Customer Service vs. Customer Experience: Key Differences

What’s the difference between customer service and customer experience (CX)?

At first glance, they might seem interchangeable. After all, both play a vital role in how businesses interact with and support their customers. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find they are two distinct concepts, each with its own purpose and impact on your business.

Customer service focuses on solving problems and meeting immediate needs, while customer experience is about the bigger picture — how customers feel about their journey with your brand. Together, they shape customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business success.

In this article, we’ll break down the differences between customer service and customer experience, explore how they intersect, and provide insights to help you strengthen both. Let’s dive in.

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

Customer service is one of the ways businesses offer good CX. It’s a part of the customer experience. Customer service is about helping customers navigate any confusion with the brand’s product or service. It involves dealing with concerns, complaints, and sometimes even arguments with unhappy customers. Whatever the issue, customer service professionals are known for helping customers when they truly need it.

Customer experience is what customers feel about your brand and how loyal they are toward it. It’s a product of long-term customer relationships that you nurture with consistent customer engagement, support, service, and a lot of relationship building.

To keep it simple: customer service is just a part of delivering a customer experience that buyers come back for.

Nextiva’s unified customer experience management (CXM) software lets you provide such experiences at scale. It aggregates customer service interactions across all channels to get overall context, helping you take the discussion forward rather than circling in a loop.

Customer service and customer experience affect customer retention metrics, churn rate, and lifetime value. Good customer service makes the customer experience positive, reflecting a positive retention rate and increased customer lifetime value. When customer experience stays positive for a long time, it influences brand advocacy, attracting more referrals from present customers.

What Is the Focus of Customer Service vs. Customer Experience?

Customer service and CX strategically focus on ensuring customer satisfaction. Customer service is reactive, while CX is more experiential based on the entire customer journey across all touchpoints.

Customer service

At its most basic level, customer service is simply a response to customer questions and concerns. It ensures customers feel heard after a product or a service is sold, just like they were in the sales process.

However, it is still mostly reactive. Modern customers need proactive service that addresses their issues before they escalate.

Customer experience

Customer experience considers every interaction your customers have with your brand or company across every touchpoint. It’s also about the quality of the interactions you have with your customers.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” This keeps you aware of customers’ perceptions and feelings before setting a customer experience strategy.

If you fail to deliver the CX your customers expect two times or more, 86% of loyal customers will likely abandon a brand. Therefore, it’s essential to prioritize CX when optimizing your strategy for repeat or recurring purchases.

What Customer Service and Customer Experience Mean for Customers

For customers, the combined quality of customer experience and customer service establishes a brand’s image or value. It helps decide where to place customer loyalty.

Great customer experience equals a brand that can satisfy its customer’s expectations. It also means that the brand is worth returning to.

What customer service means for customers

Customer service is focused on interactions and offers assistance to customers when they ask for it. However, it’s transitioning into a more proactive process in which customer issues are addressed or relevant updates are conveyed to buyers before the problem becomes a hurdle.

Source: Gartner

Proactiveness in customer service shows that the brand cares for its customers. Follow these nine actionable steps to offer exceptional customer service.

Due to customer service’s reactive nature, it focuses on fixing immediate problems. It tarnishes the service quality loyal customers get for less immediate issues. This affects their experience with your brand, mainly impacting the lifetime value.

What customer experience means for customers

The difference between customer experience and customer service isn’t as distinct for customers. Some use the terms interchangeably, while others use CX to refer to customers’ holistic experience with the brand. For some, customer service is limited to interactions with support or customer service teams.

Customers generally prefer to spend more with companies they have a good experience with. When they have experienced your brand the way it was meant to be, customers are more likely to refer to and spread positive word of mouth. Starbucks, a multinational coffee company, is an example of a business that focuses on CX. The company empowers its baristas to personalize the CX and build relationships with regulars. This helps them establish an emotional connection with customers, earning them a special place in their customers’ hearts.

