CUSTOMER SERVICE VS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience and Customer service have become two extensively used words in the world of business these days. But most of the people think that customer experience and customer service are the same things. Well, they are wrong as there are basic differences between these terms. Thus, let us dive deeper into the topic to clear the confusions for you.

What is customer experience actually? How is it different from the customer service? Why is the customer experience so important for any organisation? These are some basic questions that cross your mind when you come across these terms.

Let us start with the customer service first. Customer Service is often department oriented rather than a core imperative value of an organisation. Customer Service deals with a smaller version of the entire picture, where we can see an employee providing a service to a customer. What happens next when the service is rendered? The interactions get finished and no further interactions happen again until any service is required by the customer.

Customer Experience takes us beyond these service interactions. It builds a bridge between the company and the customers. The Harvard Review defined the Customer experience as the addition of all the interactions that take place in between the customers and the company. It encompasses everything from customer care provided by the company to its reputation, products or services, management, reliability and anything that is beyond.

Why is customer experience of greater importance to the companies?

Organisations these days try different methods to outsmart their competitors. That is why companies must take a holistic approach towards the customer experience to assess how their decisions and offerings will impact the customers thereby benefiting from it.

The field of customer experience is much greater than that of the customer service. It is about fomenting the employee management, truly understanding the customer base, planning for delivering extraordinary customer service and then empowering the employees to provide it. Thus, it can be said that customer service is a small part of the customer experience.

Actually, this theory is all about training the business leaders to bolster right behaviours among the employees which can support the extraordinary customer experience.