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

by | Sep 24, 2024

Without customers, your business wouldn’t exist. But their expectations can be tough to meet and surpass, especially with a busy team. It’s not enough just to serve your customers—you need to make sure they’re satisfied with how you serve them, too.

Customer service vs customer experience both create opportunities for businesses to improve, and ultimately grow. But tech stack limitations, overburdened teams, and inefficient processes can make it harder to capitalize on those opportunities.

So what is the difference between customer service vs customer experience, and how do you leverage both? 

Customer service refers to the way your business helps its customers.

First, let’s understand customer service vs customer experience. When your team answers a customer question, helps them find a product, or otherwise assists them with your offerings, that’s customer service.

These are often short interactions which can take place over a variety of channels, including in-person, over the phone, and via SMS, chatbot, email, or helpdesk tickets. 

Many customer service teams track key metrics, like average handle time and first call resolution, to understand the effectiveness of their support. Optimizing these metrics can have multiple results:

  • Lower costs: Deflecting customer service inquiries can reduce call volume, lower cost per call, and your overall labor needs, allowing your business to shift resources where they’re needed.
  • More balanced team workloads: By deflecting FAQs and low-level inquiries with AI, teams can focus on work that needs a human touch, boost engagement and retention, and improve training and upskilling initiatives.
  • More satisfied customers: Personalized assistance, faster response and resolution times, and specialized human assistance all help customers feel understood, listened to, and valued, making them more likely to return.

Improving metrics like average hold time can certainly improve your overall business, but customer service is only one aspect of your customer journey. To unlock new ways of growing your business, it’s important to optimize both customer service vs customer experience. 

Customer experience refers to how your customers feel about the way your business helps them.

Customer experience (CX) describes the feeling your customers get when interacting with your business—and their overall impression of your brand. Beyond your customers’ demographics or needs, CX points to just one thing: how your customers really feel about your business.

While there is some overlap in customer service vs customer experience, CX refers to your customers’ whole journey with your brand, from discovery to support.

  • Is your website easy to navigate, and are your offerings easy to understand? 
  • Is it fast and easy to reach your support team? 
  • Do you offer loyalty or other engagement initiatives?

All these things contribute to customer sentiment, which plays a big role in consumer behavior. After just one negative experience with a brand, 51% of customers will reduce how often they visit that brand or stop visiting it altogether. Plus, expectations are high: consumers reported 39% of brands offered declining CX in 2024, compared to only 17% in 2023. 

So the stakes are high when it comes to CX—it’s both a way to ensure you’re building your customer base, and a way to differentiate from your competitors.

So what next?

Ultimately, the quality of the experience you offer is just as important as the quality of your products. Customer service vs customer experience are not opposites, but represent two ways to understand your most valuable resource: your customers.

But it can be difficult to know where to start when you want to improve both.

Here are some easy ways to start incorporating CX into your customer service strategy:

Want to explore new ways to optimize your customer service vs customer experience? Read our guidebook, The Future of AI for Contact Centers, to start delivering incredible customer experiences that scale.

The Future of AI for Contact Centers

Discover:

  • The different types of AI
  • A framework for applying support automation
  • Tips for choosing solutions
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