Customer Service / Customer Experience

In the last week since I started writing this blog, a few readers have shared their ‘bad experiences’ with services. More often than not, these have been bad experiences with ‘customer service’ as opposed to bad ‘customer experience’. There is a big difference. But in the absence of any noticable ‘customer experience’, most customers perceive their experience with the helpline or customer service desk of a company to be the ‘customer experience’.

Customer experience is what a customer feels about any interaction (and all interactions as a whole) with a brand/service before, during and after he buys the service. Customer Service is a much smaller sub-interaction, usually when there is a problem.

The fact is that customers are the most sensitive to how they are treated when they go to the company with a problem. This makes customer service the acid test of customer experience. If a company has an ordinary customer experience, but very helpful customer service, it will still endear itself to the customer.

Customer experience on the other hand is about how useful the customer finds your service, whether he perceives it as ‘value for money, how easy it is for him to learn to use it, if his experience with your employees is uniformly good… and other tangible and intagible attributes that constitute your service.

In a sense, customer service is a commodity, a hygiene factor. Customer experience is what differentiates your service and creates loyalty in the long run.