customer service vs customer experience essay

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: What's the Difference?

Published: June 10, 2022

Customer service and customer experience are critical aspects of your business as they significantly impact your ability to satisfy and retain customers.

The two terms are not interchangeable, though, as each means something entirely different to your business. Read on to learn the difference between the two and how your business practices relate to each concept.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer experience is the experience customers have with your brand and the lasting impression you leave across the entire buyer’s journey, from discovering your brand to post-purchase. Customer service is helping customers solve problems, showing them how to use products, and answering questions.

What’s the difference between customer service and customer experience?

The main difference between customer experience and service is that experience is delighting customers at every touchpoint with your brand, and customer service is one single touchpoint. Customer experience doesn’t require interaction with a representative, but customer service usually does.

Experience is also proactive, while service is reactive. With the former, you aim to delight your customers without them having to reach out to you. The other usually begins when a customer initiates a conversation when they need help.

The two concepts are also measured by different metrics. Customer service metrics show how quickly you help customers resolve their issues, and experience metrics assess sentiment. So, for example, a customer experience team would measure Net Promoter Score , and service teams would look at Average Response Time .

Although different, customer service is part of the customer experience umbrella. The way you help customers when issues arise contributes to their level of satisfaction, and the faster you can help bring customers a resolution, the faster you can help them succeed and have a positive experience.

Customer Service and Customer Experience Examples

Let’s discuss the difference between customer experience and customer service with the example scenario of a customer visiting a storefront. Say a customer walks in, makes a return with a representative, and continues with their day — this is a singular customer experience. That single interaction, though, makes up a small portion of their entire experience with your business that day.

For example, the directions they found on your Google My Business page helped them get there, the setup of your storefront made it easy for them to find your customer service desk, and your customer service rep helped them seamlessly make a return and process a refund.

Everything they did that day related to your business made up their entire experience, and customer service was one of those touchpoints.

Here are some additional examples of customer service and customer experience:

Customer experience and customer service are different, but both are important.

Many aspects of customer service contribute to the overall customer experience, and it’s essential to be aware of this. Instead of focusing on one practice over the other, create an all-encompassing strategy that ensures you provide satisfactory customer service and, in the process, create an experience that leaves customers satisfied.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

How to Maximize Your Success with a Customer Experience Platform

How to Measure Customer Experience: 8 Metrics 1000+ Service Reps Prioritize [+Data]

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy's Chocolate Experience]

7 Ways to Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2024

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

• Business Management

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Key differences

February 15, 2022 •

9 min reading

Terms such as “customer service” and “customer experience” are commonly misinterpreted and interchangeably used. Similar as they may sound, both vastly differ in meaning. Knowing the difference between these two seemingly equal terms will empower you to improve how to serve your current and future customers. Exceeding your guest expectations and creating memorable moments will result in lifelong positive impacts!

"Customer service (CS)" is a key component of the entire customer journey, while "customer experience (CX)" comprises all the interactions between your brand and a customer. To understand the nuances between both, we need to dive deeper into each. 

What is Customer Service (CS)?

A good way to define customer service would be as “the act of taking care of the customer's needs by providing and delivering professional, helpful, high quality service and assistance before, during, and after a purchase of a product or a service. (...) It is meeting the needs and desires of any customer".

Customer service embraces the "human element" within the buyer journey. This, in turn, allows such clients to evaluate your company’s overall value. Simply stated, the quality of service support that a customer gets will fundamentally affect his perception of your brand as a whole.

But how do you provide a seamless service that will exceed your client’s expectations? The answer: make them feel valued as individuals.

Six ways to make your customers feel special:

• Express your appreciation
• Call them by their first name
• Pay attention to them
• Listen to their feedback
• Always be presentable as a business

The customer service goal is to go above and beyond isolating the causes of frustration in the customer’s experience over the duration of the relationship. For that, guest services leaders across all functions should aim to indoctrinate a customer-first culture within their employees.

A customer-centric culture can be viewed as a CX-minded team sport that requires the involvement of everyone within the organization (from the CEO to the managers—and even the housekeeping crew). It will allow workers to improve their customer service skills by:

• Demonstrating empathy in the rise of an issue
• Understanding the root cause of any customer complaint
• Personalizing solutions to the case-in-matter
• Being empowered to use their judgement to best deliver quick, first-class solutions

But a common fault many companies commit is on how they approach this customer-driven strategy, impelled by the end-goal of profits increase (a sales-driven culture). Instead, the guiding foundation here should be meeting customers' needs (and every employee’s goal to deliver a superb customer experience).

In contrast, poor customer service is when your business fails to meet a customer's expectations. This could translate into how long it takes for you to answer a phone call, misaligned information, being transferred from one agent to another, or any overall negative interaction with your brand.

SERVICE EXCELLENCE TOOLKIT With this 7-step process, you will have all the tools you need to master your company Customer Experience.

What is customer experience (cx).

Dave Dyson, a community marketing specialist at Zendesk defines customer experience as “ how a client feels about the sum of their interactions with a business (...). “ It involves every way a customer interacts with a company, at all stages of the buyer journey”. 

An example of great Customer Experience

In short, the customer experience is directly related to the combination of all the touchpoints a given client undergoes throughout the entirety of their engagement with your brand . This includes:

• The marketing material (perceived before they ever become a buyer)
• The sales experience
• Post-service treatment
• Product (features, reliability, ease-of-usage)
• Service as a whole

Put simply, from the moment a person first visits your website (or store) to their first conversation with a customer service agent, and even how they feel post-purchase. All these are touchpoints which, combined, are intrinsic aspects of an overall customer experience. This ultimately means that the CX is not exclusively the direct interaction that a customer has with a brand, but rather also how these customers feel throughout the buyer journey.

Brands that portray a cohesive and consistent experience across all departments build a stronger loyal customer base. Some examples of touchpoints where customers meet your brand:

• Social media
• Online advertisement
• Browse products on your website
• Interaction with staff
• Reading blog posts (digital marketing content)
• Attending events/webinars
• Making a purchase (billing actions)
• Using your product
• Thank you letters
• Feedback surveys
• Peer referral
• Upsell/Cross-sell emails
• Customer support channels
• Customer onboarding
• Customer loyalty programs

An example of poor Customer Experience

An American grandmother was recently kicked out of a hotel in the middle of her stay with her six-year-old granddaughter. The reason behind such a move was that the 63-year-old had left the hotel with a 3 out of 5-star online review midway through their stay.

What was initially believed to be a prank from the hotel’s part, resulted in a hellish experience, with the pair being escorted from their room by the police in the middle of the night. But regardless of approving the hotel’s choice or not, you don't need to be a hospitality expert to grasp how the two guests felt.

Think about it. Have you ever experienced such a fantastic service after making a purchase that you couldn’t resist but talk about it to your friends? Do you recall how that experience made you feel? Was it valued? Appreciated? Listened to?

Perhaps, all of the above?

Alternatively, remember how you felt after receiving an abysmal service? We bet the aftertaste of the latter experience was rather diverse. Maybe you’ve warned your friends and family about your negative impression, possibly even going to the extent of leaving your opinion online so that others could be equally alerted. 

Independently of your personal experiences, according to a study done by Harvard Business Review stated that 76% of executives not only see the value behind improving CX, but also go further to state that it is a high or critical priority.

The study further claims that leaders being on board set the tone and mindset for the entire organization. In other words: if leaders want to improve the customer experience, other employees will emulate it.

The impact of poor Customer Experience

So yes, offering a superb customer experience is one of the great ways to increase sales, create loyal customers, and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates. But failing to do so can result in dire consequences for your business. 

Source: hotjar

By faulting in delivering an outstanding customer experience, your brand could undergo a: 

• Loss of customers
• Damaged brand reputation
• Loss of repeat business
• Reduced customer lifetime value
• Negative customer reviews

Differences between Customer Service and Customer Experience

Now, let's look in detail at the four main differences between customer service vs. customer experience.

Limited interaction vs. an entire journey

It's clear now that customer service is part of the entire customer experience, with the key difference to distinguish each being the number of interactions between the client and the brand. Customer service comprises one (or very few) touchpoints, while various interactions build up the foundations of the customer experience .  

Reactive vs. proactive

Providing customer service will be directly dependent on a client actively reaching out for assistance via their preferred channel (email, phone, social media, live chat, etc). Alternatively, with customer experience, it’s all about anticipating the needs of a given client. Don’t wait for the customer to raise an issue to resolve their problem or meet their requirements.

To provide customers with a great CX, companies need to become intuitive, learn from previous or common issues, and should get a better understanding of the customer’s needs and expectations. For that, figures from previous interactions can be analyzed to provide improvements before customers ever encounter any issues. This will allow such companies to behave preemptively, rather than wait for problems to arise.

Interaction and ownership

Regardless if your customer interaction is face-to-face or online, the customer service teams are the people directly responsible for helping customers with whatever issues they’re facing. 

The customer experience , on the other hand, is often shared across the entire organization, from marketing and sales, to people and product teams . These teams typically don’t interact directly with customers, but their work obliquely impacts customers’ perception and loyalty nonetheless.

How to measure Customer Service vs. Customer Experience

Below are a few ways of analyzing how to measure your service quality and overall customer satisfaction:

Net Promoter Score ( NPS )

NPS is the standard indicator used by companies worldwide. It is used to measure a customer's propensity to recommend a certain brand. The NPS score is also easily comparable to that of your direct competitors and the market leaders. Because NPS follows the journey from start to finish, it’s more adapted to measure the customer experience, being ideal to reflect the customer’s global feelings towards the brand at hand. 

Customer Satisfaction Score ( CSAT )

Customer service vs. customer experience: which matters more.

By now it’s clear that, such as with cheese and wine pairing, CS and CX aren’t whole without the other. Both make up an essential part of your business’ success.

So, as a guest experience leader, if your business is in it for the long run, it’s time to look at the big picture and assess how to create a better customer experience. CX is so much more than just a trend. It should be the beating heart of everything your company does. By promoting and consistently delivering customer care throughout the entire buyer journey, you’ll be able to delight your customers.

Download our Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Key differences Infographic

Keep reading

What hospitals can learn from the hospitality industry – The operational perspective

Aug 21, 2024

Personal branding strategies: 5 tips to make you career grow faster

Aug 16, 2024

What hospitals can learn from the hospitality industry – The strategic perspective

Aug 15, 2024

SERVICE EXCELLENCE: A 7-step process to master your company Customer Experience.

1. Customer Behavior 2. Customer Culture 3. Service Design Roadmap 4. Customer-Focus Governance 5. Customer Service Goals 6. Employees Service Excellence Training 7. Service Performance & Continuously Improve

This is a title

This is a text

• Bachelor Degree in Hospitality
• Pre-University Courses
• Master’s Degrees & MBA Programs
• Executive Education
• Online Courses
• Swiss Professional Diplomas
• Culinary Certificates & Courses
• Fees & Scholarships
• Bachelor in Hospitality Admissions
• EHL Campus Lausanne
• EHL Campus (Singapore)
• EHL Campus Passugg
• Host an Event at EHL
• Contact our program advisors
• Join our Open Days
• Meet EHL Representatives Worldwide
• Chat with our students
• Why Study Hospitality?
• Careers in Hospitality
• Awards & Rankings
• EHL Network of Excellence
• EHL Hospitality Business School
• Route de Berne 301 1000   Lausanne 25 Switzerland
• Accreditations & Memberships
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Terms

© 2024 EHL Holding SA, Switzerland. All rights reserved.

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Explained

Is customer service part of the customer experience ? Or is customer experience what happens when someone receives customer service? Are they the same thing?

The terms “customer service” and “customer experience” are often confused or used interchangeably. They’re not the same thing, but they are related.

The difference between customer service and customer experience is that while customer service is one piece of the puzzle — focused on human interaction and directly supporting customers — customer experience is the sum of the entire customer journey with your business.

Let’s take a look at customer service vs. customer experience in more detail.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills , including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

Customer Service : This includes Customer Support, Customer Success , and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.

Technology : This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.

Design : This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service Vs. Customer Experience

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

Like what you see? Share with a friend.

Sarah blackstock.

Sarah is a freelance writer specializing in technology and customer support and a former Happiness Engineer at Automattic. Connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn .

We've got more to share

The Supportive Weekly

For the customer service obsessed

In the Works

For founders and growing companies

Your privacy matters! Help Scout only uses this info to send content and updates. You may unsubscribe anytime. View our privacy policy for more.

In many organizations, but not all, customer service is treated as part of the customer experience. Both are interested in driving customer satisfaction, but they focus on different parts of the customer journey to achieve it. So what are the key differences in customer service vs. customer experience? And why do both matter for your business?

Customer experience , or CX, is a holistic accounting of customers’ perceptions resulting from all their interactions with a business or brand, whether online or in-store. Customer experience involves customer experience management (CXM), which refers to strategies, technologies and practices for improving business results by creating an ideal experience for anyone interacting with a company. The overall customer experience focuses on meeting customer expectations and influencing the customer’s overall perception of products and solutions wherever they take place on the customer journey .

Alternatively, customer service refers to the actions that an organization takes to ensure that customers are satisfied with their products post-purchase. Customer service, which can also be called customer support or customer care , is much more customer-facing than many parts of customer experience. Providing great customer service involves making important decisions about pricing, branding, positioning, and use cases.

Customer-centric organizations should aim to excel at both customer experience and customer service. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to explore more deeply where the two are similar and where they differ.

Customer service vs. customer experience across the customer journey

The simplest key difference between CX and customer service is that CX is concerned with meeting customer needs during the entire customer journey. Customer service is focused on post-purchase. As such, CS is considered a subset of CX.

CX teams are concerned with both short-term tactics and long-term strategy . They are thinking about the holistic picture of the entire customer journey from awareness to consideration to purchase and post-purchase.

Customer journey mapping involves defining the touchpoints throughout the lifecycle of engagements with prospects and customers. A customer journey involves many touchpoints over the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. The assumptions behind customer journey mapping are that prospects or customers are being purposeful at each touchpoint—trying to solve a problem, answer a question, compare options, or cross something off a to-do list.

One way to think about the intersection of customer experience and customer service is to map out the marketing funnel. Doing so demonstrates how CX oversees the entire process, whereas customer service is activated for specific functions.

• Awareness : This starts with the customer learning about the organization and its solutions, and potentially exploring competitors’ solutions. They might sign up for email messages or follow the organizations on social media .
• Consideration : After they understand the value propositions, they may ask questions or do further research.
• Purchase : When a customer is ready to make a purchase, customer service activates. The function helps customers with any questions when they are finalizing purchases and can facilitate the purchase if a customer cannot buy online or in-store.
• Loyalty : The moments immediately after a purchase are incredibly important for generating customer loyalty. The customer service function helps ensure that customers know how to use the product they purchased. CS is also available to answer further questions or solve problems afterward. Companies often create customer success teams, which can be a part of customer service or the sales team, to provide tutorials and best practices on maximizing the use of a product. The goal is to help those customers use the product as quickly, simply and satisfactorily as possible.
• Advocacy : Creating loyal customers unlocks the possibility that some of them tell people in their network about an organization’s products or even potentially laud the value of the customer experience it provides. Creating customer advocates helps the customer experience function perform better. That is because new prospects come into the funnel already ‘warmed’ by the positive sentiment from previous customers.

CX and CS tools

Both customer experience and customer service disciplines rely on valuable tools to maximize their value.

Key customer experience tools:

CX teams use tools that help them see and take strategic actions across the entire customer journey.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools enable organizations to collect, track, and analyze data resulting from customer interactions across channels .
• A/B test software , which can provide different messaging to website visitors to identify which resonates the most. CX teams, working directly with UX teams, can use software to create variations of a message and track which one leads to the most purchases or time that is spent on the site.
• Dynamic recommendations for other products or accessories based on previous product purchases.

Key customer service tools:

While customer service teams will likely use the previously mentioned tools, some others are much more aligned with CS team roles and responsibilities.

• Self-service chatbots that interact with customers to provide answers to their questions. Customer service interactions are increasingly powered by automation and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
• Web-based knowledge bases where users can find articles, FAQs and videos to walk them through how to solve issues and use their products or services correctly.
• A webpage that provides customers with multiple ways to reach the organization to talk to customer support representatives.
• Proactive email or text messages to customers who inquire how the product is performing and provide instructions and tips on how to use it.

