Opinion: Don't confuse customer service with customer experience

Forrester analyst and prolific customer experience blogger Bruce Temkin writes about the need to keep a clear distinction between customer service and customer experience, two worlds which are often mashed together, to the detriment of both.

"For most companies, customer service deals with some key 'moments of truth' for customers," he writes. "So that function is an important participant in most efforts to improve customer experience. But firms can't just focus on customer service interactions or offload responsibility for customer experience to the customer service organization."

His diagram is well-executed — a visual representation of customer experience as a "phalanx of forces" that touch the customer.