Chances are you’ve noticed that the term customer experience (CX) is everywhere in business and many companies are now turning their attention towards providing a CX which offers a key differentiator and competitive advantage. Some experts are even claiming that CX has now become the single most important factor for a business to achieve success.
Yet despite the impact CX is having on modern enterprises, many business owners still don’t understand the underlying difference between good customer experience and good customer service.
In short, customer service (CS) is just one element that makes up the entire CX and can be briefly defined as ‘the delivery of a service to the customer’. Compare this definition with that of CX ‘the sum of all interactions the customer has with a company’ and you can see that CS is just one of these interactions which makes up the overall journey for the consumer.
Good customer service does not necessarily mean a good customer experience, but a good customer experience must incorporate good customer service.
The key point here is that CX encompasses every aspect of a company’s offerings whereas CS acts as a single touch-point for you to resolve and satisfy your consumer’s needs.
One way to understand how CX and CS differentiate is to think in terms of how they operate. CS is reactive in assisting customer to help meet their needs — for example providing call centre support, engaging with issues raised on social media or even the general face-to-face interaction your staff have with customers — they all react to the needs of the consumer.
On the other hand, CX is proactive (or at least should be) in a sense that a business needs to predict what the customer wants before they want it — therefore allowing them to create the platform on which CS is made accessible and delivered to the customer.
Overall, customer service is an embodiment of the customer experience as a whole however both CX and CS both align to achieve the same operational objective; to keep customers coming back again and again. Therefore, it is imperative for these to work together in synergy in order to maximise customer satisfaction.
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