CX and CS metrics are different

Both customer experience and customer service involve measurement of their activities to ensure that they are successful in meeting customer needs. Many revolve around capturing customer feedback and measuring real-time responses. And while some common KPIs relate to both disciplines, others are more closely aligned with one than another.

Key customer experience metrics:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) : CSAT is the percentage of respondents who claim to be satisfied (4) or very satisfied (5) in surveys that are offered after a touchpoint experience.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) : NPS gauges how likely a person is to recommend a company or its products to others. People are asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they would recommend it to others. Scores 6 or less are subtracted from the number of 9s and 10s to create a percentage. It is best considered a customer experience metric because it can occur during any part of the customer journey.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) : After a touch, the customer is asked how easy or difficult it was to accomplish their goal, rating the difficulty from 1 (easy) to 5 or 7 (difficult).
• Customer retention rate : Maintaining high customer retention rates demonstrates a successful customer experience function and enhances the bottom line by increasing customer lifetime value. Increasing customer loyalty and limiting churn means that customers are either satisfied with the product or solution or have yet to find a good replacement.

Key customer service metrics:

• First Response Time (FRT) : How long it takes for customer support teams to respond to a customer problem or request. It is a sign of good customer service for an organization to be able to respond immediately to a customer issue, whether on social media, email, chat room, or phone call.
• Average Resolution Time (ART) : This involves how long it takes from the beginning of a customer service interaction until the issue is resolved.
• Issue resolution rate : This relates to how many customer service issues are successfully addressed and resolved. While a customer service team cannot expect to resolve every issue, failure to solve almost all issues is a sign of an issue.

CS and CX together ensure that organizations are caring for customers

Today’s consumers are more discerning and have more options than ever. To delight your customers and remain competitive, you should personalize every touchpoint across the entire customer experience (CX). True personalization at scale involves all aspects of your business, from marketing and messaging to supply chain, sales, and service.

IBM puts customer experience strategy at the center of your business. Our deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, and data and AI consulting can help you harness best-in-class technologies to drive transformation across the customer experience.

More from Business transformation

How to address increasing regulatory concerns for third-party risk management.

5 min read - Third-party risk management remains a top priority for US federal and state regulators, who have recently imposed enforcement actions against financial institutions. This resulted in millions in civil money penalties for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and for weak third-party risk management controls. Recent actions illustrate that regulators are increasingly holding financial institutions accountable for their third-party relationships, including fintech entities. Regulatory agencies expect that institutions are establishing risk-based practices to conduct adequate due diligence on these third…

Hybrid cloud success: The role of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

3 min read - Many organizations have aligned their technology strategy to achieve business success, but they recently encountered a disruption in their plans amidst the ever-changing portfolio after VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom. This disruption has caused an uproar in the IT industry and led to mass confusion with large product modifications, licensing changes and financial implications. IBM Consulting® recognizes that organizations have many options for transformational modifications to revise their technology strategy, and we are here to help. Clients must prioritize productivity, scalability…

An in-depth look at the foundation models and tools used to develop the US Open fan experience

5 min read - For more than three decades, teams of developers and data scientists from IBM Consulting® have collaborated with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to provide an engaging digital experience for US Open tennis fans. Let’s take a deep dive into this year’s innovations across two generative AI projects that leverage IBM’s versatile family of enterprise-ready Granite™ foundation models, among other models. We’ll also look at how the team used IBM watsonx Code Assistant™ to accelerate code generation and improve productivity…

IBM Newsletters

• Customer experience management

Positive customer experiences can boost both a company’s reputation and bottom line, but negative ones can have the opposite effect. Crafting and implementing a customer experience management strategy is essential. This guide explores techniques and tools that can help organizations construct and implement an effective customer experience management plan.

Customer experience vs. customer service: how do they differ, customer experience and customer service are not the same, but they do have a shared goal: to ensure customers are satisfied and return for repeat business..

• Robert Peledie, 365Knowledge Ltd.

In today's competitive marketplace, businesses increasingly aim to provide excellent customer service and positive customer experiences. These two terms are often used interchangeably, even though they have different meanings.

Customer service is a key element within the broader spectrum of the customer's experience. A single bad interaction can taint the overall customer experience , no matter how good previous or subsequent interactions were. Thus, businesses must ensure each customer interaction is positive and consistent.

On the other hand, stellar customer service can alleviate negative sentiments from other touchpoints within the customer journey. It can become a unique selling point and differentiate the business from competitors that may offer similar products or services.

By understanding customer experience and customer service as two interconnected facets, businesses can more effectively map out their customer journey ; pinpoint potential issues; and create more consistent, enjoyable experiences for their customers.

This article is part of

What is customer experience management (CXM)? Ultimate guide

• Which also includes:
• 7 must-have skills for customer experience professionals
• How do companies protect customer data?
• 10 top customer experience certification programs

What is customer service?

Customer service forms the bedrock of any customer-oriented business strategy. It involves direct, one-on-one interactions between a consumer making a purchase and the business representative selling the product or service. These interactions can occur across various channels, including phone calls, emails, live chats, social media threads or in-person conversations.

The focus of customer service is to help customers efficiently solve immediate problems or fulfil their needs during the sale and post-purchase. Customer service teams should offer quick and reliable service to ensure customer satisfaction. Service teams are trained to resolve issues, answer questions, guide customers through the purchasing process, and handle returns or complaints. In essence, it's the direct support a business offers its customers.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience encompasses all interactions customers have with a business throughout their entire relationship. It's a broader concept that considers every touchpoint a customer has with the company, from the first interaction through the buying process and onto post-purchase support.

CX includes the interactions with the product or service itself and how customers experience the brand. CX involves every department within a business, including marketing, sales, product design, and customer service and support, to ensure a seamless, positive and consistent experience . It's about the overall perception customers form about a business based on their holistic experience with it.

Key differences between customer experience and customer service

Customer experience and customer service differ mostly in terms of their scope and approach. Their main differences are the following:

• While customer service is about the present moment -- solving immediate problems, answering questions and meeting needs -- customer experience has a wider perspective, focusing on the overall relationship with the customer and creating an environment that makes them want to return .
• Customer service is reactive and predominantly occurs post-purchase. Customers typically initiate these interactions. Customer experience is proactive and happens at every stage of the customer journey. The business typically directs this strategy forward.
• Customer service is a single touchpoint within the customer journey, but customer experience is the collective impression from all touchpoints a customer has with the business.

Examples of customer experience and customer service

An example of good customer service is when a customer contacts a business to troubleshoot an issue with a product, and the service representative quickly and effectively solves the problem, leaving the customer satisfied.

On the other hand, an example of customer experience could involve a customer's journey with a home appliance brand. It includes the first advertisement that caught the customer's attention, navigation the brand's website, the purchasing process, the user's feelings while using the appliance, and the performance of the customer service team when contacted for support. Each interaction plays a role in shaping the overall perception of the brand, influencing a customer's overall experience.

Which is more important?

In the customer experience vs. customer service debate, determining which is more important is like comparing apples and oranges. Both play crucial roles in any customer-oriented business strategy.

Customer experience and customer service are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot exist without the other.

Customer service is vital as it directly affects customer satisfaction and can turn potentially negative experiences into positive ones. A company's ability to resolve problems quickly and effectively can lead to increased customer loyalty.

However, customer experience carries equal weight. It plays a long-term role in shaping customers' overall perceptions of a brand, which influences their loyalty and decisions to repurchase or recommend the business to others.

Overall, customer experience and customer service are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot exist without the other. Businesses shouldn't choose between customer experience and customer service. Instead, they should strive to provide exceptional customer service as a crucial part of an outstanding customer experience strategy. When a business invests in both, it sees a higher rate of customer retention , stronger brand loyalty and greater overall success.

What role do customer service teams play in CX?

Service teams help shape both customer service and customer experience. Organizations should invest in effective training and support for these teams and equip them with the right tools and technologies to deliver superior customer interactions.

Organizations should also prepare customer service teams for multichannel interactions. Customer service is no longer confined to phone calls and face-to-face interactions. With customers reaching out over social media, live chat, email and more, service teams should be well-versed in managing these channels to provide consistent, high-quality service.

Key takeaways

The dynamic between customer experience vs. customer service is more than an exercise in semantics. It's an approach that can increase customer retention, satisfaction and business success. It's about understanding and meeting customers' needs at every point in their journey to create positive and memorable experiences and build long-lasting relationships.

By recognizing the unique roles and relationship of customer service and customer experience, businesses can ensure they meet -- or exceed -- customer expectations. The end goal is simple: have happy customers who are loyal to a brand and will advocate for that business to others.

Related Resources

• The Rise of South Africa as a Global CX Hub –Hinduja Global Solutions
• Customer experience maps vs. customer journey maps –TechTarget ComputerWeekly.com
• Comparing CRM to CX –TechTarget ComputerWeekly.com
• IT Basics: Real-time Analytics –TechTarget ComputerWeekly.com

Dig Deeper on Customer experience management

What is customer experience (CX) and why is it important?

CX+EX=BG, with added AI: A winning formula for customer experience

Customer experience vs. user experience: What's the difference?

Businesses fail to deliver consistently positive customer experience

Copilot -- Microsoft's AI chatbot tool -- works in several other apps, including SharePoint. Together, Copilot and SharePoint can...

Organizations often neglect information governance in favor of more revenue-generating initiatives. This leads to challenges with...

When implementing enterprise content management software, organizations should consider key factors such as developer input, ease...

Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant, offers several promising features. Find out how to configure Copilot with Teams workflows...

With its AI capabilities, Microsoft Copilot provides several enhancements to Microsoft Teams functionality, including meeting ...

Organizations have ramped up their use of communications platform as a service and APIs to expand communication channels between ...

The observability specialist's latest financing, along with strong recurring revenue and customer growth, helps set the vendor up...

Serverless, first launched on AWS, is now available on all three major public clouds in a move aimed at enabling customers to ...

Implementing a data governance strategy requires a roadmap to keep everyone on track and overcome challenges. Follow eight key ...

Studying the engineering behind IBM's mainframe architecture could help enterprises build higher reliability into the GPU ...

The hardware vendor says its new inference offering outperforms Nvidia's GPU-based tools. However, Nvidia dominates the market.

A technology fueled by generative AI is growing. Vendors like Google are providing products to help enterprises create their own ...

ERP implementations are complicated processes that can easily go awry. Learn about some of the most common issues and ways to ...

Salesforce and Workday are partnering on integrating AI data. However, the combined forces of the enterprise application giants ...

Data analytics can help manufacturing leaders make more informed decisions when planning for the industry's future. Learn about ...

• Onsite training

3,000,000+ delegates

15,000+ clients

1,000+ locations

• KnowledgePass
• Log a ticket

01344203999 Available 24/7

Customer Service vs Customer Experience: Key Differences

Discover the crucial distinctions between Customer Service and Customer Experience in this blog. Learn how effective Customer Service and exceptional Customer Experience influence business success and customer loyalty. Further, this blog explores the key differences between Customer Service vs Customer Experiences and how they can impact your business.

Exclusive 40% OFF

Training Outcomes Within Your Budget!

We ensure quality, budget-alignment, and timely delivery by our expert instructors.

Share this Resource

• Introduction to Management
• Personal & Organisational Development
• Business Process Improvement Training
• Organisational Skills
• Customer Experience Training

Customer Service and Customer Experience are two sides of the same coin. While they may sound interchangeable, they represent distinct aspects of how companies engage with their clients. Understanding the nuanced differences between Customer Service vs Customer Experience is essential for businesses striving to excel in today's competitive landscape.

If you are interested in learning about their differences, then this blog is for you. In this blog, you will learn about the crucial differences between Customer Service vs Customer Experience in great detail. Let's dive in to learn more!

Table of Contents

1) What is Customer Service?

2) What is Customer Experience?

3)  Difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience 

4) Integrating Customer Service and Customer Experience 

5)  Conclusion 

What is Customer Service?

Customer Service is vital in shaping the overall customer Customer Experience is fundamental to any successful business. It goes beyond merely resolving issues and inquiries; it involves creating positive interactions that leave a lasting impression on customers. Let's delve into the key components of Customer Service: 

The r ole of Customer Service  

The key role of Customer Service is to act as a bridge between the customer and the company. Customer Service representatives are the first point of contact, addressing customer inquiries, providing assistance , and handling any concerns that may arise during the customer's journey. They are instrumental in ensuring that customers feel valued, heard, and supported. 

Elements of excellent Customer Service

Customer Service excellence depends on several key factors that create amazing Customer Experiences. These include active listening, empathy, timeliness, responsiveness, courtesy, and professionalism. By listening and empathising with customers, Customer Service Agents can build rapport and understand their needs better.

Additionally, solving their problems quickly and communicating politely and professionally enhances customer satisfaction and positively impacts brand reputation.

The impact of Customer Service

Excellent Customer Service not only solves problems but also builds customer loyalty and trust. Happy customers tend to buy more, promote the brand, and refer others. A smart Customer Service strategy enhances the company-customer bond and the brand’s reputation. It also gives the company a competitive advantage.

What is Customer Experience?  

Customer Experience (CX) is a comprehensive concept that encompasses every interaction and touchpoint a customer has with a brand. It goes beyond individual transactions, focusing on the overall journey and emotions that customers experience throughout their interactions with the company. Let's delve into the core aspects of Customer Experience: 

The role of Customer Experience  

Customer Experience involves understanding the holistic perception customers have of a brand based on their communication and emotions. It is the sum of every encounter a customer has with the company, from the initial point of contact to post-purchase engagement. It extends beyond product quality or service delivery; it includes factors such as website usability, customer support interactions, and the ease of navigating through various touchpoints. 

The components of a memorable Customer Experience

Customer Experience is the outcome of smooth and personalised interactions that impress customers. Personalisation shows customers they are valued and appreciated. Consistency in all touchpoints builds trust and loyalty in the brand. It also helps develop an emotional bond with customers.

Accessibility and convenience make customers happy and satisfied. They also make the experience easy and enjoyable, encouraging customers to come back.

The relationship between Customer Experience and brand perception

Customer Experience is central to shaping how customers perceive a brand. A positive experience for the customer results in a favourable brand image, enhancing the chances of customers becoming loyal advocates. On the other hand, a negative experience can lead to customer churn and damage the brand's reputation.

Customers often base their perception of a brand on the emotions they associate with their interactions. Brands that consistently deliver exceptional experiences are more likely to evoke positive emotions and build a strong emotional bond with their customers.

Difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience  

Focus and scope  

Customer Service primarily focuses on addressing immediate customer needs and resolving specific issues. It is transactional in nature, dealing with individual interactions that occur during customer inquiries or complaints. Customer Service teams aim to provide timely and efficient support to meet customers' immediate requirements. 

On the other hand, Customer Experience takes a broader approach, encompassing the entire customer journey from the initial touchpoint to long-term engagement with the brand. It aims to create seamless and memorable experiences at every stage. As a result, it ensures that customers have a positive perception of the brand throughout their entire interaction. 

Interaction vs overall journey  

Customer Service involves individual interactions between the customer and the company's representatives. It is typically reactive, responding to customers' inquiries or problems as they arise. The focus is on resolving specific issues to meet customer expectations during a particular exchange. 

In contrast, Customer Experience takes a proactive approach, designing the entire customer journey to be cohesive, enjoyable, and memorable. It considers every touchpoint and interaction, aiming to leave a positive impression on customers long after individual transactions have taken place. 

Fascinated by fiction and literary works? Try our Creative Writing Training ! Join today.  

Immediate vs long-term impact  

The impact of Customer Service is immediate, directly influencing how a customer perceives a specific interaction with the brand. A positive Customer Service experience can result in customer satisfaction for that particular instance . 

Conversely, Customer Experience has a long-term impact on customer loyalty, brand perception, and overall customer lifetime value. Consistently delivering exceptional experiences builds trust and fosters lasting relationships, making customers more likely to become loyal advocates of the brand.

Reactive vs proactive

Customer Experience involves predicting the customer’s needs. Businesses use customer journey mapping, website analytics, funnel analysis, and customer feedback to enhance the brand experience and prevent customer issues. Sometimes, this may require guiding customers to start a Customer Service interaction. So, Customer Experience is proactive in this sense.

Customer Service is mostly triggered by the customer. The customer has a problem and contacts the business’ support services through their chosen channel. So, Customer Service is reactive in this sense.

Departmental responsibility  

Customer Service is often the responsibility of a dedicated customer support team within the organisation. It deals with day-to-day interactions with customers and focuses on providing immediate assistance and resolutions. 

