Is customer service part of the customer experience? Or is customer experience what happens when someone receives customer service? Are they the same thing? Vaboo explores why customer experience is so important to your agency.
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.
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 your customers.
Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, 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 brand.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.
CX involves all the ways your agency interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your products or services, their interactions with online options, the feeling of walking into your office, customer service interactions with the team, as well as the the convenience and simplicity of all of your engagement.
Customer experience includes three main components:
- Customer Service: This includes the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
- Technology: The digital channels your customer uses to interface with your business - from communication to transactions
- 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
Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organisation’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. But why is customer experience so important?
- 76% of consumers think companies should understand their expectations and needs: This high percentage is likely due to an increase in successful brands completely customizing and personalizing their customer experience (including their customer service strategies) to the specific needs and wants of customers. Internal change, or ways to asess these and gather data, is needed to address these new consumer expectations.
- 33% of consumers who ended their relationship with a company last year did so because the experience wasn’t personalized enough: To reiterate, if you are not meeting Millennial customer expectations, you will lose them as customers.
The line between how customers use a service 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.
Digital-first customer service & customer experience matters
Customer service and customer experience have always existed. After all, people prefer to spend their money with those who treat them well and give them experiences to remember. Customer experience is the powerful weapon in your competitive arsenal on the property battlefield because it is so important to today's consumer, and because it is so difficult to consistently deliver.
24/7 lifestyles require 24/7 service, beginning to end.
And, for those who live or die by referrals, 4-star "exceeding expectations" won't create the customer loyalty we depend on. Only through a new 5-star standard where the customer feels amazed, delighted and uncommonly cared for, will they become your raving fan.
To find out how vaboo can help harness the power of tenants wowed by their customer experience to attract and retain your landlord customers, get in touch at vaboo.co.uk/demo
