The difference between customer experience and customer service: CX Mini Masterclass – E15

This CX Mini Masterclass clarifies the difference between customer experience and customer service. Confusion around the distinction of these two concepts has long been a bugbear of CX professionals. This is compounded by the fact that the word “service” is vague and open to personal interpretation, so CX expert and show host Julia Ahlfeldt provides a clear definition. Clarifying the difference between customer experience and customer service In the previous CX Mini Masterclass episode, we defined customer experience as all the ways that a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, store environment, communications, service interactions and many other elements of experience. Customer service is an important component of customer experience, though it is just one piece of a large and multifaceted jigsaw puzzle. Defining customer service Customer service has always been a difficult thing to define. If you were to ask 5 people for their definition of service, you’d probably get 5 different answers, but there are some common themes. Customer service usually refers to company/customer interactions within a couple of broad categories: The human element of customer experience – we often speak about service in terms of the interactions that we have with people representing the brand. This includes perceptions of their attitude, friendliness and helpfulness. And that last one brings us to the next category… Customer support interactions – customer service often refers to actions that an organization takes to assist a customer during their journey. This can include things like expert recommendations or issues resolution. It is distinct from the first category, because it isn’t necessarily provided by a person. Support can be provided by a chatbot or through a self-service channel. Ways to keep learning about CX If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to the longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Transcript Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript. Click to expand full transcript [Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in to the second episode in my CX mini masterclass series. These weekly episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity. So whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you happen to be busy carving a Thanksgiving turkey or mashing some potatoes while you listen to this, and you hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. To my listeners in the US, Happy Thanksgiving! Tomorrow is Black Friday, which marks the beginning of the US holiday shopping season, a time when we all hit the malls and pick up goodies for our friends and family and interact with the brands that we know and love and have some extra customer service interactions with store representatives. So, it’s an apt time to be looking at the difference between customer experience and customer service. Any customer experience professional can relate to that cringeworthy feeling when someone asks you, “So, you work in customer service, right?” It’s even more disheartening when a colleague asks this. These questions leave many of us thinking, “Is my job totally misunderstood?” It can be difficult to come up with a response to others in the moment, but those of us working in this profession have a responsibility to help provide clarity. And so in this episode, we’re going to dive into the age-old question: What is the difference between customer experience and customer service? In the previous customer experience mini masterclass episode, we defined customer experience as all the ways in which a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, communication, a web interface, and so on. These factors come together to create customer experience. So the short answer to today’s big question is that customer service is one of these elements within customer experience. So we can think of customer service as one piece of the customer experience puzzle. But, it’s a really important piece, so it’s worth unpacking this concept of customer service so that we can really understand the difference. So, if you were to ask five people for their definition of customer service, you would most likely get back five distinct answers. And indeed, many customer experience professionals battle with the use of this term within their organizations. Why? Because it’s super vague, open to personal interpretation, and it’s something that people already think they understand. It isn’t hard to imagine why this might spell trouble. But I’ll get to how we can address that can of worms in just a little bit. Okay, so, back to your poll of friends and family now, and colleagues. If you were going to ask them for their definition of service, you’d hear things like employee knowledge, politeness, respect, ability to quickly resolve issues, going above and beyond the call of duty to assist a customer, things like that. And while these kinds of answers might seem really broad and varied, they’re actually some common themes that we can use to create a clear definition of customer service. The first of these themes is the human aspect of customer experience. Customer service often refers to the person-to-person interactions that get layered on top of other aspects of customer experience, like how an employee greets a customer when they walk into a store, or a team member’s demeanor when they’re advising a customer. That’s the first theme. The second theme is customer support activities, or actions that a company takes to assist a customer during their journey. This can include things like a contact center agent sorting out a customer account issue or a store employee going above and beyond to help a customer find the right product. But it can also include non-human support interactions like chatbots or the ability to quickly self-resolve issues through automated channels. And that’s why it’s important to distinguish between these two concepts, which both fall under the umbrella of customer service. Using these two main themes, we can define customer service as both support interactions and the broader human element of customer experience. And again, going back to our big question for today, customer service, within this definition, is still a component of overall customer experience. So, why go through all the trouble of defining customer service? Why not just let people define it however they like? Well, for one, it’s very difficult to help teams work towards a goal if everyone has a slightly different understanding of the objective. Customer experience teams may intrinsically understand the difference between customer experience and customer service, but if cross-functional department leaders or executive decision-makers don’t understand how customer experience function differs from a customer service function, then customer experience leaders will struggle to foster buy-in and drive change. Unlike other customer experience terminology, such as customer journey, Net Promoter Score, or even the term customer experience itself, which are all still relatively new to the business lexicon, the term customer service is not only ingrained, but it’s also a source of confusion because of the various personal interpretations. My suggestion to you as a champion for customer-centric change is to use the definition we’ve covered today and think about one or two actions that you can take straight away to help create clarity around these concepts within your organization. And please let me know what you did. I’d love to feature this on future episodes of Decoding the Customer so that we can share ideas and learn from each other. I hope that you enjoyed this CX mini masterclass. I’ll be back next Thursday with another mini masterclass episode on the concept of customer touchpoints, one of the most widely misunderstood and misused topics in the field of customer experience. I often say that the quickest way to spot someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about with CX is to listen to how they use the word touchpoint. It’s a dead giveaway. I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to be one of those people, so join me next week. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are also listed on my website. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next week. [Outro music] Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email.