What’s more essential for organizational success, customer service or customer experience?
Customer service or customer experience…. It’s all the same thing right? Unfortunately, that’s what many companies think. However, there’s a very important distinction between the two…
In this blog we explore the differences between customer service and customer experience to effectively drive customer acceleration and growth for your company.
The Differences Between Customer Service and Customer Experience
Customer service and customer experience are terms that often get used interchangeably, however they have very different meanings.
Customer service is the support provided to customers before, during and after they make a purchase typically helping solve a problem. Customer experience is the sum of all experiences, interactions, or touchpoints a customer has with a company.
A great customer experience is focused on ensuring all interactions and touchpoints with your business is easy, enjoyable, and seamless.
Although customer service and customer experience are different concepts, they work hand in hand when it comes to building brand loyalty. Customer service is just one part of the entire customer journey, while customer experience encompasses all the interactions between your company and a customer.
Let’s talk a bit more about the significance of their differences….
Customer Service
Customer service is primarily the responsibility of a customer support team and is considered reactive support meaning they wait until a customer contacts them and then they respond. Other team members may speak with customers, but the support team is typically accountable for delivering the help customers need at that time and ensuring their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
This siloed approach, however, can prevent organizations from delivering a seamless customer experience because it’s managed by one segment of the organization and may not effectively incorporate other important departments such as sales, delivery or billing for example.
Customer Experience
Customer experience is a shared responsibility across the organization and is proactive in nature by putting the customer at the center of its’ organization. Customer experience is spread across many touchpoints and is always ongoing.
Everyone in the business—from the marketing team to the sales team to the product team—is in charge of giving customers the best experience across all touchpoints.
Remember, your company has complete control over the service it provides to customers. Fragmented or disjointed customer experiences can be a major downfall for any organization. Knowing these differences, you can align your customer service with your customer experience efforts and deliver seamless experiences across the customer journey to build and nurture long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Benefits of a Customer Experience Strategy
Revenue growth is the ultimate goal for most organizations. There’s no business initiative that directly influences this more than the customer experience strategy.
Having a well-conceived customer experience management structure can have a significant impact on any business. The better experience your customers have, the more likely they are to give positive reviews, refer you to their colleagues, buy more from you while simultaneously reducing customer issues and barriers and improving operations.
Businesses without a customer experience strategy are typically playing catch up to fix problems, rather than steering the process from the start. In the absence of a well-defined customer experience strategy, businesses tend to take a hap-hazard approach, which can lead to mixed or unfortunate results.
So what is a customer experience strategy?
It’s a plan for how to improve customer experience across all touchpoints. It’s how a company defines its customer experience goals, putting in place a long-term, data-driven plan that empowers employees to meet or exceed customer expectations. It begins from initial awareness of your company through purchase and beyond.
However, a customer experience strategy can’t be developed without the input from the customer. Understanding the customer, their needs, expectations, pain points and their experiences working with your business will ultimately form the structure for the strategy development. Once the strategy is implemented, gathering customer feedback on a routine basis will ensure that your customers’ needs and expectations are being met and ideally, exceeded.
Developing a customer experience strategy is an essential step to transforming the ways your business provides services to its customers. Companies who do successfully implement a customer experience strategy achieve higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and increased revenues.
Steps to Create a Customer Experience Strategy
How customers feel after an interaction with a company has an impact on their future purchasing decisions. Customer priorities and demands are constantly changing. In the coming years, customers will gain even more power. Customers won’t choose a company simply based on product or price. Their choices will be based on their entire experience.
A customer who has a positive experience with a business is more likely to become a repeat and loyal customer. Therefore, a customers’ experience becomes a critical part of overall customer relationship management. Great customer experience then is focused on ensuring all interactions and touchpoints with your business are easy, enjoyable, and seamless.
The customer experience strategy defines the actionable plans in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience across those interactions.
How do you create an effective customer experience strategy?
- Define your Customer Experience Vision
Your customer experience strategy flows from your business and brand strategy and incorporates the brand’s personality and values. It defines not just what a company will deliver to customers, but also when, where, how, and why.
- Evaluate your Current State
Understand how your customers currently interact with your company and identify what’s working and what’s not. Make sure to include team members from all departments. This will ensure buy-in and alignment around the goal of improving the overall customer experience and strengthening relationships.
- Determine your Customers’ Expectations
Gather customer feedback to help you identify what your customers’ expectations are but also how you are performing against those expectations. Once you know where you need to improve, share that information with your team and train your staff accordingly.
- Create a New Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map outlines all of the interactions between a customer and your business. Utilize customer feedback and work with your team to create a new journey map. Brainstorm ideas to reduce friction and improve business processes and interactions to deliver a customer experience that exceeds customer expectations.
- Develop Metrics for monitoring progress
Establish clearly defined metrics to measure performance and a framework within the company to manage the problem areas and opportunities for improvement.
This strategy development should keep the focus on the customer and what their experience should be. It also aligns everyone into a collective approach to service delivery.
Consider these Customer Acceleration tips that will help you make more money from your customers and make them happier in the process!
And if you’d like some help with it, please reach out at (216-876-1165) I’m happy to help you get started.
