This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague Gregory Yankelovich writes about the difference between customer service and the customer experience. I agree and Gregory does a great job of explaining that difference. – Shep Hyken 
There are too many people who use the customer experience and customer service/support terms interchangeably. Even well respected authors and customer centricity consultants, like Don Peppers, occasionally slip into this ambiguous trap. Here are some basic definitions found on the web with a simple query:
“Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.”
“Customer Service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services.”
Customer service is just one of the attributes that comprise customer experience, but it is most definitely not the same thing. For some businesses it could be the most important ingredient, and for others in could be completely inconsequential one.
Here are some examples to make the distinctions a little more clear:
You can have great customer experience without the participation of the customer service department at all, but sometimes even the best customer support efforts cannot salvage overall customer experience:
o The most attentive waiter can’t improve a poorly cooked dish, but a scrumptious meal can be remarkably experienced in self-served establishment.
o Expertly installed TV cable service does not guarantee quality entertainment.
o Customer Success Managers can only help to retain customers for a short period of time if the software does not perform as expected.
A product plays the leading role in delivering customer experience, not efforts of customer-facing employees. If a product sucks, no heroics of the front line personnel can deliver excellent customer experience. From this perspective it is difficult to understand how product managers, and even more so product marketing managers, manage to avoid the customer experience responsibility spotlight. These are the people who interpret customer needs and wants into a product design. It is a best practice to have them handle customer support lines on a regular basis to learn firsthand how accurate were their interpretations.
Marketing is the group that creates customer expectations, and when these expectations do not meet reality of a product, customer experience suffers. Classical marketing is supposed to “learn” what customers need and translate this learning to product designers and advertising messages that attract the “right” customers to the “right” product. Instead, marketing is too often focused on “pimping” products designed by engineers overseas without any connection to actual consumers. Focus groups and survey are designed to figure out how to sell what they have got, rather than to make what customers want. No wonder the distinction between “market research” and “marketing research” is so blurry. Customer service can be very helpful to facilitate the return of an unwanted product and deliver great product return experience, but it cannot deliver a great customer experience.
Confusing customer service/support with customer experience puts an unfair and unbearable load on the shoulders of an organization that already is the second most stressed group, after sales, in the company. Even though its performance has relatively limited ability to influence delivery of customer experience, it is measured, dissected and optimized completely out of proportion. When you see that happen, it is the first sign that the company is focused on financial engineering – not on their customers.
Gregory Yankelovich has been involved with customer centric product management and marketing for over 25 years. He currently serves as Founder and CEO of Amplified Analytics. Their core competency is the extraction of Customer Experience marketing intelligence from social media, using proprietary opinion mining technology.
For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com
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