important decisions about pricing, branding, positioning, and use cases.

Customer-centric organizations should aim to achieve excellence in both customer experience and customer service. It is therefore worth exploring more deeply where the two are similar and where they are different.

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Customer service and customer experience throughout the customer journey

The simplest key difference between CX and customer service is that CX is concerned with meeting customer needs throughout the entire customer journey. Customer service centers around post-purchase. Therefore, CS is considered a subset of CX.

CX teams are interested in both short-term tactics and long-term strategies. They are thinking about the holistic picture of the entire customer journey, from awareness to consideration, purchase and post-purchase.

Customer journey mapping involves defining touchpoints throughout the engagement lifecycle with prospects and customers. The customer journey includes many touchpoints across the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. The assumption behind customer journey mapping is that the prospect or customer has a purpose at each touchpoint: solve a problem, answer a question, compare options, or cross an item off their to-do list.

One way to think about the intersection of customer experience and customer service is to plan your marketing funnel. This shows how customer service is activated for specific functions while CX oversees the entire process.

• Consciousness: This begins with the customer learning about the organization and its solutions and potentially exploring competitors’ solutions. They can also sign up for email messages or follow the organization on social media.

• Considerations: Once you understand the value proposition, you can ask questions or conduct further research.

• purchase: Customer service is activated when the customer is ready to purchase. This feature can assist customers with any questions they may have as they complete a purchase and can facilitate purchases when they are unable to purchase online or in-store.

• loyalty: The moments immediately after purchase are critical to building customer loyalty. Customer service features help customers learn how to use the products they purchase. The CS may also be able to answer additional questions or resolve the issue at a later date. Companies often create customer success teams that can be part of the customer service or sales team to provide tutorials and best practices for maximizing product use. Our goal is to help our customers use our products as quickly, simply, and satisfyingly as possible.

• advocacy: Creating loyal customers opens up the possibility that some of these people will tell people in their network about your organization’s products or even potentially praise the value of the customer experience your organization provides. Creating customer advocates helps your customer experience function perform better. This is because new prospects enter your funnel already ‘warmed’ by the positive sentiment of previous customers.

CX and CS tools

Both customer experience and customer service fields rely on valuable tools to maximize value.

Key customer experience tools:

CX teams use tools that help them identify and take strategic actions across the entire customer journey.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools allow organizations to collect, track, and analyze data resulting from customer interactions across channels.

• A/B testing software, you can present a variety of messages to your website visitors to identify which ones resonate most. CX teams, working directly with UX teams, can use software to create variations of messages and track which messages lead to the most purchases or time spent on the site.

• Dynamic Recommendations For other products or accessories based on previous product purchases.

Key customer service tools:

Customer service teams are likely to use the aforementioned tools, but some other teams are much more aligned with the roles and responsibilities of a CS team.

• Web-based knowledge base You’ll find articles, FAQs, and videos that help users solve problems and guide them on how to properly use your product or service.

• all web page Provide a variety of ways for customers to contact your organization and speak with a customer support representative.

• Proactive email or text message Provide instructions and tips on how to use the product to customers who inquire about the product’s performance.

CX and CS metrics are different.

Both customer experience and customer service involve measuring activities to ensure that customer needs are successfully met. In many cases, the focus is on collecting customer feedback and measuring real-time responses. Some common KPIs are related to both disciplines, while others are more closely related than others.

Key customer experience indicators:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the percentage of respondents who answered satisfied (4) or very satisfied (5) in the survey provided after the touchpoint experience.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures the likelihood that an individual will recommend a company or product to others. People are asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend this product to someone else. Subtract the scores of 6 and lower from the numbers 9 and 10 to create a percentage. It can occur at any part of the customer journey, so it is best considered a customer experience metric.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): After touching, ask the customer how easy or difficult it was to achieve the goal and rate the difficulty from 1 (easy) to 5 to 7 (difficult).

• customer retention rate: Maintaining high customer retention rates demonstrates successful customer experience capabilities and increases customer lifetime value, thus improving revenue. Increasing customer loyalty and limiting churn means that your customers are either satisfied with your product or solution or haven’t yet found a good replacement.

Key customer service indicators:

• First Response Time (FRT): The time it takes your customer support team to respond to a customer issue or request. Being able to respond promptly to customer issues through social media, email, chat rooms, phone calls, etc. is a sign that an organization has good customer service.

• Average Resolution Time (ART): Includes the time it takes from the start of a customer service interaction until the issue is resolved.

• problem solving rate: This relates to how many customer service issues are successfully addressed and resolved. You can’t expect your customer service team to solve every problem, but failing to solve almost every problem is a sign of trouble.

CS and CX together help organizations care about their customers.

Today’s consumers are more discerning and have more choices than ever before. To keep your customers happy and stay competitive, you need to personalize every touchpoint across your entire customer experience (CX). True personalization at scale includes every aspect of your business, from marketing and messaging to supply chain, sales, and service.

At IBM, our customer experience strategy is at the center of our business. Our deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, and data and AI consulting allows us to leverage best-in-class technologies to drive innovation across the customer experience.

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