In contrast, Customer Experience is a cross-functional effort that involves multiple departments, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer support. Achieving a seamless and exceptional Customer Experience requires collaboration and alignment across the entire organisation. 

Measuring success  

The success of Customer Service is often measured through metrics such as response time, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction scores. These metrics provide insights into how well the support team addresses customer inquiries and concerns. 

In contrast, measuring the success of Customer Experience involves assessing customer loyalty, brand perception, and long-term customer value. Metrics like customer retention, customer lifetime value and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are used to gauge the effectiveness of the overall Customer Experience strategy. 

Enhance your Customer Experience with our Customer Experience Training – Sign up now!

Integrating Customer Service and Customer Experience  

When it comes to creating a truly outstanding customer journey, aligning Customer Service and Customer Experience strategies is paramount. Here are essential ways to achieve seamless integration: 

Aligning strategies and objectives  

To create a cohesive experience, aligning both the Objectives of Customer Service and Customer Experience initiatives is necessary. Ensure that the teams work towards common goals, emphasising customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term relationships. By sharing a unified vision, all departments can contribute to enhancing the overall customer journey.

Seamless communication and collaboration  

Effective communication and collaboration between Customer Service and Customer Experience teams are essential. Encourage open channels for sharing customer insights, feedback, and pain points. Seamless collaboration enables swift problem-solving and the implementation of improvements that lead to enhanced Customer Experiences.

Gathering and analy s ing customer feedback  

Customer feedback is a valuable resource in understanding their needs and expectations. Regularly gather feedback from various touchpoints, such as surveys, social media, and direct interactions. Analy se this data to identify patterns, pain points, and areas for improvement. By using customer feedback as a foundation, both Customer Service and Customer Experience teams can make informed decisions to optimise the overall journey. Unlock the power of Emotional Intelligence (EI) with our Emotional Intelligence Training – Sign up now!

Conclusion  

In conclusion, grasping the distinctions between Customer Service vs Customer Experience and seamlessly integrating their strategies are vital for businesses aiming to thrive in customer-centricity. By prioritising both aspects and fostering collaboration, companies can forge robust customer relationships, inspire loyalty, and gain a competitive edge in the market. 

Learn assertiveness and self-esteem with our Personal Development Courses – Sign up today!

Frequently Asked Questions

Effective Customer Service can face various barriers that hinder its quality and impact on customers. These barriers include communication gaps, which can lead to misunderstandings. Other barriers like lack of comprehensive employee training and insufficient resources can impede the delivery of excellent Customer Service.

Employee training plays a pivotal role in shaping exceptional Customer service and enhancing the overall Customer Experience. It ensures that staff members are well-versed in the products or services they are offering. This leads to increased confidence and proficiency in addressing customer inquiries and issues.

The Knowledge Academy takes global learning to new heights, offering over 30,000 online courses across 490+ locations in 220 countries. This expansive reach ensures accessibility and convenience for learners worldwide.

Alongside our diverse Online Course Catalogue, encompassing 17 major categories, we go the extra mile by providing a plethora of free educational Online Resources like News updates, Blogs, videos, webinars, and interview questions. By tailoring learning experiences further, professionals can maximise value with customisable Course Bundles of TKA.  

The Knowledge Academy’s Knowledge Pass , a prepaid voucher, adds another layer of flexibility, allowing course bookings over a 12-month period. Join us on a journey where education knows no bounds.

Discover an array of Personal Development Courses at The Knowledge Academy, featuring Exceptional Customer Service Training, Organisational Skills Training, Emotional Intelligence Training, Time Management Training, etc. Designed for different skill levels, our courses provide the necessary technical expertise to build your Customer Service skills.

Whether you're starting out or looking to upgrade your Customer Service skills, immerse yourself in our Business Skills Blogs for further understanding and expertise. Embark on a journey with us to elevate your Personal Development Skills.  

Upcoming Business Skills Resources Batches & Dates

Fri 25th Oct 2024

Fri 27th Dec 2024

Fri 31st Jan 2025

Fri 4th Apr 2025

Fri 13th Jun 2025

Fri 22nd Aug 2025

Fri 24th Oct 2025

Fri 12th Dec 2025

Get A Quote

WHO WILL BE FUNDING THE COURSE?

My employer

By submitting your details you agree to be contacted in order to respond to your enquiry

• Business Analysis
• Lean Six Sigma Certification

Share this course

Our biggest summer sale.

We cannot process your enquiry without contacting you, please tick to confirm your consent to us for contacting you about your enquiry.

By submitting your details you agree to be contacted in order to respond to your enquiry.

We may not have the course you’re looking for. If you enquire or give us a call on 01344203999 and speak to our training experts, we may still be able to help with your training requirements.

Or select from our popular topics

• ITIL® Certification
• Scrum Certification
• ISO 9001 Certification
• Change Management Certification
• Microsoft Azure Certification
• Microsoft Excel Courses
• Explore more courses

Press esc to close

Fill out your  contact details  below and our training experts will be in touch.

Fill out your   contact details   below

Thank you for your enquiry!

One of our training experts will be in touch shortly to go over your training requirements.

Back to Course Information

Fill out your contact details below so we can get in touch with you regarding your training requirements.

* WHO WILL BE FUNDING THE COURSE?

Preferred Contact Method

No preference

Back to course information

Fill out your  training details  below

Fill out your training details below so we have a better idea of what your training requirements are.

HOW MANY DELEGATES NEED TRAINING?

HOW DO YOU WANT THE COURSE DELIVERED?

Online Instructor-led

Online Self-paced

WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THIS COURSE?

Next 2 - 4 months

WHAT IS YOUR REASON FOR ENQUIRING?

Looking for some information

Looking for a discount

I want to book but have questions

One of our training experts will be in touch shortly to go overy your training requirements.

Your privacy & cookies!

Like many websites we use cookies. We care about your data and experience, so to give you the best possible experience using our site, we store a very limited amount of your data. Continuing to use this site or clicking “Accept & close” means that you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more about our privacy policy and cookie policy cookie policy .

We use cookies that are essential for our site to work. Please visit our cookie policy for more information. To accept all cookies click 'Accept & close'.

Customer service vs. customer experience: the major differences

Related articles

Helpdesk Automation: Why are companies investing in it?

Customer experience automation: A guide to doing more with less

Generative AI for customer support: History, benefits and use cases

Customer success automation: A guide to a frictionless experience

See more articles

Customer service vs. customer experience . It's not just a semantic debate; it's a strategic crossroads that businesses must navigate if they want to successfully drive customer loyalty and build long-lasting relationships. 

While both customer service and customer experience are crucial, they have distinct approaches and goals. Whether or not you understand the ways in which they diverge can mean the difference between winning the hearts of customers or losing their business to the competition.

At its core, customer service is about assisting people with a specific need in a specific set of circumstances, and it’s essential for every business that wants to succeed over the long haul. After all, a staggering 95% of consumers agree that customer service influences their brand loyalty . 1

In contrast, customer experience encompasses more than just solving problems or addressing specific queries – it’s the panoramic view of the entire customer journey with your business. Rather than being confined to singular interactions, it encapsulates the collective total of all a customer’s touchpoints.

Join us as we look into the nuances of customer service vs. customer experience . This article will help you understand not only their most important differences, but also how they're each critical to a thriving business built for longevity. 

What is customer service?

Customer service (CS) is the support and assistance that a company provides to its customers throughout the lifetime of their ownership of its products or use of its services. It’s primarily focused on addressing and resolving specific issues and inquiries raised by customers through various channels, including email, phone, live chat, social media, and in-person interactions.

The primary objective of customer service is to handle these concerns promptly and efficiently, with representatives doing everything in their power to ensure that the issue in question gets resolved and the customer leaves the interaction satisfied. Achieving this objective involves the following goals:

Resolving issues : From malfunctioning products to billing errors, customer service is the first line of defense against technical issues and the frustration that so often accompanies them. Reps have a responsibility to offer clear explanations, quick solutions, and efficient resolutions, minimizing inconvenience and restoring satisfaction with their products or services.

Addressing complaints : Whether it's a polite inquiry or a passionate rant, customer service reps should strive to listen attentively, address concerns professionally, and work to leave the customer feeling heard and understood.

Providing technical support : When there’s a technical hiccup, customer service is responsible for patiently troubleshooting issues and guiding customers through solutions.

Facilitating returns and exchanges : Whether it's a customer seeking for a replacement, customer service should facilitate a smooth process, minimizing friction and frustration.

Offering post-purchase support : Beyond helping customers overcome initial hurdles, customer service teams should act as ongoing guides, providing usage tips, answering questions, and fostering a sense of trust and loyalty through their compassionate support and dependability. 

With that said, it's critical to understand that – contrary to the common misconception – customer service isn't confined solely to the domain of the customer support team . It's an organization-wide effort to effectively meet consumer expectations and cultivate enduring relationships.

If you want to enhance your brand’s customer service, read this article: 10 key elements of customer service.

Importance of customer service

Customer service is a key touchpoint in the customer journey and directly impacts the overall customer experience. According to a study by CGS, 80% of consumers feel more emotionally connected to a brand when customer service solves their problem. 2

In other words, delivering top-notch customer service is a must for every business interested in connecting with consumers and maintaining their business over time. And there are several compelling factors that help explain why customer service confers such significant advantages on those companies that deploy it successfully. 

Immediate problem resolution : Customer service is the frontline for addressing immediate issues and inquiries, ensuring prompt problem resolution.

Increased loyalty : Exceptional customer service directly contributes to customer satisfaction, fostering loyalty and repeat business.

Better customer retention : By providing excellent service, businesses can reduce bounce-offs and retain valuable customers .

Valuable customer insights : Customer service interactions provide a wealth of data about customer needs, preferences, and pain points. This information can be used to improve products, services, and the overall customer experience.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction a customer has with a company. From discovering a brand to using its product or service, CX encapsulates the totality of a customer’s relationship with a business. 

Customer experience isn’t not just about providing customers with what they paid for, either. Rather, it’s predicated on exceeding their expectations and making them feel valued and understood throughout their journey. This level of CX performance can be achieved through both direct and indirect interactions, including, customers’ experience browsing your website, interacting with customer service reps, and using the actual product or service.

Finding the right balance between people and processes is one of the keys to a great CX . Whether it’s with a sales agent, support representative, or other staff member, customers want friendly interactions that leave them feeling good about the company and the business they’re giving them. At the same time, they crave seamless experiences throughout their journey – effective and easy solutions for everything from connecting with a service rep to using self-service portals.

Regardless of the company or industry, the consistent, overarching goal of customer experience is to create positive emotions and enduring memories throughout the customer journey, fostering brand loyalty and advocacy. 

Importance of customer experience

As surprising as it may be to hear, today’s consumer places their overall “ experience ” with a business on the same level as the actual offerings of that business. That is, they care about more than just the product or service being provided; they want a fulfilling journey with your brand, from initial awareness to ongoing engagement . 

So, why is customer experience so critical for businesses? In short, because CX is about creating a sense of loyalty among customers, resulting in lasting relationships that produce  tangible benefits. Here’s a few of the most important ones: 

Revenue growth : Satisfied customers are repeat customers – it’s really that simple. According to a recent report from Qualtrics, customers who received a positive experience are 2.6 times more likely to purchase from the same business again . 4 A satisfying, even impressive, journey across all touchpoints keeps customers returning for more products or services, a pattern with an indisputably positive effect on your bottom line. 

Brand advocacy : Happy customers become brand advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth to friends, family, and acquaintances. In fact, the same report from Qualtrics shows that customers who reported having excellent experiences are 3.6 times more likely to recommend a business to others . 5 This organic promotion is a powerful marketing tool, attracting new customers in a highly convincing, authentic way without incurring significant advertising costs. (Word-of-mouth, in fact, is usually completely free!)

Long-term relationship building : CX is instrumental in building long-term relationships with your customers. Satisfied individuals who have strongly positive associations with your business are more likely to overlook occasional hiccups, leading to an increase in the overall CSAT rate .

Reduced churn rate : Investing in CX pays off by keeping your existing customers happy and regularly returning to your business’s offerings. These satisfied customers are far less likely to switch to competitors, reducing churn rates and securing a more stable customer base.

Brand reputation : Positive experiences enhance brand reliability and customer focus, attracting more consumers and contributing to a favorable brand reputation that consumers recognize and respect.

Continuous improvement through feedback : CX analyzes feedback from various customer touchpoints to understand customer preferences and pain points. This can be invaluable for refining products, services, and overall business strategies.

Deeper customer engagement : A good CX encourages customers to become more involved with your brand by interacting with its various channels. Cultivating a relationship across multiple mediums in this way leads to stronger connections and wider reach.

Increased customer lifetime value : By creating positive memories and exceeding expectations, you encourage customers to engage with your brand more often and over a longer period of time. Expanding customers’ level of engagement leads to deeper relationships and, ultimately, increased lifetime value.

Crisis management and damage control : In times of crisis, a well-crafted customer experience strategy can act as a crucial tool for damage control, turning periods of potential churn and abandonment into positive interactions that earn the respect of your customers.

Businesses must equip their frontline teams with the essential tools. Find out how help desk automation can help you deliver unmatched customer experiences . 

What is the difference between customer service and customer experience?

While sometimes used interchangeably, customer service and customer experience are distinct concepts with different roles in shaping a customer's journey. 

Before we delve deeper into the specifics and nuances  of customer service vs. customer experience , here’s a quick table highlighting a few of the key distinctions:

Customer service (CS)

Reactive : Deals with specific issues, problems, and inquiries after they arise.

Transactional : Focused on resolving individual interactions and fulfilling requests.

Touchpoints

Channel-specific : Often associated with dedicated channels like phone calls, emails, or live chats.

Prompt resolution within each interaction, leading to customer satisfaction.

Involvement

Agent-driven : Relies heavily on the efforts and skills of customer service representatives.

Customer experience (CX)

Proactive : Aims to prevent issues, understand overall needs, and anticipate wants.

Holistic : Encompasses the entire customer journey, from awareness to post-purchase engagement.

Omnichannel : Integrates seamlessly across all touchpoints, online and offline, direct and indirect.

Building lasting connections and fostering loyalty.

Systemic : Driven by processes, infrastructure, and technology designed to create a positive experience.

Now, let's break down these key distinctions between customer service vs. customer experience . 

Focus and scope

Customer service usually focuses on individual interactions , triggered when a customer encounters a specific issue or inquiry. It’s essentially reactive, responding promptly to address the immediate needs of the customer at hand. 

The scope of customer service, in turn, is narrowly tailored to direct interactions, dealing with the resolution of problems and inquiries on a case-by-case basis. It serves as a kind of skilled troubleshooter, stepping in when called upon.

In contrast, customer experience is proactive and holistic , aiming to shape the overall experience customers have with a brand and their consequent perception of it. This means anticipating needs, understanding overall sentiments, and fostering positive emotions from the very outset of the customer journey. CX is about crafting a satisfying journey that moves seamlessly from the initial touchpoint through every subsequent phase of the customer lifecycle. 

Customer service is generally associated with dedicated channels like phone calls, emails, and live chats. These serve as distinct points of contact when customers encounter problems or have inquiries, functioning as accessible solutions to immediate needs.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is integrated across and embedded within all touchpoints, whether consumers are online or offline. It extends beyond dedicated support channels to encompass all interactions a customer has with the brand, with the goal of creating a cohesive journey that never suffers from major interruptions or jarring shifts in tone, style, or format. 

Driving force

Customer service relies heavily on the expertise and skills of individual representatives. The ability of these frontline teams (and the availability of necessary tools) to resolve issues efficiently and empathetically is key to the success of customer service.

CX, however, is more systemic. Processes, infrastructure, and technology play a crucial role in creating a smooth and successful journey. In order to achieve truly effective CX, the entire system must work together to anticipate and fulfill customer needs.

Customer service fixes problems and answers questions. It ensures basic needs are met and issues are resolved, preventing immediate interruptions in usage and longer-term dissatisfaction.

The impact of CX is broader and more ambitious: it seeks to shape the overall narrative. By creating positive emotions, exceeding expectations, and making customers feel valued, CX aspires to build trust, loyalty, and the customer advocacy that grows out of them. Its focus is always intently fixed on forging the kinds of long-term relationships that build a trustworthy – even admired – brand within its respective marketplace. 

The relationship between customer service and customer experience

Customer service vs. customer experience : Despite the differences we’ve just outlined, there’s still a great deal of important overlap between the two. And when brought together effectively, they can create a positive and lasting relationship between your customers and your business.

