The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience
Introduction
People often conflate customer service with customer experience management, despite the substantive differences between them. In this article, I’ll try to lay out the most important distinctions to clear up the confusion.
Customer service management focuses on frontline employees — ensuring they deliver a minimum level of service and present it in a specific way. All of this constitutes a single touchpoint within a long customer journey full of other touchpoints across multiple service channels, all of which are managed by customer experience.
Customer service relies heavily on the rational (functional) side of the relationship between the customer and the service or product provider — in other words, how we serve the customer. It meets needs and resolves problems and complaints. Customer experience, by contrast, attends to both the rational and emotional sides — focusing on what the customer feels and perceives at every touchpoint with the service or product provider. In other words, how the customer feels when receiving the service or product from me. For this reason, it’s wrong to say that a company offering excellent customer service necessarily offers an excellent customer experience.
Angle of view: Customer service represents the organization with an inside-out perspective, anchored in the company’s policies and procedures. Customer experience represents the customer with an outside-in perspective — it puts itself in the customer’s shoes and designs and decides accordingly.
Senses: Customer service trains employees on appearance and tone of voice (the customer’s sight and hearing). Customer experience attends to all five senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell — plus what some call the sixth sense: emotion.
Culture: Customer experience doesn’t succeed unless the culture of every individual in the organization is customer-centric. With customer service, it’s enough for the frontline culture to be customer-centric for the function to succeed — though the latter rarely materializes in the absence of the former.
Role: Customer service is reactive; its turn only comes after an incident occurs. Customer experience is both proactive — anticipating problems and addressing them before they happen — and reactive, after incidents occur.
Relationship between the two: Customer service is part of customer experience. When we talk about experience, we’re talking about something larger and more comprehensive. Experience involves analyzing and studying stages of the journey the customer passes through in which customer service has no role — the company website, for example. So customer service is often tied to employees, while customer experience encompasses employees as well as non-human touchpoints like the website, the mobile app, and any device or machine the customer interacts with to complete their service.
In many organizations, customer service teams are drowning in firefighting complaints and don’t have the time or tools to investigate root causes. That latter role is played by customer experience, because of its knowledge of the inner workings of services and its understanding of the relevant stakeholders and each person’s role in the process.
Influence: Customer experience influences most departments in the organization because it plays the role of the customer’s defense attorney. This means intervening in company policies and procedures, reviewing and analyzing the impact of incentive and bonus structures to ensure they don’t negatively affect employee behavior toward customers, working with Legal to remove or add contract clauses that make the customer-company relationship fairer, working with HR on employee experience (which deeply affects customer experience), helping define the selection and recruitment process for frontline employees, proposing activities to raise employee engagement, and working with Training to spread a customer-centric culture. There’s also a critical role with Transformation/Strategy in shaping service strategy and customer centricity, and with Marketing to ensure marketing only promises what can be delivered. By comparison, customer service’s intersection with other departments is limited.
Hierarchy: Customer experience doesn’t succeed unless it sits under the most influential and powerful umbrella in the organization, regardless of the title of those leaders. This isn’t true for customer service.
In Closing
If you wanted to summarize the difference in one sentence: customer service aims to help the customer and fulfill their requests so they’re satisfied with the service, while customer experience aims to fulfill the customer’s needs while creating positive emotions that make the customer happy with the experience — not just satisfied, but transformed into an ambassador who tells everyone around them about an experience that exceeded their expectations.
I hope I’ve succeeded in clarifying the substantive differences between these two fields and that you found this article useful. What’s described above about the importance of customer experience does not diminish the important role of customer service in any way — since it’s part of the experience, ignoring it will ultimately hurt the overall customer experience.
I invite specialists in customer experience and customer service to weigh in for the benefit of everyone.
For related concepts, see Customer Journey Mapping, Customer-Centric Operating Model, and CX Maturity Model.
← Articles MOC