Customer service VS Customer experience | Use both to your advantage

We have talked why customer service is important to your business and ways in which you can implement it into your strategies of eliminating churn risk. Today we will go into two more terms that every successful business needs to know.

So, what is the difference between these two, and which one is right for you? We are here to tell you that both are different, and both are equally important for your business.

What is customer service?

Customer service is your best friend when working on building customer loyalty and creating a long-lasting relationship with your customers. It is defined as every interaction a customer has with your company, every contact with the Customer Care department. Meaning that there needs to be an investment into resources for your team and their special set of skills, knowledge, and soft skills.

It embraces every part of the purchase: the period before, during, and after it. If we hop onto Wikipedia, we can see that perception of the success of such interaction is dependent on employees ‘who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest.’ 

People can mix up customer service and customer experience easily since having a great customer service result in up-to-par customer experience, right? Not quite.

With the expansion of the Internet and different ways of making purchases, customer experience is much more complicated and not so easily tied to only customer service.

How can we define customer experience?

Customer experience is the broader term for entire customer journey through interactions with the company. It consists of several parts that make the entire journey:

• Discovery – How the customer found out about your brand, different people tend to believe different sources for the recommendation.
• Brand touchpoint – After the customer has discovered your product, or a website, the design, and marketing you have will provide a specific brand voice that can either appeal or not to the customer.
• Interest to purchase – The person will look into your website or ad more thoroughly, and if that interaction is positive, it will lead to a possible purchase.
• Customer service – We come to that one difference between customer experience and customer success. Customer service is one part of the entire journey, experience customer has with your business.
• Purchase and use – Once the purchase is complete, the customer will have first-hand experience in trying it out, testing the technology behind it and how it works.
• Promotion – If all the steps leading to the promotion have been positive, the customer will be recommending the product, and possibly become a brand advocate.

It can happen often that a business will focus on only one part of the customer experience, but the truth is – a good and compelling customer service, design, technology and product itself work together to create the best possible experience for your customers.

Conclusion

It can be concluded from above that customer service is just one part of the customer experience.

Customer service comes into play when a customer contacts the company. It can be either from curiosity, possible issues that need to be solved or, unfortunately, the most often reason, when they are unsatisfied.

Customer experience is there to work on all parts of your business so it can lower the need for customers to contact you for any kind of issue.

Getting the grips of the meaning will show you why everyone is talking about these important parts of running a business and how you can use them to your advantage as well.