While resolving individual issues may seem like its only purpose, customer service plays a crucial role in shaping the broader customer experience . Every interaction – from answering questions to fixing problems – leaves an impression on customers, influencing their overall perception of your business. If they’re satisfied with the prompt, efficient, and empathetic support you’re consistently providing, they’re more likely to remain loyal to your business and recommend it to others.

Additionally, customer service interactions serve as a valuable feedback loop for the brand. Understanding customer concerns, preferences, and pain points across various channels provides insights that can be used to enhance the overall customer experience.

In essence, by combining the reactive problem-solving of customer service with the proactive, all-encompassing approach of customer experience , businesses can develop a customer-centric strategy that fosters a loyal and lasting customer base.

Learn how Rebag unified its online and in-store shopping experiences with Intercom to optimize every stage of the customer journey.

Intercom can help you deliver exceptional customer experience

According to our Customer Service Trends Report 2024 , 87% of support teams noticed an increase in customer expectations when compared with the previous year , up from 2022’s figure of 75%. 6 Customers are increasingly looking for prompt responses, personalized experiences, and seamless assistance across various touchpoints. 

Is your business well-equipped to cater to these heightened demands?

If you’re not entirely confident in your answer to that question, don’t worry: Intercom has your back. With Intercom — the fully integrated, omnichannel, AI-powered customer service platform — you can deliver faster and more personalized customer experiences.

Intercom is an all-in-one customer service solution that packs powerful features, including:

A combination of Help Desk , AI Chatbot , and Proactive Support solutions

Built-in integrations for efficient service delivery

In-depth analytics and reporting

Low-code and custom integrations with 450+ apps

Automated workflows

AI-powered Help Center

Omnichannel support

Shared inbox for enhanced team collaboration and issue management

Join over 25,000 prominent businesses in delivering experiences that keep your customers engaged and coming back for more. Start your free trial or book a demo .

NICE , 2022 Digital First Customer Experience Report. Based on a survey of 1,320 respondents.

CGS , 2022 BPO and Customer Care Dynamics. Based on a survey of 200 business leaders and decision makers across 25 industries .

Qualtrics , ROI of Customer Experience, 2022.

Intercom , The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report 2024. We asked 2,000+ customer service professionals across the globe how they’re meeting the challenges and opportunities of 2024.

Cut support volumes and make customers happier with the power of AI

Meet the team behind INSIDEA

Our Partners

Know our partners

Shape your professional jouney

Our Services

• E-mail Marketing
• Sales Development
• WordPress Management
• Content Marketing
• Performance marketing
• Social Media
• LinkedIn Marketing
• HubSpot Onboarding
• HubSpot Whitelabel Solution
• HubSpot Management
• HubSpot Migration
• Email-Support
• Live Chat Support
• Voice Support
• Technical Support
• Administrative Tasks
• Executive Level

News and Updates

Guides and Play-books

Interviews with Leaders

Success Stories

Making It Happen

Newsletters

Stay up-to date

Press Release

Discover our latest stories

A Complete Guide on Customer Service vs. Customer Experience

• Chinmay Mahanta
• November 25, 2023

You’ve likely heard the phrases “customer service” and “customer experience” tossed around. But what do they really mean, and how are they different? 

Customer service is the help we give or receive during purchases, like asking about a product’s feature or reporting a problem. On the other hand, customer experience is the complete process of a new customer, from browsing a website to post-purchase support. 

Understanding customer service vs. customer experience is crucial for any brand to thrive in the market.

In this blog, we’ll break it all down for you.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is the bridge between a brand and its customers. It’s centered on problem-solving, addressing concerns, and ensuring satisfaction. It’s direct communication that addresses immediate needs, answers queries, and fosters trust between a business and its clientele. 

Simply put, customer service vs. customer experience is all about building a relationship of trust and reliability by assisting and supporting the customers through various means.

The Role of Customer Service

Now, let’s get a closer look at the role of customer service:

• Problem Resolution: Addressing and rectifying customer issues promptly
• Building Trust: Establishing confidence in the brand through reliable support
• Enhancing Satisfaction : Ensuring customer needs are met and expectations are managed
• Retention: Keeping customers loyal to the brand by consistently meeting their service needs
• Feedback Loop: Gathering customer insights to improve products, services, and processes
• Brand Representation: Serving as the face or voice of the company during most direct interactions
• Driving Revenue: Assisting in upselling or cross-selling opportunities by understanding customer needs
• Crisis Management: Handling complaints or issues effectively to protect the brand’s reputation
• Educating Customers: Providing information about products, services, or policies
• Setting Standards: Upholding and promoting the company’s values, culture, and ethos in every interaction

What is Customer Experience?

Now let’s debug the customer experience in our customer service vs. customer experience journey. The customer experience is all about the entirety of a consumer’s interactions with a brand. It covers every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase. Its job is not done after the transaction. Customer experience is where you nurture your clients and ensure their overall service satisfaction. 

A well-curated customer experience talks about needs, ensures seamless service integration, and aims to build lasting trust and loyalty.

The Role Of Customer Experience

A stellar customer experience ensures long-term growth and strengthens the brand’s image in the market. Customer experience is the backbone of a brand’s reputation and success, setting clear expectations for what customers can consistently look forward to.  Now, let’s get a closer look at the role of customer experience.

• Holistic Perspective: Customer experience captures a customer’s journey with a brand
• Building Loyalty: It encourages repeat business by creating positive, memorable interactions
• Differentiation: Customer experience sets brands apart in a competitive market based on the quality of interactions
• Driving Decisions: It influences purchasing choices based on past experiences
• Feedback and Improvement: Customer experience provides insights into areas the brand can refine and enhance
• Emotional Connection: It cultivates a deeper bond between customers and brands through positive experiences
• Brand Advocacy: Delighted customers become brand ambassadors, promoting the brand organically
• Long-term Growth:  It directly impacts a brand’s sustainability and growth by retaining customers and attracting new ones
• Setting Expectations: Customer experience benchmarks what customers can consistently expect from a brand
• Strengthening Brand Image: It shapes a company’s public perception and reputation in the market

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: 4 Ways They Are Different

Customer service and customer experience are crucial in building and maintaining client relationships. While they often overlap, understanding their impact can help businesses cater to their clients better. So, let’s get started with the four main differences between customer service and customer experience.

1. Comprehensive Experience vs. Specific Interaction

The customer experience encompasses a consumer’s journey with a brand, from discovery to potential repeat purchases. It’s the cumulative result of all interactions. In contrast, customer service is a single stage in this journey that addresses specific queries or concerns.

2. Multiple Touchpoints vs. Limited Engagement

The customer’s journey with a brand, denoted as the customer experience, involves many interactions and requires coordination across different departments to ensure a pleasant experience. On the other hand, customer service is often limited to one or two direct touchpoints, typically overseen by customer-facing departments.

3. Proactive vs. Reactive Approach

The customer experience is about anticipation. Brands are proactive in this domain, constantly refining the journey, analyzing potential challenges, and guiding customer interactions. Customer service is largely reactive. It springs into action primarily when a customer initiates contact due to an issue or query.

4. Ongoing Relationship vs. One-Time Event

Customer experience is continuous and difficult to pin down to a single event. It’s an evolving narrative that continues each time a customer interacts with the brand. However, customer service is about distinct events like addressing a specific concern or responding to a particular query. Such interactions are measurable through various metrics, signifying distinct touchpoints in the customer’s journey.

Unlock Customer Service Excellence with INSIDEA’s Expertise!

Customer experience is the most important company differentiator and growth driver. In fact, customers are already willing to pay more for superior experiences and might move to a competitor brand after just one unpleasant experience. The truth is that these terms are frequently misunderstood and used interchangeably. While customer service is crucial to the whole customer experience, it is only one element in the process. However, customer experience is usually after a purchase has been made. 

Are you ready to transform your customer support and take your customer experience to the next level? INSIDEA is here to guide you through every step of the way, ensuring that your support team is empowered to deliver exceptional service.

As experts in customer support solutions, we pride ourselves on helping businesses optimize their support strategies for maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction. Reach out today to discover how INSIDEA can revolutionize your customer support and contribute to your business success!

Tailored Support Strategies: At INSIDEA, we understand that every business is unique. That’s why we work closely with you to develop customized support strategies that align with your specific needs and goals.

Industry Expertise: Our team brings a wealth of experience and industry knowledge to the table, ensuring that you have access to the best practices and insights in customer support.

Customer Commitment: Your customers’ happiness is our top priority. We are dedicated to helping you exceed their expectations and foster long-lasting relationships.

Ready to elevate your customer support experience with INSIDEA’s Customer Support Service ? Book a meeting with our experts today and start your journey towards outstanding customer service and satisfaction.

Get started now !

• Customer Service

The Award-Winning Team Is Ready.

“At INSIDEA, it’s all about putting people first. Our top priority? You. Whether you’re part of our incredible team, a valued customer, or a trusted partner, your satisfaction always comes before anything else. We’re not just focused on meeting expectations; we’re here to exceed them and that’s what we take pride in!”

Pratik Thakker

Founder & CEO

Featured In

Ready to take your marketing to the next level.

• How INSIDEA works
• The subscription plan that best fits your needs.
• Chat about pricing, onboarding, and anything else.
• How to Achieve Scalable Marketing: Better, Faster, and More Cost-Effective

Book a call with us

By clicking next, you agree to receive communications from INSIDEA in accordance with our Privacy Policy .

• US : +1 (323) 405-9120

Digital Solutions

Client reviews.

© 2024 Insidea. All rights reserved. Any information, whether oral or written, obtained from the Insidea website, services, tools, or comments does not constitute any form of legal and/or regulatory advice. If any kind of legal assistance is required, users should consult with an attorney, a lawyer, or a law firm.

• Marketing Strategy
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Advertising - Performance
• App Store Optimisation
• Online Reputation
• HubSpot Implementation and Onboarding
• HubSpot CMS Development
• HubSpot API Integration
• HubSpot Training and support
• HubSpot Agency White- label Support
• Video Testimonials
• HubSpot Reviews
• Terms and Conditions
• Terms of Use
• Cookie Policy
• LinkedIn Community
• WhatsApp Community

© 2024 Insidea. All rights reserved. Any information, whether oral or written, obtained from the insidea website, services, tools, or comments does not constitute any form of legal and/or regulatory advice. If any kind of legal assistance is required, users should consult with an attorney, a lawyer, or a law firm.

INSIDEA Talent

Making it happen

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Key Differences Explained

Not many people want to contact customer service. Usually, that means something went wrong, and it makes things worse when a customer doesn’t get what they expect. To avoid this problem, many companies are rethinking the business-consumer relationship to focus on another concept: customer experience. 

Firms that lead in customer experience report 5-10% higher revenues and 15–25% lower costs. Long hold times, constant transfers, and having to repeat oneself are just a few factors that impact satisfaction. In this blog, we’ll define the differences between customer service vs. customer experience and offer ways you can offer better experiences for your customers.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

There are multiple definitions of customer experience but what matters is that they all converge on a single principle: making sure customers perceive your company positively. This is the result of accurately understanding the touchpoints customers go through with your product all the way from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It also takes into account the ways in which customers get to find your product, from the moment of awareness and discovery all the way through retention and recommendation. 

What is Customer Service?

Customer service refers to the actions brands take to support customers when they have a question or face a roadblock. To build a great customer service process, it is important to consider support channels, the types of service you need to provide, some of the key functions that are helpful to customers, and, of course, basic service skills like listening, empathizing, solving problems and having patience.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: What's the Difference?

People often view customer service and customer experience as synonymous, but they’re not the same. Gartner defines customer service as "retaining and extending customer relationships once a product or service is sold." It’s about making sure a customer is satisfied with a single transaction, usually facilitated in a contact center.

To define customer experience, Gartner says it is "the sum of all the interactions a customer has with a company” and "the customer's perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's employees, systems, channels or products."

Customer experience covers the whole customer journey. This includes customer service, but that’s not all. Customer experience consists of all interactions a consumer has with the company through the contact center, in-store, marketing materials, and even while using your product or service.

Let’s explore some of the key differences between customer experience and customer service in more detail.

Difference in Scope

Customer service is concerned with a single objective: providing excellent service. Customer experience, on the other hand, is a much larger endeavor that includes service, perceptions, marketing touchpoints, etc. Think of customer service as the department that ensures customers are satisfied with the product or service and customer experience as the one that refers to the overall brand perception. 

Nature of Interaction

Customer service generally plays an important role when customers have problems. People working in this field must ensure that issues get solved quickly to prevent churn. CX is a bit more proactive and tries to focus on building experiences that are so positive and helpful that problems don’t even take place. 

Interactive Channels

Customer service generally focuses on providing excellent service based on the customer channel and single point in time being used. In other words, if they call you with a concern, the objective is to ensure it gets solved fast during that particular call. In opposition, CX does not focus on solving problems in a single channel but on creating an integrated and interactive experience across all channels for customers. 

Metrics are Different

There are three main metrics used for customer service departments: customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). While some of them also overlap with CX, generally speaking, when you work in a CX department, you are more concerned with metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rates, retention rates, etc., that inform the overall experience of a customer not just how easily they can solve a problem.

Who is Responsible?

Customer service is the responsibility of the customer support teams. They're the ones who talk to customers, solve their problems, and ensure quality of service. CX is not a particular department's responsibility but a compounding perception of any specific brand. In other words, everything around the brand, including how its employees interact with it, is part of that perception. 

Which One Should You Prioritize?

Instead of focusing on customer service or customer experience, organizations should understand that excellent service is part of the customer experience process. In other words, brands should focus on creating a great overall experience for the customer. This process includes the service they receive, marketing efforts, the way sales reach out to offer new products, and any other proactive efforts. 

The Impact of Customer Experience on Customer Service Contact Centers

For many businesses, the contact center is the primary provider of customer service; therefore, contact centers play a bigger role in adding value to the customer experience.

Let’s break this down. The defining characteristics of great customer service and experiences develop over time. With digital transformation on the rise, "innovation" and "adaptability" are at the forefront. 

The channels we use also evolve, with experts claiming that digital channel adoption fast-forwarded seven years during the first eight weeks of the pandemic. This shift forced companies to accelerate their strategies and turn transformation plans into adoption seemingly overnight as a way to meet new customer service expectations. 

Before, businesses viewed contact centers as a platform to provide customer service. Now, with the focus on customer experience and minimizing the impact of pandemic-related disruptions, companies are enhancing their customer service contact centers to support the needs of individuals and businesses operating from home.

Consumers have learned from experience that contacting support can be time-consuming. Therefore, reducing the effort required by customers to access support increases the likelihood that a customer will be loyal. Consequently, failing to provide a positive experience can easily fuel disloyalty. Contact center solutions can better meet customer needs if they are easy to navigate, quick, offer complete answers, and feel in control.

Customer Service and Customer Experience Examples

To better understand the differences between customer service and customer experience, it is beneficial to look at examples of excellent customer service and customer experiences. "Great" customer service accounts for the little details: unique gestures such as gifts, frequent thank you's, the anticipation of customer needs, or involvement in social causes. Customer service truly stands out when businesses include a level of personability that makes customers feel valued and more than just a number. 

For example, a customer flying JetBlue once tweeted that he was upset he hadn't been able to get his coffee before boarding. Within seconds of sending the tweet, JetBlue contacted its customer service team at Boston's Logan airport. The customer service team promptly delivered a mocha to the customer, all before takeoff, which resulted in the customer raving on Twitter, promoting the airline in a way that otherwise may not have been possible. JetBlue saw the opportunity to go above and beyond and deliver high-quality service to the customer.

In this example, JetBlue tailored its customer service to satisfy one customer. The team prioritized a single transaction, which boosted the airline's overall reputation.

To better understand customer experience, consider Zalando’s 100-day return policy. This policy limits long return lines after holidays and eases anxiety to return products immediately. Another example is Starbucks’ loyalty program, which uses gamification to make earning points fun. Plus, the Starbucks app remembers your order, as do many Starbucks baristas. These policies are designed to impact every customer touchpoint, from online shopping to in-store purchases to returns and beyond.

Customer Service KPIs

Are there any key performance indicators (KPIs) that track customer service? The measurement of customer service and customer experience KPIs share many similarities, including customer surveys and contact center metrics like call abandonment rate, the average speed of answer, and first-call resolution.

