Customer experience and customer service are two of the hottest buzzwords in business these days. But not every business has fully understood the definition of customer service and customer experience. Both of these teams work with the aim to achieve customer satisfaction, gain customer retention and generate more sales. But, their work is totally different from others.
Understanding these two will allow you to improve customer experience and service to serve customers better. In this article, we will have a closer look at their definition and point out their differences. We also give you the 5 best strategies to provide your customer with a great experience and services. Let’s dive in immediately
Table of Contents
What is customer service?
Customer service is the act of taking care of the customer’s needs before, during, and after a purchase of a product or a service. By providing and delivering professional, helpful, high-quality service and assistance, customer service helps win customer satisfaction and gain their loyalty.
The customer service team mostly works directly with the customers. They can meet customers in the physical stores, or use third-party apps to call customers such as video calls. Either way, they need to work face-to-face with the customers to solve their problems.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience refers to how customers feel and their impressions are created through the entire customer journey. It included all their interactions with every touch-point such as viewing products on websites, reading blogs, attending webinars, making a purchase, and using products and services.
Brands that perform a cohesive and consistent customer experience across all channels have higher customer retention rates and can win their loyalty easily.
Differences between customer service and customer experience with example
In fact, customer service is the more narrowed scope of the two. Let’s take a closer look to make out the differences between them.
Customer journey vs. a set of customer interactions
- Customer experience: including all interactions on every touchpoint, customer experience sets the stage from the customer’s first interaction with the brand to post-purchase care.
- Customer service: is one step of a customer’s journey. The customer service team works with the aim to solve any questions or issues that customers meet on their journey. They often work face-to-face and directly with customers.
Proactive vs. Reactive
- Customer experience: This team works with data from previous interactions and touchpoints which can be analyzed to improve the service, and ensure customers don’t run into problems. Overall, customer experience is all about forecasting the needs of the customer on their journey.
- Customer service: When customers face problems with products or services, they reach out to the customer service team. That’s when this team comes in handy and reacts to customer interactions.
Interaction vs. ownership
- Customer experience: shared responsibilities across the organization, from marketing and sales to product teams. These teams don’t usually work directly with customers, but they make a huge impact on the customer’s journey.
- Customer service: is responsible for managing customer relationships. They often have customer support managers and agents to work with customers. Other teams may speak to customers, but customer services control the relationship.
5 strategies to improve customer experience and customer service.
Personalize customer experience
Personalization is very abroad. For instance, when customers receive an email or SMS to congrats them on their birthdays with a coupon. You have a personalized customer experience in their purchasing phase.
This process has many forms and it can occur everywhere on the customer journey, there are a few examples to show you how to make the process work:
- Congrat customers on their special events
- Use customer loyalty programs
- Send an Email or SMS after they purchase your products
- A face-to-face meeting to solve customer questions and issues about the products or services.
If you can apply personalization throughout a customer’s journey, there will be a higher chance of boosting customer retention rate, reducing customer churn, and gaining more revenue from returning customers.
Be on every channel
If you can not be there when your customer needs you, they are more likely to migrate to your competitors. Being on every channel to support your customer whenever they need is the most crucial key to retaining your customers. To do so, first, all your messages need to be on the same platform so that your agents can check them easily. With NestDesk, you can centralize all customer’s messages from different channels into one dashboard. No more missing chats!
Gather customer feedback
Customer feedback is key to knowing whether you are doing good or need improvement. To gather feedback, you can use surveys to directly ask your customers after they use products or services. Remember to make an avenue for feedback and segment it into product feedback and service feedback. By doing so, you can fully understand the customer’s desire or their willingness about the products or services.
Be patient and have a nice word
An agent working with customers has to deal with different types of cases. Some of them might be very annoying or confused or have a lot of questions. But, once the problems are solved, you will achieve customer satisfaction and win customer loyalty
To do so, your customer service agent needs to understand customer insight and what problems they are facing fully. Patience and professionality are very crucial. Moreover, they need to develop good communication skills with customers and with their team.
NestDesk’s features can help you with that. With NestDesk, your agent can access customer information very easily because it is shown next to the box chat. Internal notes can also help you to improve internal operation, your agents can leave notes to other agents to inform teammates about customer information or problems.
Measure and improve
Improving customer satisfaction is not a one-time task, you always need to measure the effectiveness and analyze it to make services and customer experience better. By continuing to do these activities, you can prevent your team from leading customers to a poor experience.
To measure both teams, you can use metrics such as:
- Customer experience: To measure the effectiveness of this team, you can use Customer churn rate (CCR), customer retention rate (CRR), customer effort score (CES), and customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Customer service: To measure the satisfaction and the quality of your service, you can use the Net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
Provide customers with great services and enjoyable experiences
It is clear now that customer service and customer experience are different from each other, but they still work together to provide great services to make customers satisfied. Delivering great services along with experience is a hard mission – but with NestDesk, things will get easier. NestDesk has so many great features to improve both teams. With NestDesk, your agents are able to assist customers whenever they need, them across all channels.
