Customer Service Vs Customer Experience

What Does Each Mean to Businesses in Kenya?

Customer service and customer experience are terms that are closely related and are often used interchangeably because most people do not know that there is a difference between these two important terms.

Both customer service (CS) and customer experience (CX) are essential components of any business as they substantially impact on the ability of a business to satisfy and retain customers.

So What Is The Difference Between These Two Terms?

Customer Service is the act or process of advising and assisting customers with their concerns or requests before, during or after making a purchase from your business. It is meeting the needs of your customers.

In order to ensure your business is offering great customer service, your customer service team needs to possess the appropriate skills such as product knowledge, positive attitude, patience and confidence so that they can offer solutions and assistance to the needs of the customers. Customer service embraces the human component in the customer’s journey.

The quality of customer service received will essentially affect the customer’s perspective of your business as a whole. The idea here is to ensure that you do not only meet the customer’s needs but exceed them by making the customer feel cared for and valued.

Features of Great Customer Service?

• ?Resolving most of the issues that come up on the first attempt without the need to escalate or due to unnecessary delays.
• Adding empathy in all interactions with customers. The customer care representatives need to be aware, understand and respect the customer’s emotions in cases where the customer has raised an issue.
• Expressing gratitude to your customers for their patronage and when they offer feedback
• Paying attention to their needs and assist in meeting them
• If you have access to their information, addressing them by their names
• Listening to the customer’s feedback and acting on the same
• Meeting the customers where they are or whichever channel they want to use to communicate to you i.e. email, social media, text, live chats or in-store

Customer Experience is the overall feeling that a customer has after the various interactions with a business at different stages of a customer’s journey. It is the lasting impression your brand leaves across the entire customer’s journey, from getting to know your brand all the way to purchasing.?

Customer experience is spread across multiple touchpoints that a customer goes through in the entirety of their interaction with your business. It involves all the ways your business engages with the customer along with the interactions outside the conventional, direct customer facing service.

These touchpoints or engagements include,

• Marketing material - when buyers are on the discovery journey through the website, interacting with staff in-store or over the phone, reading blog posts; even before they become a buyer
• Sales experience - when the customers finally makes the purchase of your product or service
• After purchase experience
• The product - were the instructions provided, the ease of use as well as the feature. Same applies for a service, how well it was provided to the customer.

The most common aspects of a positive customer experience are;?

• Going over and above which in turn translates to exceeding the customer’ expectations
• Offering personalized service to your customers.
• Providing recommendations and offers that cater to their needs makes the customers feel special and helps the business cultivate long term relationships with the customers.
• Collecting feedback regularly in order to monitor the quality of your product or service and as a business you get to learn what is working and what needs improving.

Ultimately, all the touchpoints in a customer’s journey are fundamental aspects of an overall customer experience. Customer experience does not solely depend on the direct engagement that a customer has with a business but rather, how they feel during the entire buyer’s journey.

The Differences Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

1. Limited Interaction Vs the Entire Journey:

It is evident that customer care is part of customer experience with the distinguishing factor being the number of engagements between the customer and your business.?

Customer service includes one or a few touchpoints which is a very impactful part of the overall customer experience. Some customers may require one or no interaction on their journey while others may require a few more engagements.

Customer experience will compromise numerous interactions or various touchpoints that form part of the customer journey. Multiple departments may be involved in creating a great experience whether or not the customer contacts support.?

?2. Reactive vs. Proactive:

Customer service is reactive in nature in that it is directly dependent on the customer actively reaching out to a business for assistance or guidance. The business reacts to the customer’s issue in the effort to try and resolve or answer a customer’s query.

The customer service team only gets assistance with a customer’s issue once they are submitted to the support desk via either phone, email, social media, live chat or other channels.

Customer experience on the other hand requires business to become intuitive, learning from the usual issues that keep coming up to get an improved understanding of the needs and expectations of a customer.?

Data collected from previous interactions and touchpoints can be analyzed and the information can be used to anticipate the needs of the customer such as what they like, what they don’t like and what makes them keep buying from your business.

The process of trying to understand the customer’s personality, mapping out the customer journey , analyzing traffic on social media, websites etc. can be used to make improvements to a product or service before a customer ever encounters any issues.?

?3. Interaction and Responsibility:

The responsibility of customer service fully lies on the customer service department which includes the customer service representatives, the managers and leaders. In an organization, other departments may interact with customers but ultimately, the responsibility to assist customers with their issues, lies wholly on the customer service team.

Customer experience on the other hand, is the shared obligation of the entire business. This includes the sales and marketing teams, product and service team.?

For example, the marketing team is tasked to ensure that the correct information or offers reach the customer while the production team is tasked to ensure that they develop products or services that meet customers’ needs.

These other teams do not necessarily interact with customers on a day to day basis but their job also impacts the customer’s perception and ultimately, their loyalty to a brand.

4. Success Metrics & Performance Indicator:

Surveys are a great way to learn and evaluate how your brand or business is performing in the market. From the feedback received, you get to learn if you are meeting the customer’s needs as well as the opportunities for improvement.

The quality of customer service and customer experience is measured using different metrics.

Most common metrics used to measure the quality of customer service is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) which will gauge the degree of satisfaction with your business.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a good indicator to gauge the likelihood of a customer to recommend your business or brand to others.

For customer experience, the common metrics used include customer effort score (CES), customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention rate and customer churn rate which are more broad and capture data on how people experience your brand.

In retrospect:

Both customer service and customer experience are vital for the success of any business. Customer service and customer experience are intertwined such that you cannot have one without the other; both are not whole without each other.?

To create a successful business in Kenya, as a business owner you need to leverage both customer service and customer experience in order to improve customer satisfaction. Both of these concepts work hand in hand in building customer loyalty.

Research from Customer Experience Trend Report shows that Seventy-five percent of customers are willing to overlook price if the organizations offer great customer experience.?

When issues come up, as they always do, customers are willing to stay loyal to companies that offer great customer experience when dealing with issues.

For your business to set itself apart from the many businesses in Kenya offering similar products or services, there is then a need to look at the big picture and invest in creating great customer experiences for your customers.?

Customer experience should be at the core of everything that your business does. The whole team needs to ensure they are creating a memorable customer experience for the customer should it be at the point of purchase or when they lodge a complaint.

As a business owner or manager, there is a need to create a business strategy that is encompassing both of these concepts to ensure that your business is delivering high quality customer service and in so doing, create a remarkable customer experience that is satisfactory to the customer.

Article Author

Jackie Wahome, a Customer Experience Trainer in Kenya with over 15 years of experience in Customer Experience across different industries in Kenya.

I help businesses make more and retain more customers through unrivalled Customer Experience.

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