These metrics are used as customer service KPIs to track how a customer feels about one interaction with the brand. As customer experience KPIs, they track data across the entire customer lifecycle. Below are several more customer experience KPIs to measure.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a core metric companies use to measure customer experience. Companies typically gauge satisfaction following an interaction with a support representative or after a customer uses a product. The KPI is based on the customer's perception of the quality of service.

Many companies use surveys to track CSAT. The survey includes one or more variations of the question, "How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?"

Respondents use the following 1 to 5 scale to answer the question:

• Very unsatisfied
• Unsatisfied
• Very satisfied

The business then averages the survey results to get a composite CSAT score, which is typically a percentage.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another standard indicator companies use to measure their customers’ propensity to recommend the brand. NPS is calculated from the question, “Would you recommend this company to a friend/colleague/relative?”

Based on the response, customers are put into one of three categories according to their degree of enthusiasm:

• 0-6: Detractors – Dissatisfied customers who can negatively impact the brand.
• 7-8: Passives – Satisfied customers vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• 9-10: Promoters – The most loyal customers who will continue to buy the brand’s products while advising those around them to do the same. They will become ambassadors of the brand.

The final score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of the promoters. Brands can easily compare their NPS score to their direct competitors and market leaders.

Another measure of customer experience is the Customer Effort Score (CES). This is the third most prevalent method of calculation that involves customer input. CES uses a 5-to-7-point scale system and asks, "How easy was it to solve your problem today?" 

CES is a transactional metric that helps businesses analyze a single customer interaction's complexity or simplicity. This makes it a customer service KPI, foremost, but a valuable measure improving customer service improves one aspect of customer experience.

Churn and Retention Rate

Retention rate is another KPI that indicates how well a business can maintain its customer base over a period of time. Churn rate is closely related to retention, as churn reflects the number of customers who have ended their use of a business's services or products over a particular period. The goal is to have as low a churn rate and as high of a retention rate as possible.

Customer Lifetime Value

As the name suggests, customer lifetime value (CLV) is a KPI that measures a customer's entire relationship with a company. Since it is less expensive to keep an existing customer rather than recruit a new one, CLV is important, as it informs businesses on how they can increase the value of existing customers. CLV is typically seen as an average . Companies can calculate it over a specific period, or over the entirety of a business and consumer relationship.

First Response Time (FRT), Average Resolution Rate (ART) and Average Wait Time 

First Response Time (FRT), Average Resolution Time (ART), and Average Wait Time are important ways to measure customer service effectiveness. FRT measures initial response speed after a customer reaches out, which usually leads to higher customer satisfaction. The faster you solve your customer's problems, the happier they will be with your service. 

ART tracks how long it takes your team to resolve an issue from the first contact to the final solution. A lower ART means teams have the skills and capacity to do great work and solve problems. 

Finally, the Average Wait Time metric revolves around customers waiting time before service is provided. As a general rule, decreasing the response time improves customer experience, given that users are given a quick answer that leads to a less stressful interaction. 

Tips to Improve Customer Service Experience KPIs

When it comes to contact center solutions, there are technologies that companies can use to solve the issues mentioned previously, such as long hold times, repetitive communications, and slow response times.

In addition to conducting surveys to assess customer needs and implement changes, companies can boost customer service with AI-powered technology. More and more customer service and support teams are using AI to facilitate day-to-day operations. In fact, 55% of established companies have already started investing in AI technology. Moreover, AI bolsters a company’s ability to develop creative and strategic initiatives and manage the customer experience in a proactive way.

AI-powered contact center solutions and personalization of customer service boost the effort to increase satisfaction by speeding up the service process and collecting data on customers to better understand and serve their needs.

AI features like skill-based routing remove the inconvenience of transferring between multiple reps. Instead, the customer reaches the right person the first time. Personalization of service and quick answers come into play as contact center AI can direct inquiring customers to a strong knowledge base filled with answers pulled from a history of others with the same issue or query.

AI-powered support chats and AI-assisted support agents like our conversational AI tool, Mosaicx , can solve customer requests in much less time than human agents alone. AI-enabled agents create contextual and personalized interactions without help from a human agent. Companies can automate common customer inquiries, minimize wait times, establish easy AI-to-agent handoff, lower average call costs and increase customer retention. As a result, companies will improve the customer experience and see greater customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Great Service + Great Experience = Happy Customers

Understanding the differences between customer service and customer experience is the key to increasing business success. Businesses can maintain this success by analyzing customer experience KPIs, listening to customer feedback, and incorporating new technologies that meet modern customer needs.

In today’s climate, it is essential that companies prioritize the customer experience. AI-enabled contact center solutions can help boost the customer experience. By empathizing with customers and providing what they need, companies ensure a healthy relationship with customers that will benefit both parties in the long term.

IVR vs. IVA: Is There a Difference and Does It Matter?

IVR and IVA are both technologies that allow customers to interact with a company without having to speak to a live agent. They have two purposes....

How Customer Experience Management Gives You a Competitive Advantage

Everyone is looking for an edge over their competitors, and customer experience management may be the best way to gain a competitive advantage....

Not many people want to contact customer service. Usually, that means something went wrong, and it makes things worse when a customer doesn’t get...

Customer Experience vs Customer Service: What Is the Difference and Why Does It Matter?

Don’t know the difference between customer service and customer experience? Read this to find out what they are, how they’re different, and how to measure them.

Freya Laskowski

Freya is an SEO consultant who helps brands scale their organic traffic with content creation and distribution.

Customer experience and customer service are used so often in marketing that they can start to sound the same.

Although there are undeniable similarities, they aren’t the same (or interchangeable).

In this blog post, we’ll explore what customer experience and customer service are, plus their four most significant differences.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience (CX) is the journey your customers go on, starting from when they hear about your brand to when they become loyal, repeat buyers.

This is often called the “sales cycle” or “buyer’s journey.” It includes five main stages:

• Awareness Stage.  This is when the customer realizes they have a need, want, or problem.
• Consideration Stage.  In this stage, the customer starts searching for products or services that will solve a problem or fulfill a need. They start comparing companies to decide who they will buy from.
• Intent Stage.  The customer now engages with a brand (or a few) and expresses interest in their product. They become a lead in this stage. Usually, they graduate to this stage by contacting someone,  subscribing to an email list , downloading a content offer, booking a free trial, etc.
• Decision/Purchase Stage.  The customer reaches this stage once they’ve decided who they will purchase from and have bought the product. They are now officially a customer.
• Loyalty Stage.  In this stage, the customer becomes a repeat buyer, coming to the same brand every time they need more of the product. They also recommend the brand to their friends and family members.

Each stage is an opportunity to provide a top-tier customer experience, pushing the customer to the next stage. Customer experience doesn’t occur in just one stage—it happens across all five.

Customer experience is also multichannel. Everyone who interacts with your brand (whether they’re already customers or not) should have a positive experience no matter where they are. 

For example, customer experience can be impacted by your social media content, blog post content, free content offers and lead magnets, customer service team, email newsletters, reward systems, and more.

HubSpot  breaks providing a high-quality customer experience down into three simple steps:

• Attract  — lead generation and brand awareness tactics (i.e., running ads, content marketing, marketing campaigns, etc.)
• Engage  — interacting with leads and coming up with competitive offers (i.e., prospecting, price quoting, pipeline management, etc.)
• Delight  — leave a positive impression on customers and leads by alleviating pain points, simplifying the buying process, providing support, and more

The “delight” stage includes customer service (which we’ll discuss next), as well as self-service options, customer support, collecting customer feedback, and more.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is an interaction between customers and a brand’s customer support team. 

Someone from the team helps the customer solve problems, answers their questions, explains how to use a product, and ensures they get the most out of their purchase.

However, in digital marketing, customer service can include automated and self-service options. These features allow customers to quickly get the help they need without having to call someone.

One of the most popular self-service options is live chat. For example,  The Patel Law Firm  has a live chat feature that lets potential clients find answers to their questions 24/7, including after the firm’s working hours have ended:

Shaked Law  has a similar feature that allows new visitors and existing clients to text them 24/7 from their website’s homepage:

You can easily add live chat to your website by downloading a plugin supported by your hosting system or hiring a  WordPress developer . 

You could also use free third party apps to add live chat to your website. Some common options include  Tidio  or  Zendesk Messaging . 

There are countless ways to provide high-quality customer service outside of self-service options and staying patient with busy customers on the phone. To name just a few:

• Asking for and collecting customer feedback
• Acting on customer feedback
• Quick response times
• Little to no customers are placed on hold
• Interacting with customers on social media (i.e., answering their messages, responding to comments, etc.)
• Responding to online reviews
• Answering customer support tickets within 24 hours

While your customer service team will mostly interact with existing customers, it’s essential to note that providing world-class customer service to those in the first few stages of the buyer’s journey can heavily impact their decision to buy from you.

Plus, customer service plays a major role in graduating customers from the “decision/purchase” stage to the “loyalty” stage.

Positive customer service keeps retention high—  d ata from Zendesk  reveals that a positive customer service experience led 42% of customers to purchase from the company againm and  according to further  research , repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers.

Finally, customer service is especially important when dealing with existing clients in a service-based business. Many times, you’ll need to communicate with the client after they’ve signed a contract or placed an order to get the details you need to provide the service. This is usually done through an onboarding process.

In this situation, your customer service team’s goal should be to make the process as easy as possible. How can you simplify it to take less time? How will you  request client files  in a safe, secure manner online? Who will be supporting your new client throughout the process?

What’s the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience?

Now that you know customer experience and customer service, let’s explore their four most significant differences.

1. Customer experience is a journey vs. customer service is an interaction

Customer experience starts when someone realizes they have a need and comes across your brand in their search to fill it.

It’s how they interact with your brand and the experience they have with it—how helpful were your blog posts? How engaging is your  social media profile ? How easy is your website to navigate?

Customer service is not a journey—it’s an interaction that often  happens just once.

However, it’s critical to note that customer service impacts the customer experience. Positive, helpful customer service contributes to a customer’s overall experience with your brand. Customer service falls under the “delight” step of improving customer experience—it’s one piece to a much bigger puzzle.

HubSpot summarizes this excellently by describing the steps brands take to improve customer service compared to just a few factors that impact customer experience.

Because of this, customer experience and customer service cannot be used interchangeably. And it’s not a direct relationship that flows both ways.

In other words, if your customer service is poor, customer experience will suffer. But just because your overall customer experience is good, doesn’t mean your customer service is.

2. Customer service and customer experience success are measured differently

Because customer experience and customer service are different, the way you improve and measure them will be different. 

Customer experience entails a seemingly endless list of parts to your marketing strategy, from social media to website navigation. So measuring it is typically less straightforward than customer service. 

Because of this, companies use tons of metrics to track progress. A few of the most common ones are:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)  — measures how easy it is for your customers to find something they’re looking for
• Customer Satisfaction  (CSAT)  — measures how happy or unhappy customers are with any part of your business on a scale of 1-10 (i..e, a product, your customer service team, delivery of a service, etc.)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)  — measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to people they know on a scale of 1-10
• Customer Churn Rate  — measures how many customers you’ve lost over a specified time period
• Customer Retention Rate  — measures how many repeat customers your business has over a specified time period
• Customer Referral Rate  — measures how many customers are referring other people to your business
• Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate  — measures how many people who sign up for free trials turn into paying customers after the trial ends 

Some of these metrics—such as CES, CSTAT, and NPS—require you to use surveys. You can calculate the other metrics by  collecting and using data  you already have, such as Customer Retention Rate and Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate. 

Although customer service is much less broad compared to customer experience (due to being an interaction and only a piece of the overall experience), it’s more difficult to measure without the help of your customers. 

The most common way to measure customer service is through customer feedback surveys.

These can be done quickly at the end of a customer service call. Or you can ask a list of people—previous customers, customers who have recently made a purchase, customers with recently closed support tickets, etc.—to fill out a quick online survey. 

Whichever option you choose, make sure to keep the survey as short as possible. It should take a minute or less to complete.

3. Customer experience is proactive vs. customer service is reactive

Customer experience can be measured at any point in the buyer’s journey based on data you already have. This makes it easy to be proactive about the positive and negative results you discover from those metrics. 

Customer service, on the other hand, is a response to customers reaching out to you with problems or questions. It’s reactive. If no one emailed, called, or submitted support tickets, your customer service team would be jobless.

4. Everyone is responsible for customer experience, but not customer service

Anyone who works with any of your brand’s teams automatically impacts customer experience in some way, whether they’re behind the scenes or on the frontlines. 

To name a few examples:

• Marketing teams that run social media ad campaigns
• Content writers who craft SEO blog posts that will  rank well on Google  and bring more traffic
• Social media managers who schedule content for the week and interact with followers
• Product designers that ensure the product is durable and high-quality 

Customer service, though, is only handled by your customer service team—a group of individuals specifically trained to deal with customers in need, solve problems, and maintain clear communication.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: The Bottom Line

Knowing the difference between customer service and customer experience is important.

They aren’t interchangeable terms, and understanding how they affect one another can improve your  conversion rate and (most importantly) retention rate.

But although they’re different, the most impactful similarity is that they should both continue past the purchase stage and start before it.

No matter which stage your prospects are currently in, if you focus on attracting, engaging, and delighting them, you’ll be on the road to more revenue and a loyal fan base.

About the author

Freya is an SEO consultant who helps brands scale their organic traffic with content creation and distribution. She is a quoted contributor in several online publications, including Business Insider, Fox Business, Yahoo Finance, and the Huffington Post. She also owns CollectingCents- a personal finance blog that she grew from the ground up.   

Related articles

Copyright © SurveySparrow Inc. 2024 Privacy Policy Terms of Service SurveySparrow Inc.

Customer Service vs Customer Experience: Definition, Differences & Examples

Last Updated: 23 May 2024

10 min read

Table Of Contents

The Dawn of a New Customer Era

What is customer service, an example of a customer service interaction, what is customer experience.

• An example of a customer experience interaction
• Customer Service vs. Customer Experience

Surveys: The Key to Better Customer Service and Experience

How can surveysparrow revolutionize your customer experience, wrapping up.

Okay, so today is about customer service vs. customer experience!

How do you handle customer issues or the emotional connection you foster with your customers? If this question leaves you pondering, then welcome aboard. Every interaction between a brand and its customers in the bustling marketplace counts.

Customer Service and Customer Experience. Each plays a distinct role in influencing the performance of businesses in the marketplace. This blog will unravel the definitions, key differences, and real-life examples of both, offering readers an in-depth understanding of their roles in shaping a brand’s identity.

• An Example of a Customer Experience Interaction

As you enter a new era where customer interactions are not just transactions but experiences, it’s imperative to comprehend the difference between Customer Service and Customer Experience. They may sound similar but are as different as chalk and cheese, each with its unique impact on your business narrative.

Customer service is the support and advice provided by a company to those people who purchase or use its products or services. This extends from assisting customers in making cost-effective and correct use of a product to helping troubleshoot and deal with complaints or issues.

Imagine you’ve just bought a new gadget. You’re excited, but there’s a glitch, and it’s not working as expected. That’s when you reach out to the company’s support team. The person on the other side of the phone, email, or chat guides you, addressing your concerns and offering solutions – that’s customer service.

Whether it’s guiding a customer through a complicated setup process, resolving a billing issue, or simply assisting a customer in navigating a company’s product, good customer service ensures a positive, helpful, and friendly interaction between the customer and the company.

Customer Experience, often called CX, is a customer’s broader journey with a brand, encompassing every interaction from the first point of contact to the final purchase.

An example of a Customer Experience Interaction

Picture yourself strolling through a bookstore. The inviting aroma of fresh paper, the neatly organized shelves, the knowledgeable and friendly staff helping you choose the perfect book, the seamless checkout process, and the joy of finding a personalized bookmark inside your new book. Each of these elements contributes to your overall experience.

Similarly, in a digital scenario, it could be the ease of using a website, the personalized recommendations you receive, or the follow-up emails checking your satisfaction with a product.

Unlike customer service, which focuses on resolving specific issues, customer experience is about crafting a journey that leaves customers feeling heard, understood, and cared for at every touchpoint. It’s about building lasting, positive emotional connections that keep customers returning. The end goal of a superior customer experience is a loyal customer who not only continually chooses your brand but also advocates for it.

Are you looking for a Customer Experience Survey Template? Access it for free.

Preview Template

Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

Defining customer service vs. customer experience can feel like trekking through a labyrinth, as the two are intricately linked. However, their differences emerge when we illuminate the distinct roles each plays.

