Bridging the Gap Between Customer Experience and Customer Service

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When customers face a challenge and need help, customer service or support representatives are their heroes — and organizations have invested a lot of time to make customer support a breeze in a growing number of channels:

• Store representatives are trained to empathize with customers and know how to quickly get them tailored solutions in person.
• Call centers assist customers at any hour of the day, with expert scripts and knowledge bases designed to help them navigate even the trickiest situations with ease.
• Online chatbots can now manage many support interactions without the customer needing to call in if they don’t want to!

I often encounter those who think of customer service and customer experience (CX) as interchangeable ideas. It’s understandable, considering how much the two can overlap.

But customer service and customer experience aren’t the same thing.

Customer experience and customer service fulfill fundamentally different yet complementary needs. It’s important to have both represented in your organizational strategy and aligning the two is a guaranteed way to supercharge your success.

Let’s take a look at what separates customer service and customer experience, as well as their similarities, including proven strategies to drive customer loyalty by intentionally balancing both areas.

The Difference Between Customer Service and Experience: Reactive vs. Proactive

Let’s start with the big question: How are customer service and customer experience different?

Customer service happens when our customers and people need us. It is reactive by nature. Customer service can look like a few things:

• A customer can’t find something they’re seeking in a store, so they look for someone to help them.
• A customer receives the wrong item in their shipment and needs help making it right, so they open the store app to contact support.
• A customer buys new software for their business but is having trouble getting everything up and running, so they email the sales representative they worked with.

In each of these situations, the customer is the one who reaches out for a solution to their problem. When something doesn’t go right or if the customer needs more information, customer service is there to save the day. It’s undoubtedly important to prioritize!

Customer Experience Explained

Customer experience, the way I like to define it, is proactive and intentional. Every customer has an experience at each step of their journey—starting before they are a customer—whether you intentionally craft that experience or not. It’s a long journey built on many, many moments, and some are more important than others.

Customer experience is the concept of learning about an organization’s distinct customer groups and their needs, and comparing those needs and expectations to their journey engaging with the brand.

Customer experience seeks to:

• Remove barriers for the customer and help them move through their journey easier
• Address potential confusion or strong emotions like stress and anxiety
• Empower them to quickly find the best product or service to solve whatever challenge they’re facing

Every business leader should absolutely care about customer service, but they need to care about CX as well.

The Importance of Customer Experience

Many organizations think about customer service before they think about customer experience. It makes sense because failing to help potential or existing customers means they likely won’t stay customers for long (if they even make a purchase).

Prioritizing the customer experience, however, can help organizations in several ways that directly benefit their bottom line and limit the need for customers to seek support:

• Reduce service costs: Customer experience teams can analyze data from customer service interactions and speak with service reps to understand the issues customers most often face. Those are perfect areas for CX leaders to prioritize, which will eliminate potential problems for customers.
• Increase customer loyalty: When customers have a great experience, they are more likely to come back. They may even shop with you more often, upgrade their service level, or even refer you to their friends.
• Gather feedback for continuous improvement: Prioritizing the customer experience means you are listening to customers throughout their journey and looking for ways to make their experience better. This helps focus your efforts where they matter most. With a loyal customer base, you can even test new products or services and gather reliable feedback to refine your strategy before investing in something that won’t perform well.

Making the Case for Customer Experience Beyond Customer Service to Leaders

Prioritizing customer experience as an organizational mindset requires buy-in from the leadership. The best way to gain this buy-in is to prove how a better customer experience can fulfill team goals and directly impact the bottom line.

You can develop a strong business case for CX by gathering a baseline of your current customer retention rates, average customer growth, total number of customer service requests each month, and estimated spend on customer service related activities.

For example, do you know how much it costs for each customer service request? What about sending out workers for repairs or correcting issues with refunds? Those are expenses to consider.

With your baseline in hand, it’s time to explain what you hope to achieve by prioritizing CX. A Customer Experience Strategy Success Statement is especially important for defining what success looks like and what outcomes you hope to achieve.

You can measure your success through metrics and concepts like:

• Increased revenue from retention and referrals
• Cost savings from fewer service issues
• Stronger standing against industry competitors

Start with a clear pain point in your customer experience you know is a sticking point for your leaders. Implement the right solution to clear that hurdle, and measure the difference your efforts made.

A large organization we worked with identified that slow responsiveness rates to customer requests was negatively impacting contract renewal success. By speeding up responsiveness rates, contract renewals were more likely to happen with less negotiation and more timely, requiring less effort for both the clients and those who served them.

Customer stories and their emotional journeys are especially powerful for connecting with leaders on a human level. Your customers are real people who seek your product or service to make their lives better or easier in some way. Use examples and their direct feedback to prove how customer experience efforts have helped them and strengthened their connection to your organization.

Bridging the Gap Between Customer Experience and Customer Service

The best way to align customer service and customer experience teams is to ensure cross-functional alignment at the leadership level. Who are the leaders you can reach out to in your organization to bridge the gap and create the cross-functional leadership you need in order to deliver a positive customer experience?

Host weekly or monthly meetings with CX and customer service leaders to review priorities, challenges, and opportunities to get ahead of customer issues.

There are several proven ways to accelerate your alignment:

• Conduct customer journey mapping exercises to identify high-priority moments and optimize your customer service and CX strategy for each journey. (Don’t forget Micromapping for specific issues!)
• Use AI to analyze customer support transcripts and flag recurring issues or topics, which become your CX focuses.
• Prioritize CX education for all employees, which will empower everyone to recognize their role in enabling a great customer experience and identify opportunities to provide more robust support options.

Driving Lasting Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Organizations can attract and retain more customers than ever — and stay ahead of the competition — by providing a range of support options for customers and consciously building frustration-free experience.

Customer service and customer experience teams need to align efforts and showcase the tangible ways each team is helping the organization achieve its goals and boost revenues.

But let’s be honest.

It can be challenging as customer experience leaders considering many organizations lack in-house resources and expertise that address our unique needs. That’s why Experience Investigators has built a thriving community of CX leaders with plenty of support to empower you further on your journey:

• The Experience Action podcast answers actual questions from CX leaders to help them overcome their real-world challenges. Leave me a voicemail here and I can help you on an upcoming episode.
• I’ve engaged more than 500,000 CX professionals through my LinkedIn Learning CX courses , which explore foundational topics and guide you through your planning.
• We have several CX workbooks and guides to help you lay your foundation and drive ongoing success.

Customers need service. Your organization needs results. Proactive, intentional customer experience strategy needs leaders like you to make these outcomes possible.

This article originally appeared as How to Align Customer Service and Experience to Drive Lasting Business Growth on ExperienceInvestigators.com .