Role of Customer Service and Customer Experience Professionals

Providing a good overall customer experience and customer service is directly associated with employees’ job satisfaction. While this may put some stress on and increase the pressure on employees, it becomes truly rewarding when customers see and value the results.

Customer service teams

Customer service employees are on the front line. They must handle customer queries tactfully and solve their problems in real time. Such roles require quick thinking, adaptability, and dealing with complex situations.

The role consists of tasks like responding to phone calls or emails and handling issues on multiple platforms. It involves dealing with complaints and urgent requests while constantly being stressed by the reactive nature of work. You’ll need to prioritize requests and offer timely solutions, which requires strong time management and organizational skills.

Here’s a brief overview of the skills and attributes customer service roles need:

• Active listening
• Quick thinking
• Attention to detail
• Adaptability
• Ability to deal with complex situations
• Ability to work under pressure
• Time management and organizational skills
• Prioritization

Customer experience professionals

This is a more strategic role that goes beyond responding to customer issues. CX professionals are responsible for crafting the entire customer journey. They apply empathy and personalization to design experiences that reward businesses with satisfied customers. This delivers a positive customer experience across all touchpoints.

Source: Nextiva

CX roles involve analyzing data and customer feedback on design experience. These roles are more strategic and generally include people from various backgrounds who collaboratively work on laying out exceptional CX in customers’ journeys with a company.

How Do Customer Service and Customer Experience Impact Brands?

Your customer service and CX directly impact your market publicity. If they‘re negative, they can hamper your success or the speed of your success. On the other hand, positive interactions with customers give your brand a stronger reputation, making the road to success comparatively easier.

How customer service impacts brands

When sales did not recur as in the era of SaaS, customer support was considered a cost center. These departments might have been easier decisions for layoffs, but this is no longer the case. Today’s brands see the value of customer service and how it significantly influences repeat purchases, positive word of mouth, and, most importantly, brand advocacy in the marketplace.

Modern brands’ reputations are built on the value that customer service generates. Companies acknowledge this and constantly strive to improve their customer service experience.

However, if your product or service lacks quality or is misleading, great customer service alone cannot help unless you resolve product issues. This will allow you to build customer relationships when you reach out with the updates they seek.

Overall, excellent customer service gives your brand a more positive voice.

How customer experience impacts brands

A well-crafted customer experience becomes a differentiator that gives a company a competitive advantage. It creates a bond beyond fulfilling simple needs, such as personalization.

Personalization creates a strong emotional connection with the customer. Take Netflix, for example. Its “Because You Watched…” recommendations are personalized to every user profile, making the experience unique for its user base.

Investing in CX is also strategically focused on improving net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer retention, referrals, and long-term revenue from customers.

Nextiva: How a Unified Customer Experience Management Solution Helps

Customers expect more for every consecutive dollar they spend with a business. Their experience can be affected by how a business treats them or the extra benefits they receive as their relationship with a brand grows.

Nextiva’s Unified Customer Experience Management (UCXM) platform delivers a unique approach to meet brands’ rising expectations. The technology:

• Centralizes communication: This gives you a single interface to manage all your communication channels. These channels can be phone, SMS, email, social media, or any channel popular in a given region, like WhatsApp. This keeps the context alive and lets you serve customers while cherishing the relationship in communication with context.
• Uses AI, chatbots, and automation: It’s not about just a handful of customers on your side of the business. You need to build relationships across the whole lot. This requires agents to spend ample time building relationships with every customer. AI makes it possible by taking up administrative or repetitive tasks that don’t benefit any differently if agents were to do it. It frees up a lot of time for actual relationship building.
• Integrates channels: Nextiva’s omnichannel abilities let you transition between communication channels without a hassle. It integrates all communication channels to empower you to interact without hiccups.

Schedule a demo of Nextiva’s UCXM platform to start building long-lasting customer relationships at scale. 👇