Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: What’s the Difference

The terms customer service and customer experience differ considerably despite being used interchangeably.

In simple terms, customer service is one aspect of a comprehensive customer experience. Customer experience refers to a client’s journey with any business, from the primary awareness stage to post-purchase maintenance. 

On the other hand, a customer service is usually a single event when a client reaches out for service and help during this journey. Hence we can say that customer service and experience are equally crucial to your company’s success. And a business cannot function adequately without the other, so it’s essential to learn the difference between customer service vs. customer experience.        

What Do We Mean By Customer Service?

Customer service plays a significant part in customer experience. To better understand what customer service is, think about when any person reaches out to the support center of a company or connects with a chat agent to ask about an order concern — a negative conversation with an agent could vary a client’s perception of your business for the worst. 

Thriving companies understand that the key to excellent customer service is fulfilling clients’ requirements wherever and on whatever mediums they like. In addition, whether they reach out via text messaging, email, social media platforms, in-store, or chat, individuals always want a similarly smooth experience.  

Moreover, when speaking of creating this kind of connected experience, customer experience technology like co-browsing, video chat, live chat, and AI-powered chatbots can assist your team in bridging the void between in-person and in-store assistance. Customer service also drives a human factor to the customer experience. Even though chatbots and self-service options can be beneficial, nothing can entirely substitute a cordial, sympathetic support representative. 

What Do We Mean By Customer Experience?

Customer experience is usually the impression made by the complete client journey. It contains all communications, like skimming through products on the business website, reading blog posts, watching promotional videos, interacting with staff in-store, making purchases, attending webinars, and utilizing your goods or service.

That implies that excellent customer service and how your goods or service performs are equally significant and that facilitating operations can affect client viewpoint as much as the way offer your brand on different social media platforms. In addition, brands with a cohesive and uniform experience across all online platforms and sites retain clients better and create dedicated client bases more effortlessly.

Furthermore, customer experience comprises three primary elements:

• Customer Service: This contains Client Success, Client Support, self-service help, and all the touchpoints at which your client interacts with your workforce.
• Design: This is the business and brand touchpoint that comprises design, marketing, and the emotions your brand makes for your client.
• Technology: This includes how the product works and interacts with your clients.  

While these three elements are quite different, there are no rigid lines between them. Furthermore, all the pieces connect and function concurrently to make up the seamless customer experience.

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Understanding the Key Differences 

The fundamental difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience concerns the entire consumer journey, including customer service. On the other hand, customer service remains restricted to client interactions when pursuing guidance or service on goods or services. 

Moreover, understanding the customer experience comprises analyzing data from non-client-facing teams, adding to a client’s overall experience with goods or services. Below are some key differences between customer service vs. customer experience. 

1. Holistic experience vs. thorough communication 

• Customer experience essentially refers to the complete client journey. Furthermore, initial and post-purchase maintenance contains discovery and understanding of a company to ensure better client retention. 

As a result, it concerns multiple touchpoints and indicates numerous units need to be concerned in building a satisfactory customer experience. In addition, not every client journey will look similar, but all will comprise more than one communication with a company, making for a holistic customer experience. 

• Customer service is only one aspect of client experience and is one stage of a client’s journey. Some clients will not need to interact with the client support team, and others may require more than one communication during their entire customer journey. 

The role of the client support team is to help the client by resolving their problem, which enhances their overall client experience. It concerns the work of customer-facing divisions and generally contains just one or two communication points. Hence it might not be wrong to say that customer service is to particular client communication with a business. 

2. Ongoing relationship vs. remote event

The next difference between customer experience and customer service is how they are estimated and related to other events. 

• Customer service refers to a specific occasion, i.e., a client reaching out to your business for assistance and help or registering a complaint. Also, as an occasion, it can be estimated by numerous metrics, such as first-time solution rate and average reply time. In this way, client assistance is a measurable, remote event. 
• Customer experience deals with the client’s association with a company. It cannot be measured or remain specified to one event or communication. In this way, customer experience is a continuous relationship – if clients keep returning to your company (which everyone wants!), their customer experience resumes. 

3. Reactive vs. proactive

Another fundamental difference between customer service and customer experience is who directs the process: is it the client or the company? Is it a proactive or reactive process?

• Customer service is essentially always created by the client. The client encounters an issue, and they reach out to a company’s support assistance via their favored medium, e.g., email, phone, social media, or live chat. In this way, client service is reactive.
• Customer experience is all about predicting the requirements of the client. Through client journey mapping, examining sales and website analytics, and asking for client feedback, companies continually strive to enhance the client knowledge, and guarantee clients don’t run into issues. It could concern guiding clients to initiate a client service communication where required. In this way, customer experience holds a proactive nature. 

4. Backend Management vs. Frontline support

• Customer service usually acts as the frontline of your company. They are a client-communicating team, and they require your full help. In addition, they support and diversify your brand by communicating with others about your products or services to fix client issues. 

There is not much forecasting or research concerned with this method of assistance. Nevertheless, quick review and interaction aptitudes play an essential role. It makes this a more reactive part, as the workforce has to work in answer to the client.

• Customer experience is usually a comprehensive backend functional part. It assists the frontline workers in advancing their approach with predictive thinking, data analysis, and scripts. 

On the other hand, the backend crew operates behind the scenes and deals entirely with the brand- including product enhancement, relationship administration, marketing and promotion, and more. It is a more proactive strategy, as you must pre-determine the client’s expectations based on conduct and browsing habits and design the most suitable engagement for them.

The Bottom Line

To sum up, we can say that customer experience and customer service don’t operate in silos. They are both an essential component of your enterprise’s accomplishment. In addition, the discussion of customer experience vs. customer service is essential. Individuals usually concentrate on customer service, overlooking the customer experience factor. 

Furthermore, solving issues is no longer enough if you wish to retain clients and keep them engaged. Also, we can say that brand building relies profoundly on the customer experience. Understanding the difference will allow you to take a suitable approach and invest accordingly in each of these aspects to get better outcomes.