Customer Experience vs Customer Service

Customer experience management is the blueprint to effectively implementing a customer service action plan.

Experience management is the organization of all of your service actions, touchpoints, and components that will build your exceptional customer experience. Whether it’s a story you want to tell, an emotion you want to create, or an action you want your customer to take, customer experience is the strategy to making sure that your desired customer outcome takes place.

Too often, however, we fail to differentiate between “customer experience” and “customer service”. They are indeed two different things.

Customer service is the raw materials, the building blocks of your service experience.

It’s the “Hello’s”, “My pleasure’s”, and other verbiage, actions, behaviors, and atmosphere that contributes to the overall plan.

Just as a pile of nails, wood, and carpeting doesn’t make a home, in customer service, words, actions, and behaviors have to be organized around a plan in order to work together to create a memorable, exceptional customer experiences.

Successful customer experience design begins with the end in mind.

Establish what you want to achieve. What actions do you want your customers to take after experiencing what you offer? What feeling or emotion do you want to invoke with your customers? Do you have the habits in place that lead to great service experiences?

Then, work backwards and determine the right words, actions, behaviors, and atmosphere that will have the greatest chance to accomplish that desired outcome.

Step backwards again and identify the structure that will be required in order to create a team of experts that can deliver these customer experience actions.

Step backwards again and look at the people you enlist in your mission and ensure that they will fit, commit, and excel in the program.

Aligning these components and understanding their role in helping your implement your unique customer experience is critical to creating the type of experience programs that develop customer loyalty and ensures that your organization consistently delivers an exceptional customer experience.