Giving customers a great time during transactions is always at the helm of any startup business. But while it is a straightforward mission, there are two different ideas businesses can go with: customer service and customer experience. So, which one should you go with? Let\’s take a closer look and find out how you can utilize both.
What Is Customer Service?
In its simplest definition, customer service is all the tasks intended to assist customers before and after purchase. This typically refers to a single event where a customer engages with your brand.
Another defining trait of customer service is that it involves buyer-facing departments. The classic CS agents are the most common ones that you will associate with the term. But other departments like sales and IT might also serve as needed.
Because they need to interact with people, agents and other personnel that provide customer service require a specific set of skills. This includes both hard skills like product expertise and technical knowledge, as well as soft skills such as patience and communication skills. Agents also rely on different tools to manage and streamline the assistance process.
What Is Customer Experience?
As the name implies, customer experience refers to the entirety of the journey that people go through when engaging and transacting with your brand. It covers a larger number of touchpoints, some of which might not be directly service-oriented. This includes things like the development of self-help tools that customers can use in lieu of direct engagement.
It is worth noting that customer service is itself included under the customer experience banner. Aside from that, there are two other major components. The first one is the product itself. This includes how it works and the points of interaction that customers should know when using it.
The other major component is the design. This refers to the way your brand interacts with the customers. Marketing and public relations are some of the things that fall under this area. It also includes customer care, the process of building an emotional connection with buyers.
The Difference Between The Two
Even with the above definitions, a startup company might still have a hard time establishing the distinctions between the two areas. As such, it would help to explore some more key differences between customer service and customer experience.
Nature
The first major difference is the nature of interactions. Customer experience is a more proactive approach to engagement. Here, the brand is the one that reaches out to people and ensures that they have a good journey from the get-go. It happens across different stages from pre to post-purchase.
Meanwhile, customer service is more reactive. It responds only when customers themselves contact for assistance. Thus, it is focused only on that specific interaction. Future interactions with the same customers are treated as separate.
Organization In A Startup Business
As customer service deals with a specific form of customer interaction, it can be readily departmentalized. This allows a startup business to better manage all the tasks associated with it. It also points customers to a specific direction when seeking help.
On the other hand, customer experience can never be put into a single department. Instead, it is the effort of multiple departments to ensure that customers’ journeys succeed. And since each journey is different, these departments need to come together to develop a more holistic strategy.
Measurement And Analysis
Both customer service and customer experience use almost the same metrics. But they use these metrics in different ways. For the former, the focus is more on customer satisfaction for the given interaction. As such, Customer Service Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are given a greater priority.
Meanwhile, as customer experience focuses on the entire journey, it utilizes customer effort scores more often. This is the measure of how difficult it is for them to accomplish the journey. CES is also closely tied with customer loyalty. The easier the experience, the more loyal customers can be.
Using Customer Service And Experience In Your Startup Business
While customer service and customer experience are two essential areas in business management, they have become more intertwined. As such, your startup company needs to build a strategy that effectively harnesses both.
Building A Great Customer Experience Vision
The first thing you need to better harness both is a clear customer experience vision. Ask yourself what kind of experience you want people to have when engaging with your brand. Note that you need to be specific here.
Use your company’s core values to further flesh out this vision and define the principles that will help you achieve it. Make sure that everyone within the business understands this vision. You would also want to be clear as to how it will relate to their work.
Developing Your Startup Business Intelligent Communication
The main thrust of any customer experience effort is to provide excellent one-to-one communication with customers. This one is particularly important for the service department, as it revolves around direct interaction with people. But beyond that, you need to prepare every department to support this kind of communication and create continued engagement with them.
One way to do this is by providing service agents with all the information they need to guide customers through their journey. Analytics data is foremost here, as it will help them better understand customers and decide what kind of solutions they want.
Building Your Startup Business Emotional Connections With Customers
Customers know that they had a great experience with the brand if they get to feel positive emotions from it. The Harvard Business Review noted that emotionally engaged customers are three times more likely to repurchase. Furthermore, they are also more likely to recommend your brand to others.
There are many ways that you can create a more emotional experience for your buyers. One of these is by providing personalized engagements. The idea here is that they will become more emotionally invested in you if they see that you pay attention to their individual needs.
Harness Customer Service And Experience For Your Startup Business
Once you have properly built your customer experience plans, you also lay the foundations for an excellent service to your patrons. But your startup company will still need help implementing both. Contact us and we will be ready to assist you in giving customers a wonderful time.