Nowadays, customer experience and customer service have become buzzwords in the business-centric milieu. However, customer experience, customer service, and even customer care are so confusing, that often businesses don’t bother to invest separately.
No doubt, these are much puzzling, yet different. A clear-cut differentiation is essential as customer experience is surpassing even the price and quality. According to the Oracle Report, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiation in 2020.
On the other hand, a report (Oracle) says that 83% of customers shopping online require some support or service to complete their purchase. Also, web leads are nine times more likely to convert if they are followed up within under 5 minutes.
Therefore, knowing all about these terms will help you to understand, make strategies, implement processes, and analyze metrics independently. Thus, it would lead your organization to out-perform. Let’s have a quick introduction.
So, What’s the Customer Service?
Customer service is assistance provided by the organization that could be helping a customer choose the right product, assisting the purchase process, and troubleshooting after buying. Also, it ensures that the customer is leaving with the ultimate customer satisfaction, brand affiliation, and developing a long-term relationship.
Customer service is essential as the Oracle Report says that 97% of executives believe delivering excellent customer experience is critical to success. On the other hand, Forrester’s Customer Experience Index shows that the companies that invest in the customer service department had higher stock price growth and a higher total return on investment (ROI).
How Can You Measure Customer Service?
When the customer interaction is evaluated, managers can figure out the customer satisfaction rate in numbers with the help of various matrices. Then, the customer satisfaction rate is further analyzed.
So, you can measure customer service performance with the help of a customer satisfaction score (CSAT). Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) would help further to make the strategy of customer experience.
And What Are Vital Elements of Customer Service?
Now, the next question is, what are the essential elements of customer service? Well, according to Study.com, here are some salient aspects of customer service.
· Professionalism
Customer service representatives must be trained to treat the customers professionally. Customers like to talk with professionals and experts.
· Promptness
Modern customers want everything right away. So, do not delay at any cost. So, make replies to messages, calls, and emails as soon as possible.
· Politeness
Treating customers with the ultimate courtesy is mandatory for businesses. Whether a customer makes a purchase or not, you must have to deal with them politely.
· Personalization
Every customer wishes to be handled with courtesy and personally. So, the organization should treat them on a personal level.
Customer Experience: Sum of All Interactions with A Brand
Now, let’s talk about the customer experience. Customer experience is the total journey of a customer with a particular brand from discovering to understanding, purchasing, and sentiments after actually using a product. Also, this includes emotional, physical, and psychological inclination toward that brand.
Moreover, the customer experience includes all touch-points and mediums that a business is using at that time. So, you can say that it is not a one-off experience.
Basics Elements for Excellence in Customer Experience
At times an organization focuses on specific touch-points and may fail to address all aspects. Failing to search for all aspects of customer care will result in bad customer experience, causing brand disloyalty and detachment.
A holistic process can deliver tangible and sustainable development. Following are four core elements for a successful customer experience approach:
· Inspiration
A comprehensive vision is necessary if you are running a customer-centric business. Moreover, you have to identify targets and then plan accordingly.
· Insights
Analyze customer satisfaction rates and develop inferences. Then, relate these facts and figures with key performance indicators and business objectives.
· Improvement
Based on the insights, radically design the strategy to redesign the journey of customer experience from start to finish.
· Institutionalization
Shift all the business processes from the front line to C-suit. Changing the business processes means you should change the culture in your organization to a more customer-centric.
Measuring Customer Experience
Measuring customer experience is necessary as it would give you some invaluable insights helping to improve and institutionalize your business processes.
Customer experience is measured by net promoter score (NPS). This factor tracks how likely a customer is to recommend the brand to a peer.
What Is Customer Experience?
Some confusion must be alleviated before you implement any strategy to improve the customer experience in your organization. Well, following are the clarifications:
- Customer experience is not a single department. It involves all processes, strategies, and functions of an organization. So, customer experience includes all factors, from marketing to sales and customer support to the manufacturing department.
- Customer experience is not reactive. You don’t have to wait for the customer to raise an issue and then you will fix it. Contrarily, it has a proactive approach. So, you should evaluate internal processes regularly to make sure your customers will have an excellent customer experience.
Finally, the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service
Though there is a fine line between the concepts of customer experience and customer service, yet differentiating them is necessary. Agency Nation highlighted that customer experience is a broader term that is proactive and requires a broader vision. It’s about analyzing how your customer is feeling at every point of the journey with the brand. The journey includes product quality, packaging, pricing, delivery times, ease of use, and such other elements.
On the other hand, customer service refers to only a single aspect. It is a reactive operation. It serves the customer after selling. So, customer service deals with the issues and troubleshooting after the customer has purchased the product.
Final Verdict
In a nutshell, one can say that the customer experience is a wider term that leads to the overall improvement and modification of organizational processes. On the other hand, customer service is just a department that deals with questions and queries from customers. However, keep exploring further and discover newer aspects. Happy learning!