Customer Service is typically reactive. It springs into action when a customer encounters an issue with a product or service. It’s about addressing specific queries or complaints and providing immediate resolution to ensure customer satisfaction. Imagine you bought a new phone and can’t figure out a particular feature. The help you get from the company to understand and use that feature is customer service.

On the flip side, Customer Experience is far more comprehensive and proactive. It involves every interaction a customer has with a company, from the moment they learn about it through their engagement with the company’s products or services. A seamless website navigation, a smooth checkout process, easy product setup, and personalized communications are part of the customer experience.

Customer service is a single touchpoint within the larger journey of customer experience. Both are crucial yet serve different purposes in the realm of customer interactions. Understanding and leveraging both appropriately can create a symphony of positive interactions and memorable experiences, leading to satisfied and loyal customers.

Surveys play a fundamental role in curating compelling customer service and experience. They act as a compass, guiding businesses toward understanding customer sentiments, needs, and expectations.

Let’s delve into the roles of surveys in fostering meaningful customer service and experience.

Tapping into the Customer’s Mind

Surveys serve as a direct communication channel between a business and its customers. They give customers a platform to voice their thoughts, providing businesses with valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. These insights can then be used to enhance both customer service and experience.

For instance, if customers express dissatisfaction with response times, businesses can focus on improving this aspect of customer service. Likewise, if customers indicate they value personalized product recommendations, this insight can be used to enhance the overall customer experience.

Evaluating Customer Service Effectiveness

Surveys allow businesses to measure the effectiveness of their customer service. Companies can gather data on areas like resolution speed, communication quality, and overall satisfaction by asking customers about their recent interactions with the customer service team.

This feedback can be invaluable in training customer service teams and improving practices to meet customer expectations better.

Understanding Customer Experience

While customer service focuses on individual interactions, customer experience is the cumulative effect of all touchpoints a customer has with a business. Surveys help map these touchpoints and understand the customer’s journey. They highlight areas of friction and reveal opportunities for creating delightful experiences.

For example, customers might find a business’s website difficult to navigate or feel bombarded by excessive promotional emails. Identifying these pain points through surveys can help businesses optimize their customer journey, leading to a better customer experience.

Tracking Changes Over Time

Surveys aren’t a one-time deal. Conducting them regularly helps businesses track changes in customer perceptions over time. This longitudinal data can reveal trends, measure the impact of new initiatives, and help businesses adapt to evolving customer needs and expectations.

In conclusion, surveys are potent tools for businesses to understand their customers better and create superior customer service and experience. By providing direct customer feedback, they empower businesses to make informed decisions and forge stronger customer relationships.

SurveySparrow is more than just a survey tool – it’s a comprehensive platform transforming how businesses engage with their customers. Here’s how SurveySparrow can revolutionize your customer experience

Let’s explore more standout features of SurveySparrow that can take your customer experience to the next level:

Recurring Surveys

Keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment with the recurring surveys feature. This allows you to schedule automatic surveys at specified intervals, which is ideal for tracking changes in customer opinions over time.

Mobile-First Surveys

In the era of smartphones, ensuring mobile-friendly surveys is critical. Enjoy high response rates even from mobile users, thanks to the mobile-first surveys designed for optimal performance on smaller screens.

Advanced Logic Features

Including advanced logic features like skip logic, display logic, and scoring leads to dynamic, personalized surveys. This not only boosts completion rates but also yields more precise data.

Multilingual Surveys

Language should never be a hurdle in gathering feedback. Broaden your survey’s reach and inclusivity by utilizing the multilingual surveys feature, designed to cater to customers in the language they’re most comfortable with.

White-Label Surveys

Consistency in brand experience is key. By fully customizing and branding your surveys – from URL to logo, colors, and fonts – you’re providing a consistent brand experience across all customer interactions.

Audience Management

Manage and segment your audience directly within the platform, allowing for targeted surveys to different customer segments. This improves the relevancy and effectiveness of your surveys, leading to more actionable insights.

Rich Insight Dashboards

Harness the power of rich insight dashboards that provide real-time data and advanced filtering options. These reports, exportable in various formats, can fuel data-driven decisions to shape an exceptional customer experience.

Secure and Compliant

Security is paramount. By adhering to GDPR compliance, you can ensure that your survey data is securely stored and handled, building customer trust.

By tapping into these standout features, businesses can gather and analyze customer feedback more effectively. This paves the way for shaping a customer experience that is not just remarkable but also truly memorable.

Sign up for free and get access to a survey tool that does it all.

14-day free trial • Cancel Anytime • No Credit Card Required • No Strings Attached

In the grand scheme, customer service and customer experience play pivotal roles in crafting your brand’s narrative. Understanding these terms, their differences and their intertwining roles forms the foundation of effective business operations. Harnessing the power of survey platforms like SurveySparrow, with its array of standout features, you’re empowered to gather and analyze crucial customer feedback.

This isn’t just about resolving queries or streamlining processes; it’s about shaping memorable customer journeys. At the end of the day, every touchpoint matters, and every voice counts. It’s time to turn feedback into your most powerful tool and let your customers lead the way to exceptional service and unparalleled experiences.

Growth Marketer at SurveySparrow

Passionate, eidetic, and a writer at large.

You Might Also Like

Top 10 HIPAA Compliant Survey Tools: Safeguarding Your Health Data

Technical SEO Best Practices: Enhancing Website Performance

Patient Feedback: Definition, Purpose and Benefits (With Free Template)

SurveyMonkey vs SurveyGizmo: Detailed Comparison

Turn every feedback into a growth opportunity.

14-day free trial • Cancel Anytime • No Credit Card Required • Need a Demo?

Good vs Great Customer Service Experience—What's the Difference?

Customer experience is a top priority for consumers. So much so that 86% of customers will pay more for a great experience. And if they are not satisfied, not buying from you is the least they can do . 

In a world where most of us are glued to our smartphones, reports of bad customer experiences spread online very quickly. It's vital that you design your customer service experience in a way that makes your customers feel that you do care about them. 

Today, we’ll show you how to turn a good customer service experience you might already deliver into a great customer service experience your customers will fall in love with. 

In the meantime, you can start discovering what matters most to your customers with a Voice of Customer survey :

What is customer service experience?

Customer service experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with a company, both in direct communication and through other actions. These experiences can include checking out after making a purchase, talking to a sales representative, or trying to return a product.

Why is customer service experience important?

First of all, customer experience affects your customers’ loyalty to your brand and how they talk about you to other people, both online and offline. Retaining customers is the only natural way to grow businesses, and research says so, too. In fact, acquiring a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one .

If you deliver at least decent customer service experience, it pays off in more referrals, more satisfied customers, more sustainable growth, and more feedback you can use to develop your product or services further. 

And a lack of customer service experience measures can, in turn, lead to disappointment on all sides.

The difference between good and great customer service experience

The little things that you do to make your customer feel valued can make a huge difference in how they perceive your brand.

Let's suppose your customer is experiencing a problem and they’re speaking directly with your team. 

Good customer service experience means you’ll hear their problems and assess how to tackle them. You look at what to do. Your customer service agents may not find a solution instantly, but in the end, the problem is remedied. 

Great customer service experience , however, means that you’ll listen to their problems and look for solutions straight away. You quickly see what can be done, and how. If applicable, you compensate your client and turn a negative situation into a positive brand experience.

One of the many ways you can collect feedback on your customers' needs is by using surveys :

To offer great customer service experience, you need to have a solid customer experience strategy in place and clear processes for your team to follow. That way, every customer gets the same quality of customer service.

Every step of the customer experience with you, from discovery to post-purchase support, should be designed with your customers in mind . 

Think about Amazon. It’s become a powerhouse thanks to the fantastic customer experience it provides. Whether you’re just browsing, going through the checkout process, or returning an item: it just works.

Delivering great customer service experience doesn’t always have to be about going the extra mile. Very often, it’s just doing the right things in the right way.

Great customer service experience: an example

Here's an example of a small business giving the best customer experience:

"I bought my car used from a dealership, and after seeing the advert online, I called to check if it was still available. It was. So the next day I went to have a look at it.

The moment I arrived, I looked at the car and then went inside to talk to the salesman, who was also the owner. He immediately got up, got the car out of the bay, handed me the keys, and let me have my time with the vehicle .

He didn't hover or try and tell me what to do. He just let me take the car out.

When I got back, I said I liked it. I asked if there was any movement on the price, and we quickly made a deal . I put down my deposit, and the next day I returned to pay in full and collected the car.

Doing the paperwork at his desk was stress-free: We were sitting in an open space with big windows. His wife was working at another desk, and their cocker spaniel was weaving around my feet. When everything was signed and paid for, we shook hands. I took my car home, enjoying the awareness of having a year-long warranty included in the deal."

What makes this customer service experience great?

"Buying a car is stressful. If the seller had hovered around bombarding me with questions while I was trying to figure things out, it would have turned me off. At no point did I feel pressured or like a nuisance.

While I was waiting for the paperwork to be done, a customer came in. The woman wanted to have her car worked on in the shop. She seemed to be deliberately difficult. I sat there admiring how he and his wife dealt with that awkward customer with considerable aplomb."

How you can ensure a great customer service process 

What steps can you take to ensure that you provide an excellent experience? 

Do you remember the last time you had to call customer service to get a question answered about a product or service? Can you recall the experience?

You went to the website, found a contact number, and you embarked on a long wait that lasted way too long, making you anxious about the bill you'd pay. Finally, when you managed to get through, you didn't get help.

Maybe the person was rude, perhaps just incompetent, and, since the call was recorded, they passed you on to somebody else.

Or, maybe they transferred your call, and then the connection broke. Or you hit a communication barrier, unable to break through the jargon they used. 

There are countless things that can go wrong with customer service today. How can you provide customer service experience that excels?

1. Use a customer feedback management system

With solid customer feedback management software, you can provide the best customer experience at every touchpoint along a customer journey.

Customer feedback software allows you to:

• easily create and send surveys,
• gain insights into how customers experience using your product or service,
• have an overview of all the feedback you receive in one platform, 
• detect the most pressing problems your customers have that may lead to customer churn ,
• integrate with other solutions to make the most of your data.

Any company should understand the importance of customer service. Still, if you want to excel at providing top customer experiences, track customer experience metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS): 

and the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). 

The first one measures your customers' readiness to promote you. The latter tells you how satisfied your customers are with various aspects of your product or service.

Good customer feedback management software, such as Survicate, integrates with major marketing platforms, including Intercom and Hubspot .

This way, you can analyze the feedback you proactively gain with surveys and expand it even further. Moreover, you can compare it with the feedback your customers voluntarily give in your communication channels. The result is an accurate picture of your customer experience .

2. Offer multiple customer service channels

Providing your customers with avenues such as a website, blog content , phone number, text message, email, and social media channels allows them to reach you the way that works for them.

It’s often said that millennials hate picking up the phone to make a call. Creating different opportunities to connect with reps avoids lousy customer service experiences that ruin your reputation. 

3. Be proactive in your customer service

Being reactive is not ideal for customer service. 

Be proactive instead. If you're only talking to your customers when there's a problem, then you're doing something wrong.

Reach out to your customers and give them an opportunity to give feedback about their experience. This allows you to mitigate any issues before they escalate.

Here is a Customer Effort Score survey template you could send out to your customers to gather their feedback:

This type of survey helps you test how difficult it is for customers to perform a certain activity with your product or service. You can use the survey template above for free—just sign up for a Survicate freemium plan and you’ll find it in the template library.

4. Provide consistency in your customer service

Regardless of what avenue you're using, customer service should be customer-centric and consistent. Adjust the communication channel to the preferences of your target group. Make all the communication—be it on the phone, via email, or text—consistent.   

And remember: great customer experience starts with great employee experience. 

If something doesn't feel right, you need to identify the challenges and bottlenecks within your department. For this purpose, you can also use surveys. With Survicate, you can measure employee satisfaction with easy-to-use templates.

5. Manage customer expectations

A lot of customer dissatisfaction stems from misinformation or incorrect expectations. That is why it is essential to go the extra mile to make sure your messaging is logically designed against customer/user journey maps.  

To manage customer expectations, you must commit to educating your business about what your customers need and how they perceive your product or services. 

Here are some survey templates you can send out regularly to collect customer feedback : 

• Net Promoter Score will reveal how likely your customers are to recommend you to someone they know.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) will put a number on the customer satisfaction level. Make sure you run the survey at touchpoints crucial to your business. 
• Customer Effort Score will show you which types of processes your customers are struggling with and how.

There are countless types of surveys you can use to collect customer feedback. To get inspired, check out a list of survey templates most popular with Survicate's customers. There are over 125 templates that you can use for free and customize to suit your needs.

Common signs of poor customer service 

Here are some fairly common causes of poor customer service. If any of the items on this list apply to your business, you need to reevaluate the way you provide customer support.

1. Providing only one specific channel for customer service

If you provide only a phone number or only an online contact form, you’re not doing everything you can to help customers reach out to you. Not every customer loves to sit hours on the phone with a customer service representative, and not everyone will take the time to write to you using a form. 

A good rule of thumb is supporting customers on the same platform they used to contact you. So, you shouldn’t redirect your clients to a phone call if they sent their request via email, and vice versa. 

Livechat apps and chatbots are a growing market for a very good reason: customers feel less intimidated by using a chat than by filling in a contact form. Chatbots are also proactive, which takes the weight of starting the conversation off your customers' shoulders. 

If you want to find out if your helpdesk is doing a good job, this survey template will be particularly useful: 

2. Displaying poor communication skills and little empathy

There are few things worse than being frustrated with a bad customer service representative. Someone rude either doesn't listen to your issue or can't relate to the problem you are experiencing. That’s if you manage to reach them… 

In business, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and react immediately if something doesn’t work. 

Keep a close eye on individual agent performance to spot underperforming reps in time. If someone in your team is not great at showing empathy, you can offer them additional training.

You can use this survey template to learn directly from your clients how your customer service is performing:

3. Fear of ownership

Everyone makes mistakes. When someone at your company does something wrong, you need to own up. Make sure that your customer service staff know when to admit they, or the company, put a foot wrong. Train them to be polite when apologizing. 

According to research by American Express, 33% of customers say they’d consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service. However, most of them are willing to stay if the company shows genuine remorse. 

Even if you're unsure whether it should be you saying this, a simple "we apologize" can go a long way.

4. Not educating customers

Customer service fails when customers don't understand the company's process. Whether they're returning a product or looking to get assistance with some other issue, educating them step by step is crucial.

It’s not about putting a few FAQs or contact details here and there. It’s actually about creating and publishing helpful resources for your clients so they can find their answers more quickly. For example, you can use an open-ended website survey asking “why are you leaving our site?” inside your help desk resources. 

Create an amazing customer service experience today

Customers expect support to be tailored to their needs, work seamlessly, and to take place immediately. Alongside all those expectations, they also value the human touch.

Your business simply cannot afford to deliver a mediocre customer service experience. To stand out from the crowd, you need to sweep your customers off their feet. 

And it does not have to be complicated or expensive. In fact, all the best things in life are free, including Survicate.

With Survicate, you can use over 300 survey templates and start collecting customer feedback where it matters. If you’re ready to gather amazing client insights, sign up today for a 10-day free trial and check out all Business plan features free of charge.

We’re also there

Ready for the future of customer service?

Download your free report: The 2024 Inner Circle Guide on Chatbots and Conversational AI

Customer Service vs Customer Experience: Key Differences

Customer service and customer experience are two terms that get thrown around a lot in business, but their definitions can be elusive.

The phrases are often used interchangeably, but in reality they are different things.

Put simply, customer service is one part of a holistic customer experience.

Customer experience refers to the complete journey a customer takes with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase care.

Customer service refers to a single event when a customer reaches out for help and support during this journey. 

Both are equally important contributors to the success of your business.

You can’t do one one well without the other, which is why it’s so important to know what they are and how they are different. 

In this post, we take an in-depth look at the customer service vs customer experience question. We'll cover:

• What is customer experience?
• What is customer service?
• The key differences between customer experience and customer service
• How to succeed at both

As mentioned, customer experience (CX) refers to the entire journey a customer takes with your business.

It's a key brand differentiator and an important factor in the success of a business.

In fact, SuperOffice reports that customers spend 140% more and remain loyal for up to 6 years when they rate a brand highly for customer experience.

CX involves many touchpoints and engagement channels across multiple departments. 

Imagine your company is a retail business that specialises in selling fashionable trainers.

