Customer service vs customer experience is a widely talked about topic as the two certainly overlap, but there are vast differences that need to be known. Since companies need to identify the touchpoints that matter inside a customer journey, we are going to zero in on this situation to help you to find out many interesting facts. The reality is that many firms avoid paying close attention to the whole customer experience, so we are going to dive into this topic as well.
Customer Service VS Customer Experience
Customer Experience
Many companies think that touchpoints are all that matters. However, this situation can bring about a distorted photo of the things that are really going on with a client during and after the purchase. A business might consider that their customers are happy with their products and services when they are not. Companies might lose sight of the bigger picture: the end-to-end experience of the customer.
For instance, a company receives millions of calls from their customers, which might not consider a call simply as a “product question.” To thrive in the business landscape, a firm must understand the bigger picture or the broader reasons a customer might have in his or her mind to make such a call. It might be an annoying technical issue or a contract`s clause the customer does not understand. So a company needs to find out the root causes of these calls and get as much as feedback as they can.
Firms that fully handle the entire customer journey will experience less churn, better customer satisfaction, increased revenue and their employees will work harder. These firms also learn to collaborate better across levels and function, which will bring about many gains over time. Companies of all sizes need to take a close look at the customer experience to find out what the problem is. In addition, they have to see the whole picture, which means the total number of interactions with a customer over time.
Onboarding Process and Customer Service
What does customer interaction over time mean? It means that a firm could get high level of customer experience per call, but they will not pass the exam when the total number of interactions is taking into consideration. First instance, the onboarding process could need an improvement as a whole, which is very important for any firm out there. The problem is that the root causes might not be addressed at all while taking care of a customer over time, which will hurt the company`s bottom line in the long haul.
The cumulative experience of a customer across various touchpoints and in many channels over time will have a lot of influence on what a client thinks about the company. The firm as a whole must thrive to find out what a customer really want and design a cross-functional process that delivers top-notch service across the entire customer journey. The culture of continues improvement and change must be part of any successful customer service team out there.
Judgment-driven, top-down evaluations and data-driven, bottom-up analysis are needed to find out where to start a transformation in the customer journey. Whenever possible, management should pursue these goals in parallel. Executives have to make some working sessions to find out pain points inside the customer journey such as any discrepancy between the service the customer actually gets and the promise of the marketing material.
Walking the Walk
Firms need to walk the walk when it comes to improving customer experience. It means that their top-down efforts must identify early wins that are capable of setting the tone for additional transformation. Most companies will solve their customer experience issues this way, but those needing to change the overall customer satisfaction level have to write up a complete plan describing the whole process from the beginning to the end, taking into consideration the impact that these changes bring about for the organization, and lays out a feasible, commonsense set of initiatives.
The best companies take advantage of regression models to understand what customers really want and the impact of those decisions on the performance of the entire organization, and then simulations take place to find out the future impact of different initiatives.
Bottom-up Efforts and More
Businesses need to make many bottom-up efforts to find out the touchpoints that matter most within the customer journey, and the way they will influence both the company and its customers. The problem is that this information might not be quite easy to get as new type of data are required and then assemble them in different, new ways may be challenging.
Management will be able to see what it is going on with the customer service vs customer experience by combining data from competitive and customer research, marketing and operational departments, though this process might take up several months. To identify the problems underlying the current performance, management teams want to identify the most important customer journeys.
So call monitoring as well as employee and customer focus groups might be needed over time. To find out the steps the company must take, the previous data must be combined with a bottom-up analysis that maps the most important transformations of each journey. These maps will reveal some processes inside the company that may be yielding adverse results for the firm.
Every firm out the needs to find out what the most important touchpoints are within the customer journey in order to improve the customer experience. Therefore, a top-down approach is needed to find out what a customer really needs at a certain point of the service and what the root causes are for a particular problem. The process the firm must design should be cross-functional and take into consideration the multiple touchpoints inside the customer journey. Employee and customer research, operational and marketing data must be collected to find out what it is going on with customer service vs customer experience inside the firm over time.
