We are often asked "what is the difference between customer service and customer experience?" This is a very good question and one worthy of exploring further. Customer service is the series of rudimentary transactional elements that you can expect when buying a product or service. Things like eye contact, a smile, a warm greeting, and asking if you would like your receipt for your wallet or in the bag are some of the common customer service elements. While necessary to ensure that customers feel welcome, valued, willing to part with their hard-earned money at a business, it is easy to replicate and can seem insincere if it is being done by habit or because it is dictated by the company's employee manual.
Customer experience, on the other hand, is a process that starts with a well-designed strategy that consistently attracts, delights, and retains customers because it is seen from the perspective of the people giving and receiving the service. Customer experience involves key dimensions of touchpoints, pathways, empathy and delivery to create a mutually reinforcing ecosystem. It is this ecosystem that becomes paramount in creating company culture, influencing business decisions, and determining future strategic objectives; all of which are customer-centric. Customer experience requires collaboration, creativity and keen execution to be effective, and when done properly, it creates tremendous value for customers, saves organizations time and money, and significantly improves the bottom line by increasing customer spending and loyalty.
According to the Harvard Business Review, customer experience is defined as the sum of all interactions a customer has with a company. This can include a customer's initial awareness or discovery of a company, a product or service, and the purchase and use of that company’s products or services. Together, these all add up to the critical moments — what the Disney Institute calls "touchpoints" — that create an organization’s overall customer experience. In the most basic sense, customer service is as a procedure, while customer experience is a process.
The next time you purchase a product or a service, either as the buyer or seller, we recommend that you ask yourself "is this customer service, or a customer experience?" If it feels consistent, seamless, meaningful, well-coordinated, and exceeds your expectations, great news, you have had a great customer experience! Customer service is a directive that is quick and easy to implement, however, it is not innovative, nor does it differentiate businesses from each other to provide distinct competitive advantages.
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About the Author
James Grieve is a Certified Management Consultant and partner in Nucleus Strategies, a Kelowna-based consulting firm that specializes in working with businesses in a variety of industries to design great service experiences that delight customers and improve business performance. He can be reached at 778.214.6010, or james@nucleus-strategies.com.
A version of this post was first published here.
