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The difference between customer experience and customer service

May 13, 2010 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

"Customer experience" remains a nebulous term for many people, akin to when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that he couldn't define what made something obscene, "but I know it when I see it."

But a story in today's Globe and Mail has as good a definition for customer experience as I've yet seen: "everything that happens between (a company) and its patrons."

Still pretty nebulous, but at least it's a target worth aiming for. As the story goes on to point out, many companies make the mistake of equating customer experience with customer service, but those two disciplines are more like overlapping circles on a Venn diagram than synonyms:

Most businesses fail to recognize that service is just a small part of CX, (Mark Healy, a partner at Toronto’s Satov Consultants) observes. Meanwhile, some have appointed a chief customer experience officer, or CXO, which Mr. Healy predicts will become a key position. But often, he says, the result is little more than a revamp of customer service. “In very big companies, I think customer experience equals the call centre, which is ridiculous.”

Instead, Mr. Healy encourages companies to map, measure and maximize CX in four categories: pre-purchase, purchase, usage and post-purchase. Mapping such touch points can be as simple as enlisting a third party to poll the firm’s departments, but Mr. Healy says a more detailed approach is to have people phone the call centre and go mystery shopping.

Those four categories make for a pretty good road map, I think. And a dizzying one: If your emphasis on making a great experience is limited to in-store, you've neglected three of the four (at home before buying, at home using, and attitude toward the purchase/product after the fact).

How do you quantify customer experience? Have you made an attempt to? How do you break the experience down? Talk about it in the comments.

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