FAQs – Customer Service & Customer Experience

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the entire customer journey, including customer service.

• Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service.
• Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analysing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.
• Customers consider the entire picture when thinking about your offerings and hence it is important to focus on the holistic customer experience rather than just service.

In situations where customer contact information is not recorded, agents can be your best proxy of gaining the pulse of the market. Agents can inform you about the different market events and support issues that are impacting the customer experience they deliver to end customers.

Even if customer feedback is collected, agents can be a good source of ideas to understand and solve the systemic and operational issues faced by customers. Involving agents in the decision-making process also leads to higher engagement among agents, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

The kiosk is most suited to environments where it is difficult to get customer data, e.g in-store/on-premise, where it is not necessary to provide contact information. The kiosk needs to be positioned according to the type of information to be collected. For example, if non-buyer feedback is to be gathered, the kiosk should be placed at the store exit with signage to attract attention.

To make sense of the complex journeys undertaken by your customers it is important that the program is implemented in real-time. This means the following:

• Real-time capture: Data on experience must be captured as soon as possible after the interaction, as this ensures the experience is fresh in the minds of the customer, leading to more accurate and contextual insights.
• Real-time action: Ensuring the right issue is assigned quickly to the employee that is most empowered to resolve the issue, leading to a quicker resolution and an improved experience.
• Real-time reporting: Quantitative and qualitative metrics are aggregated and reported as soon as they are recorded to provide actionable insights across the organization. Users can segment the data along transactional variables to diagnose the systemic issues affecting overall customer experience.

Customers will give feedback when they have something to say, which is not every time. However, the following measures do help in driving customers to provide feedback:

• Make it simple for the customer to provide feedback when it is fresh in his/her mind.
• Take action upon the feedback to resolve the issue; thus reinforcing the feedback behaviour. Make the customer feel like their feedback is valued.

In today’s complex world, insights have an expiry date. What holds true today may not hold true tomorrow. A constant stream of insights is needed CX is more than just a one-time campaign.

It is a continuous improvement journey, where businesses must put processes in place to resolve the current customer issues and make systemic changes in operations to improve customer experience. To that end, it is important to keep measuring CX and validate hypotheses continuously and track the impact of new initiatives and process changes.