Here’s an example of a simple customer experience journey in that scenario: ‍

• A potential customer searches for ‘best trainers of 2020’ in Google and comes across a blog post from your company titled ‘Ten Trendiest Trainers of 2020’. They click the link to be taken to the post on your site. 
• Whilst reading the post, a pair of trainers on the list really catches their eye, so they click the internal link to arrive on the product page.
• At this stage, they aren’t sure if they want to buy the trainers, so they leave your site. 
• A few days later, they are browsing Facebook when they see a targeted advert for your business. 
• They click the advert to be taken back to the trainers’ product page. This time they decide to make a purchase either through your website or app. 
• When placing the trainers in their basket, they wonder if they can be bought in blue and white, as well as the traditional red and white, so they initiate a live chat using the chat widget on the web/app page to ask a customer service advisor.
• After chatting and understanding the customer’s enquiry, the advisor escalates the live chat to a video chat interaction to show the customer the trainers in different colours.
• The customer is happy with the further information and thanks the advisor - the interaction ends.
• After seeing the trainers in different colours, the customer opts for the blue and white version. They edit their basket accordingly and complete their purchase.
•  A few days later, the trainers are delivered. The customer is very happy with the product and their experience with your brand, so they continue to purchase trainers and accompanying accessories from you in the future. 

In this example, the customer had multiple touchpoints with the business (blog, website, in-app feedbacks , social media , live chat, video chat), and encountered the work of different departments (marketing, customer service, sales) to complete their customer journey .

Each step of the journey made up the overall customer experience.

The key to creating an optimal customer experience is making sure all the touchpoints are linked, allowing customers to jump between them.

• What is customer service? 

Customer service refers to the customer support function of a business.

It’s the help and advice offered to customers when they have a question or an issue concerning your product or service.

Unlike customer experience, customer service is an isolated event and only involves customer-facing departments.

It typically involves human contact with brands, but as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, we are seeing more and more automation involved in customer service too.

Chatbots, for example, are increasingly used by businesses to deal with FAQs and to direct initial enquiries to the right advisor. 

Going back to the example used above, steps 6 and 7 of the journey saw the customer have contact with customer service.

They reached out via live chat, and the advisor used their resources (in this case video chat) to best serve the customer and answer their question. 

In this way, customer service makes up one part of the overall customer experience with a business.

That's why providing exceptional customer service is essential if you want to improve the customer experience .

Key differences between customer service & customer experience

Now we know what customer service and customer experience are, let’s explore the main differences between them.

1) Holistic experience vs specific interaction

A major distinction in customer service vs customer experience is the number of touchpoints involved and the length of the interaction.  

• Customer experience refers to the entire customer journey. This encompasses discovery and awareness of a business, through to initial purchase and post-purchase care, to hopefully repeated purchases. As a result, it involves numerous touchpoints and means multiple departments need to be involved in creating a positive customer experience. Not every customer journey will look the same, but all will involve more than one interaction with a business. In this way, customer experience is holistic. 
• Customer service is part of customer experience: it’s one step of a customer’s journey. Some customers will not need to interact with customer service and others may need more than one interaction during their journey. The role of customer service is to support the customer by solving their issue, which improves their overall experience. This involves the work of customer-facing departments, and typically involves just one or two touchpoints. In this way, customer service refers to a particular customer interaction with a business.

2) Reactive vs proactive

Another key difference between service and experience is who leads the process: is it the customer or is it the business? Is it reactive or proactive?

• Customer experience is all about anticipating the needs of the customer. Through customer journey mapping , studying funnel drop-off points and website analytics, and asking for customer feedback , businesses constantly work to improve the brand experience and ensure customers don’t run into problems. Where needed, this could involve steering customers to initiate a customer service interaction. In this way, customer experience is proactive. 
• Customer service is nearly always initiated by the customer. The customer faces a problem so they reach out to a business’ support services via their preferred channel. In this way, customer service is reactive.

3) Ongoing relationship vs isolated event

The last difference between customer service and customer experience is how they are measured and connected to other events. 

• Customer experience is all about the customer’s relationship with a business. It cannot be quantified or pinned down to one single event or interaction. In this way, customer experience is an ongoing relationship - if a customer keeps coming back to your business, their customer experience continues. 
• Customer service refers to a specific event, i.e. a customer reaching out for help and support, or making a complaint. As an event, it can be measured by a number of metrics, such as first time resolution rate and average response time . In this way, customer service is a quantifiable, isolated event. 

The takeaway: how to succeed at service & experience

Despite the differences between them, customer service and customer experience are inextricably linked.

Ultimately, a business needs to succeed at both in order to thrive and foster lasting brand loyalty.

And in an increasingly saturated market, offering outstanding customer service and experiences is the only sure-fire way to stand out from your competitors.

But how can you ensure that your brand is able to meet these high standards?

You can start by investing in the right platform.

Talkative’s customer engagement solution was specifically designed to power superior service and next-level, personalized experiences at every digital touchpoint.

We provide a complete suite of engagement channels including web calling , live chat , cobrowsing , video chat , messaging , and an AI-powered chatbot .

And you’ll be able to manage all customer interactions, from all channels, within a single pane of glass.

As a result, you and your customer advisors will be fully equipped to engage and convert more customers than ever before.

Want to see for yourself? Book a demo with Talkative today.

• Customer service vs. customer experience
• The takeaway

Engage more customers in just three minutes

Get your weekly three minute read on making every customer interaction both personable and profitable. Sign up to the Talkative newsletter now.

Download The 2024 Inner Circle Guide to Chatbots & Conversational AI

Customer service vs customer experience: 5 key differences

Curious about the differences between customer service vs customer experience ?

Many organizations use the terms customer service and customer experience interchangeably.

However, they don’t mean the same thing. 

From the point of activation to their approaches , there are a lot of differences between both. 

In this article, we’ll explore what customer service and customer experience are and highlight five key differences between the two. We’ll also take a look at how you can provide fantastic customer service and customer experience.

This article covers:

(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section)

• The Point of Activation
• One-time Interaction vs. Overall Experience
• Reactive vs. Proactive Approach
• Different Performance Metrics
• Different Tech Stacks
• 3 Actionable Tips to Provide Good Customer Service
• 3 Simple Tips to Provide a Great Customer Experience

Let’s get started.

Customer service vs customer experience: 5 major differences

First, we’ll understand what customer service and customer experience mean. 

A. What is customer service?

Customer service is the assistance (or advice) your support team provides to your customers during and after purchasing your product or service.

Your organization can provide customer service in different ways, such as:

• Chatbots and FAQs : To solve basic consumer queries via self-service.
• Call support : For quick escalation.
• Live chat and email support : For customers on the go.

Additionally, customers can rely on live chats or call support if they’re unsatisfied with the self-service options.

Why’s a positive customer service experience crucial to business success ?

Customers who have a bad experience with your customer service team will most likely not remain loyal customers. As a result, to boost customer retention , your customer service team needs to avoid poor customer service.

Additionally, good customer service enhances customer loyalty and improves your chances of making an additional sale to the customer.

Next, we’ll look at what customer experience is and how it differs from customer service.

B. What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience refers to how a business interacts with its customers at every point in a customer’s journey.

In a customer experience ecosystem , your business interacts with the customer even before they complete their purchase and continues after the sale is made. 

As a result, customer experience is an ongoing process .

Here are the three most important areas to provide a better customer experience:

• People : Customers want to communicate with helpful and qualified team members. This includes communication with your customer care team and sales team. 
• Process : Customers prefer a seamless experience across their entire journey. By following a customer experience design process, teams can optimize processes at every touchpoint.
• Product : Customers want high-quality products that solve their problems. As a result, you’ll need to identify your unique selling points to provide a good customer experience.

And while all three are distinct components, your company needs to improve on all of them to ensure a positive customer experience.

Now that we’ve understood what customer service and customer experience mean, let’s take a closer look at their differences.  

1. The point of activation

Customer service usually begins when a customer approaches your business for purchase, assistance, or clarification. As a result, the customer initiates the customer service process , and it ends once the issue or query is resolved.

Additionally, every customer service interaction is part of the larger and unified customer experience.

On the other hand, the customer experience process begins even when the customer is still just a prospect. For example, social media ads and blog posts can leave an impression on potential customers and hence are part of the customer experience.

In other words, customer experience remains active throughout the entire customer journey. Companies may also use insights about customer preferences from historical customer data to reactivate passive customers.

And it doesn’t matter if you have an online or brick-and-mortar business. You must always focus on giving customers the best experience across all touchpoints.

2. One-time interaction vs. overall experience

One of the key differences between customer service and customer experience is the number of touchpoints involved in the customer’s journey.

For example, your customer will only interact with your customer service team when there’s an issue to resolve. This will involve your customer-facing departments and typically require only one or two touchpoints .

On the other hand, from the initial sale to the post-sale service to repeated purchases, customer experience relies on multiple business interactions and impressions. 

And while not every customer journey is the same, one thing is certain – almost every customer will interact with your business more than once.

As a result, customer service is only a part of the customer lifecycle, whereas customer experience is the entire journey. 

3. Reactive vs. proactive approach

Customer service and customer experience also have unique problem-solving methods.

Remember, customer service is typically initiated by the customer while facing a pre-sale or post-sale problem. 

Here, customers can usually reach out to your business via their preferred communication channels , including phone, email, messaging, or live chat. In this regard, customer service can be described as a passive or reactive method. 

On the other hand, customer experience is all about anticipating your customers’ needs through various means. This involves using customer journey maps, satisfaction surveys, website analytics, or even useful metrics like customer churn rate. 

This proactive approach can help you improve your relationships with your customers and boost brand loyalty. 

4. Different performance metrics

Customer service and customer experience rely on different performance metrics to address customer’s needs. 

Performance metrics help you determine the effectiveness of your customer service and customer experience team. 

For example, customer service teams use the customer effort score (CES) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to measure performance. Since it’s calculated on a case-by-case basis, it’s always interaction-specific. 

On the flip side, customer experience is measured through extensive surveys depicting the entire customer experience or level of satisfaction. 

You can also measure customer experience by keeping a close watch on your company’s social media accounts, product feedback page, or feedback survey form.

5. Different tech stacks

Customer service teams generally use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to keep track of customer interactions.

A CRM platform is a customer management software that helps customer support teams manage interactions with existing and potential customers. 

With CRMs, you can store customer contacts, delegate duties, and automate repetitive tasks. This way, your customer service agents can improve every customer’s journey.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is much more extensive and requires more than a single platform. Nowadays, to provide an exceptional customer experience, your company needs to collect relevant customer data from every possible touchpoint.

For example, you need to collect data from marketing channels (website and social media analytics), sales channels (CRM), packaging, and finance.

To truly improve your brand’s value proposition, you need to get both the overall customer experience and the customer service provided right.

So we’ll take a look at how you can improve your customer service and customer experience.   

3 actionable tips to provide good customer service

Good customer service is essential for customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It also helps in positive word-of-mouth marketing, bringing in more sales and profits. 

Here are three ways you can provide great customer service:

1. Personalize customer interaction

Customers need more than just automated messages — they need human interaction as well.

To build a fantastic customer relationship, you need to personalize your interactions with your customers. This is crucial since most customers expect an experience that’s tailored to their unique preferences. 

For example, you can:

• Use your customer’s name while communicating with them, whether that’s via email or live chat.
• Use the customer’s past purchasing data to recommend products to their liking.

However, many customers are often reluctant to share their data. 

An Accenture survey found that 83% of respondents were willing to give companies their data for better personalization.

2. Make data-driven decisions

In 2017, the Economist published a report titled “The world’s most valuable resource is data, not oil.” Since its publication, “Data is the new oil” has become a common buzzword.

What does it mean?

Data can fuel everything from marketing strategies to AI-based chatbots.

To keep up with changing customer needs, you need to equip your employees with analytics and customer service software that gives them instant access to customer data across multiple channels. 

In doing so, you’ll enable your support team to go beyond capturing data and focus more on reacting to different data trends.

For example, once a customer is registered on your website using their email address, you can collect more data as they’re browsing your website.

In addition, having access to real-time and historical data means that your team can take action on what’s trending at the moment and change course if needed.

3. Provide omni-channel support

In this age of social media and chatting tools, customers prefer to connect with businesses in multiple ways. A customer on the move should be able to contact you via their preferred communication channel , like live chat.

By providing omnichannel support, you’re already halfway there in delivering excellent customer service.

So how do you do this? Simple: by equipping your agents with technology that lets them switch across different channels quickly.

However, you should also train your customer support agents to handle questions via phone, email, social media, and live chat.

Lastly, customer service is just one part of the customer journey. You also need to provide a seamless customer experience.

So, how do you provide a great customer experience? 

We’ll find out next.

If you want a comprehensive understanding of omnichannel support, check out our guide on Omnichannel Contact Centers.

3 simple tips to provide a great customer experience

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is important for any business.

But what makes a customer experience great?

Here are three things to keep in mind to help you provide a great customer experience:  

1. Pay attention to customer feedback

It’s no secret that customer feedback is paramount for meeting customer expectations.

Constantly asking for your customers’ opinions and incorporating that feedback into your customer experience strategy can make your customers feel valued.

Here’s how you can use customer feedback to grow your business:

• Follow-up with your customer base: It’s important to use real-time or post-purchase surveys to get a customer’s perception of your business. These follow-ups can give you insight into areas that you succeed in and need to improve on.
• Pay attention to social media : Pay close attention to platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. For this, you can use a social listening tool to monitor and analyze online conversations about your brand.
• Keep a close eye on review websites : Check for your product reviews on third-party websites like TripAdvisor or Amazon.

That’s why, regardless of your business type, you need to engage with your customers wherever they are.

2. Take advantage of analytics tools

How do you know if your customer experience efforts are paying off?

The answer lies in measuring business results.

You can monitor key customer experience metrics in real-time with the help of powerful business intelligence tools like Tableau and Oracle Analytics Cloud.

Many organizations also use the NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure the success of customer experience. Since NPS is easy to visualize, it’s a favorite among marketing executives.

3. Optimize your customers’ journeys

You need to consider the entire customer journey when creating an excellent customer experience.

To do this, you need to create a customer experience design process with the help of your customer experience management team. 

Customer experience design is the process of optimizing the customer experience across all touchpoints.

Here’re some examples of how your team can optimize a customer’s journey:

• Send them personalized recommendations of your new products based on their previous purchase history.
• As the needs and habits of the customer evolve, their preference also changes. Consistently review your customer profile to keep offering a personalized experience.
• Provide omnichannel personalization by collecting data from all channels, including websites, social media, phone calls, mobile apps.

Focusing on the customers’ journey and identifying problems within each step helps you determine ways to improve the customer experience.

Although customer service and customer experience are quite different, the two work hand-in-hand to build strong customer relationships .

A strong customer experience at every touchpoint increases the likelihood of converting a prospect into a customer. And a robust customer service setup will ensure long-term customer retention. 

Use the information we covered here to improve the way you serve your customers and achieve customer success.

View a free demo of Time Doctor

Andy is a technology & marketing leader who has delivered award-winning and world-first experiences.

Why top companies track customer experience analytics

15 key points you must include in your outsourcing agreement, related posts, what’s the average salary in pakistan, understanding soc 2 compliance: key concepts, best practice and the benefits of..., how time doctor makes flsa compliance easier, your quick-start guide to gdpr compliance in 2024, understanding the 3 levels of employee engagement, what is the average salary in thailand.

• Loop Messaging
• Loop Blissful Kiosk
• Loop Elegant Kiosk
• Loop Nugget Kiosk
• Loop Walley Kiosk
• Channels of Engagement
• Enteprise Integrations
• Facilities Management
• Food Services
• Hospitality
• Case Studies
• White Papers
• Help Center
• Company Culture

The Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service 

For many, the terms customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably. It’s understandable, they sound similar and they both can be used as a measurement for business success. 

However, while they may hold similarities, customer experience and customer service couldn’t be more different. 

With today’s importance of providing an exceptional customer experience, it’s important to differentiate these two terms. In this blog, we’re defining customer experience and customer service, while highlighting the key differentiators and how you can measure them for greater success. 

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the sum of all interactions between business and consumer. It covers every aspect of the buying journey, from the moment a customer discovers your product or service, to well after they’ve experienced it. As Hubspot so eloquently wrote, customer experience is the customer’s view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line, including revenue. When measuring the customer experience, there are many moving parts and teams to consider, rather than measuring one specific interaction, the customer experience involves measuring many. 

