Back to Basics: The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

To attract, retain and convert customers, you need to offer both a great customer experience and customer service. Each one is essential to reaching sales targets, keeping your customers satisfied and ultimately gaining a competitive advantage. While these two terms are often used interchangeably, they have some significant and important differences. Let’s take a closer look.

Customer Service

Customer service describes the specific interactions your customers have with your company. Effective customer service ensures your customers get the most out of your services by focusing on problem-solving.

Customer service is more than just a conversation to help solve your customer’s issues; it’s an integral part of the overall customer experience. To keep your customers satisfied, it’s important to make it easy for your customers to contact your company for support. You can do this through email, text messages, video calls, live chat bots or social media – or better yet, all of the above. Regardless of the platform, there are some guidelines to keep in mind to provide your customers with great service.

Guidelines to follow:

• Create a delivery outline. Use a map to summarize the customer service process and understand how service is delivered. It’s important that your team knows where things could go wrong and how to pivot to alternative solutions in case of failure.
• Follow up. It’s imperative to ensure that your customers’ issues are resolved thoroughly, which should include follow-up touchpoints. This is an excellent way to prove to your customers that your company actually cares whether their issue was resolved.
• Personalize your communication. When you implement customer service tactics through various platforms, don’t forget to add in personalized elements. You can do this by using customer data to provide customized greetings and recommendations.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is your customer’s overall journey with your company from start to finish. From visiting your website, downloading your app, listening to your podcast or going through the process of purchasing your product, every interaction a customer has with your company shapes their experience.

Customer experience may seem like a very broad and complex topic, but it all comes down to building a positive relationship with your customers. Your customers will form their own perceptions—positive or negative – from various touchpoints during the customer journey.  By implementing a cohesive customer experience across all platforms, you are much more likely to retain customers and achieve customer loyalty over time. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind for delivering a stellar customer experience:

Guidelines to follow:

• Implement consistent design elements. You will be able to keep user experience as a top priority during each step of the customer’s journey by using consistent branding on all your platforms such as social media, website, and email.
• Keep an eye on your metrics. It’s crucial to regularly measure your customer’s satisfaction levels, conversion rate, average response time and other appropriate metrics. You can then utilize this data to continue to improve your customer experience strategy.
• Give your team the tools they need to succeed. Creating an outstanding customer experience is a team effort. To get the best results, you need to encourage your team’s development through continued training and coaching.

Happy Marketing!