For the sake of further defining customer experience, let’s put it into real-life practice. Let’s say you’ve begun running ads for a product; A customer sees your ad on social media and likes it. Three days later, because of that ad, the same customer visits your website, browses your products, and sends a message via your web chat. The customer purchases a product for curbside pickup and visits your store to obtain the item. After the experience, they follow up with an email to review their service and provide valuable feedback. 

This entire scenario from the moment the customer saw the ad, to them providing feedback is the customer experience journey. It’s a flow of touchpoints and a sum of interactions with your customer.  

What is Customer Service?

Customer service alternatively, is the one on one interaction between customer and business, holding value as a part of the customer experience. It is a single moment within the experience where the customer reaches out and asks for assistance, clarification, or provides a valuable comment. This means that the quality of service is dependent on the support your business and employees offer and is the key to retaining and building great customer relationships.

Now, let’s see customer service as a real-life example. Imagine a customer has recently purchased your product, they love it but are unsure if they are reaping the full benefits. The customer reaches out to your business via a phone call and asks to speak to a representative that can help explain the product use cases and benefits. The employee assists them, the customer receives their answer and the interaction is complete.

Customer service in this scenario is the representative’s time with the customer, explaining the product, answering questions, and asking for feedback. Whether the service is good or bad, is dependent on how the employee interacts and empathizes. In summary, customer service is only a fraction of the entire experience. 

Key Differentiators

In order to emphasize the differences between both customer service and customer experience, here we break down the top differentiators.

Customer Service Focuses on Support

The nature of customer service is directly tied to the support that employees provide to customers. Whether it is helping a customer find the right size of shoe, collecting information on faulty items, or taking a customer’s order, customer service is designed to strengthen relationships and make the customer’s life easier through support.

Customer Experience is Holistic

It’s evident in the definitions provided that customer experience focuses on the holistic journey, where customer service is limited to the direct interaction with the employee and the support that they provide. 

Rather than measuring between customer and employee, the experience involves many moving parts and teams that need to be consistently measured over time.

Proactive vs. Reactive

Where customer experience aims to be proactive in analyzing, planning and providing elements of great experience, customer service is often reactive in that it is the result of a customer needing support. Although there are cases where an employee may reach out to a customer, customer service is often used as a way to resolve issues, answer frequently asked questions, and improve customer satisfaction.

Customer Experience Empowers Great Service

While customer service is undoubtedly the key to a thriving business, customer experience is what dictates the quality of service your business provides. Creating a thorough experience plan, and measuring key moments of the journey, can help businesses understand customers better to empower great service. 

How to Measure Customer Service and Customer Experience For Success

Now that we’ve provided a clear distinction between these two powerhouse business terms, it’s important to understand how you can measure each for greater customer insight and business success.

Using a customer experience management platform such as Loop, measuring becomes simplified. With it you can measure the customer experience as a whole, while also obtaining granular service data on individual employee performance – all in real-time. 

From a customer service perspective, a sophisticated CEM can provide a suite of employee-facing metrics . Understand top-performing and underperforming employees, discover rush hours for scheduling, understand establishment standards, and obtain trending topics of conversation for service/product adjustment. Further, with a CEM like the Loop Experience Platform, you can measure over a customized time period, and provide employees with real-time insights while working to improve service and create a friendly work environment.

In terms of measuring the entire experience, a customer experience management system can also provide a holistic view of performance. Measure from multiple locations and obtain trending topics along with heatmaps for general data on experience. Further, understand the average customer sentiment, operational performance, messaging channels most used, critical customer touchpoints, and much more to elevate the overall experience. With a customer experience management system, you can obtain data to help you strategize and understand motives in order to adjust experience, retain customers and maximize revenue.

Looking to obtain more insight from your customers? Contact us and discover how the Loop Experience Platform has helped some of the world’s leading customer-centric brands. 

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Have The Loop Report Delivered to Your Inbox Monthly Join customer experience leaders and receive customer engagement tips and resources delivered directly to your inbox with  The Loop Report  each month.

Benbria needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.

Latest Blogs

• (855) 776-7763

All Products

Knowledge Base

Survey Maker

ProProfs.com

• Get Started Free

FREE. All Features. FOREVER!

Try our Forever FREE account with all premium features!

Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Key Differences

Customer Service & CX Specialists

ProProfs Help Desk Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about help desk management. We update you on the latest trends, dive into technical topics, and offer insights to elevate your business.

Do you feel a sense of confusion around the terms customer success vs. customer experience? You are not alone. 

Business terminologies can seem greek to most people. But understanding the smallest of differences between important terms can help you become a customer-centric brand. 

The quality of both customer success and customer experience can help you alter the customers’ perception of your brand, encourage repeat purchases, increase loyalty, and drive business growth. 

Customer success (CS) is a term that has gained massive popularity in recent years. But what does it actually mean? What is the difference between customer success and customer experience? Can you prioritize both without losing focus on the customer? 

We understand you must be full of questions. In this blog, we will explore their definition in detail. Later, we will understand the 5 key differences between the two and see how you can improve both to win more customers for your business. 

Let’s go! 

What Is Customer Success? 

Customer success is a business process that operates with the intention of helping customers reach their desired goals and outcomes. The main purpose is to help customers make the most of your offered products or services. 

Modern companies have dedicated customer success teams to proactively help customers use products effectively and attain success. Customers will likely continue buying from you when they can reap the maximum benefits from your products and services. 

Here are some common roles and responsibilities of customer success teams: 

• Providing in-depth onboarding sessions
• Encouraging renewals and repeat purchases
• Increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) and revenue
• Collecting and implementing customer feedback

What Is Customer Experience?

The customer experience (CX) is the result of the interactions a customer has with your brand across various stages of the customer journey. The customer experience is composed of different interactions – from browsing an online website to speaking to a sales or customer service representative. 

Customer experience has the power to make or break a brand. If customers have a delightful experience, they will stay loyal, buy more often, and recommend your products to friends and family members. On the other hand, a poor experience can make you lose existing and potential customers. 

Here are some benefits of delivering great CX:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Increased customer loyalty
• Improved word-of-mouth marketing 
• More product or service recommendations

Read More: 10 Surefire Ways to Improve Customer Experience With Help Desk

5 Key Differences Between Customer Success & Customer Experience 

Here are the top 5 major differences between customer success and customer experience: 

1. Timeline 

Customer experience begins with the customer’s first contact with the company. This could be even before they buy from you. For example, when they are scrolling through your e-commerce website or when they receive a cold call from your sales team or an email from the marketing department. 

On the other hand, customer success comes into play at a very later stage of the customer journey. Customer success teams are brought into action when the customer actually makes a purchase. The main focus is ensuring customers have a smooth experience using a new product or service. 

2. Objective 

On comparing customer experience and customer success, you will notice that the former is a broader concept than the latter. The main objective of customer experience is to build a healthy relationship with customers across different stages of the customer journey – from awareness to purchase to advocacy. 

Customer success is only a small part of the customer experience. The main objective of customer success is to ensure customers attain their desired goals and expectations when they start using your product or service. For example, if you sell a team communication app, the objective of your CS team would be to help customers collaborate with team members without any hassles. 

3. Metrics for Measurement 

Businesses use different metrics to measure the quality of customer experience and the efficiency of customer success teams. Let’s discuss them right away. 

Customer experience is measured using metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), customer acquisition rate, etc. 

On the other hand, customer success is measured using metrics such as renewal rate, customer lifetime value, customer health score, customer churn rate, repeat purchase rate, etc. 

Read More: 15 Help Desk Metrics to Improve Customer Support

4. Responsibility

There is another major difference you must know about in this battle of customer experiences vs. customer success. The responsibility for the quality of customer experience falls on the entire company, involving different departments. While the product team is responsible for developing well-designed products, the sales team must offer the best deal to customers to enhance their experience. 

However, when it comes to customer success, only one department is responsible – the customer success team. They are responsible for ensuring customers attain success as quickly as possible and make regular purchases to boost the company’s revenue. In some cases, even the customer service teams are responsible for helping customers better understand a product and achieve their desired outcomes. 

Read More: 10 Tips to Build a High-Performance Customer Success Team

5. Industry 

Customer experience is a common area of focus for almost all industries. From banking to healthcare to e-commerce, companies belonging to these industries know that in order to survive, they need to improve the CX. 

But this isn’t true for customer success. You will find customer success teams in companies belonging to the SaaS (software as a service) industry. Here the sole focus is to educate customers about the product through detailed walkthroughs and training. CS teams can also be found in B2B companies that sell technical or complex products such as machinery, electronic gadgets, and more. 

Can Customer Success and Customer Experience Work Together? 

For optimum success, customer success and customer experience teams should work together like a well-oiled machine. 

As discussed above, customer success is only a part of the customer experience. This means their functions often overlap with each other. Both teams share common goals of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty and driving rapid business growth. 

If you have dedicated teams for both, here is how you can make them work in sync. While the customer success team can focus on people who have already signed up for your product or services. The CX team can focus more on making potential customers aware of what the brand stands for and how it can solve their unique problems. 

It is also important to ensure you track their performances using different metrics. For example, you can adopt a more quantitative approach to measure customer success – renewal rate, churn rate, repeat purchase rate, etc. On the other hand, a qualitative approach can help you measure customer experience – CSAT or open-ended surveys, interviews, etc. 

Read More: 8 Ways to Excel at Customer Service Team Collaboration

Role of Customer Success & CX in the Customer Journey 

Well-trained customer success and CX teams can positively impact the customer journey. But what exactly is the customer journey? 

The customer journey can be defined as a map that includes all the interactions a customer has with a business. Every touchpoint of the customer journey should further familiarize the customer with your brand and leave a lasting impression. This can only be done successfully if you give equal consideration to customer experience and customer success. 

• Businesses with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their competitors.
• According to a study , over 72% of companies say that improving customer success would be their number one priority

Now, let’s see how these two teams can help you improve the onboarding stage of the customer journey. 

During the onboarding process, the CS team can offer in-app walkthroughs and training sessions to help customers understand the product better. They can even share links to self-service articles, FAQ pages, video tutorials, etc., to answer all their product-related queries. 

On the other hand, the CX team can share surveys or have one-on-one sessions with customers to understand their pain points. They can then share this data with the CS team to improve future onboarding processes. 

Prioritize Both Customer Success and Customer Experience 

Successful businesses such as Apple, Amazon, and Disney have their eyes on both customer success and customer experience. While both the terms are often used interchangeably by industry experts, there lies some major differences between the two. 

While customer success teams attempt to help customers reap the best results from their products or services. On the other hand, customer experience is a broader approach that aims to measure the quality of interactions across multiple touchpoints. 

So is there any tool that can be used by both CS and CX teams? We are glad you asked! You can use ProProfs Help Desk to manage all customer communications in one place, encourage self-service, generate leads, and capture feedback using versatile surveys. 

About the author

ProProfs Editorial Team

ProProfs Help Desk Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to improving your help desk operations with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you're getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives.

Related Posts

7 Expert Customer Service Tips during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Crisis

20 Best Customer Service Software in 2024

What is Customer Churn? Learn About Types & Effects of Churn

10 Post-Purchase Customer Experience Tips with Real Examples

How to Improve Customer Experience in Call Centers

10 Tips for Handling Customer Service During the Holidays

• Our Vision & Core Values
• Leadership Team
• Our Community
• Superior for You
• Superior for Banks
• Superior for Business
• Risk & Compliance Management
• All Solutions
• Technical Assistance Center
• Remote Deposit Capture
• Merchant Cash Services
• Treasury Call Center Services
• Mergers & Acquisition Support
• All Products
• Customized Checks & Cash Management Products
• Smart Safes
• Check Scanners
• Cash Counters
• BioCred by Panini
• Case Studies, White Papers, Guides & Downloadables
• Product Catalog

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service: What's the Difference?

In today's fast-paced business landscape, providing excellent customer service is no longer enough. Companies must strive to create positive customer experiences that keep c lients coming back, especially in the financial sector. But what exactly is the difference between customer service and customer experience?  

Comparing Customer Experience and Customer Service: Understanding the Key Differences

"The customer experience is the next competitive battleground." Jerry Gregoire, former CIO at Dell

Customer Service

Customer service is the act of providing help and support to customers. This includes answering questions about account information, addressing customer complaints, and providing information about financial products and services. It is the basic level of support that customers expect and require. Excellent customer service should be timely, effective, and efficient. It should be able to anticipate and solve customer problems with minimal friction.  

Customer Experience

Customer experience is the overall perception of a customer's interactions with the organization. It includes not just customer service, but also the design of financial products and services, the ease of use of online banking, the friendliness and accessibility of staff, and the overall atmosphere of an institution. A positive customer experience leaves the customer feeling satisfied, valued, and loyal to the brand. In other words, customer service falls under the broader umbrella of customer e xperience.  

Key Considerations About Customer Experience

1. customer experience is proactive..

This means that it is about creating an emotional connection with customers. By creating a positive experience , financial institutions can differentiate themselves from competitors and create loyal customers.

2. Customer experience is multifaceted.

Cu s tome r e xperience covers various interactions with a brand across a customer’s journey . A positive experience at one stage can be offset by a negative experience at another . Fi nancial institutions must be aware of every possible interaction and strive to create great experiences at every touchpoint .  

3. Customer experience requires a holistic approach.

Organizations must consider every point of connection , from the first interaction to post-activity follow-up and support. C ompanies must listen to their customers , use feedback to make improvements, and create a better experience.  

Examples of Successful Customer Experience Strategies

1. personalization -.

Personalization can make customers feel valued and appreciated. Financial institutions can use data and analytics to personalize the customer experience by offering tailored products, services, and support, and p roviding personalized communication.  

2. Convenience -

It is critical for banking to be easy and convenient for customers. This can include providing online banking, mobile apps, digital online tools, and best - in - class customer support.

3. Transparency -

Being transparent can increase trust and loyalty. It helps with building long-term relationships and lead s to increased customer retention ; customers are more likely to stay loyal and continue doing business with a company they trust and understand.

Benefits of Outsourcing Customer Service During a Conversion to Improve Customer Experience 

Another critical area where creating a positive customer experience is essential is during a core conversion or platform migration. For financial institutions, this means upgrading or replacing legacy systems with more advanced and efficient technology, or navigating a merger or acquisition and consolidating banking systems. This process can be challenging for both the institution and its customers as it can cause disruptions and inconvenience. However, if done correctly, it can seamlessly aid the customer experience by providing more advanced features, better security, and improved digital services.  

Dedicated Team of Experts

Outsourcing customer service to a vendor provide s a dedicated team of expert c lient service professionals who are trained to handle complex technical issues and provide quick and effective solutions. This can help to minimize disruptions and provide a more seamless transition. Additionally, outsourcing customer service provides access to specialized expertise and resources that can be difficult to replicate in-house.  

Enables Your Team to Focus on Value-add Activities

One of the key benefits of outsourcing customer service is that it allows financial institutions to focus on their core competencies. Instead of dedicating resources to customer service, financial institutions can focus on developing and improving their products and services. Additionally, outsourcing customer service can help financial institutions to save money by avoiding the costs associated with recruiting, training, and managing customer service staff.  

Customer Experience and Customer Service are Two Distinct But Closely Related Concepts

Customer experience and customer service are separate entities but closely interconnected. Customer service refers to the actions and interactions a company has with its customers to address their needs and concerns, while customer experience covers all aspects of a customer's interaction with a company, including the product or service itself and the overall feeling they have about the company. Both customer service and customer experience are essential to provide the best possible service to its customers.  

Outsourcing customer service can be an effective strategy for improving customer experience during a core conversion or platform migration. By providing customers with a dedicated team of expert customer service professionals, financial institutions can minimize disruptions and provide a more seamless transition. Outsourcing customer service can also help financial institutions save money and focus on their core competencies.  

As specialists in delivering excellent customer service, we understand the importance of a positive customer experience during core conversions, RDC conversions, ACH wire platform upgrades, and other system platform changes. With a long history of excellence in treasury management, banking practices, and customer experience, Superior is here to help you achieve your goals.  

Explore more topics

Share this post.

Call Center Excellence for Your Bank

Related posts, enhancing customer experience with conversational ai in banking.

April Levin | Customer Experience

How to Boost Retention by Outsourcing Customer Service During a Conversion

Superior | Core Conversion

6 Advantages to Outsourcing Customer Service During Software Conversions

Kevin Traut | Core Conversion