Customer Service or Customer Experience [Experience Action Podcast]
Summary
TLDRJeannie Walters discusses the distinction between customer service and customer experience, emphasizing the importance for leaders to understand both concepts. She explains customer service as reactive, while customer experience is proactive and holistic, affecting the entire customer journey. Walters urges leaders to consider the strategic business value of enhancing customer experience to drive growth, reduce costs, and innovate, advocating for a cross-functional approach to truly prioritize customer-centric strategies.
Takeaways
- 😀 Customer experience (CX) and customer service are not interchangeable; CX is proactive and intentional, while customer service is reactive.
- 🔍 Jeannie Walters emphasizes the importance of understanding the difference between CX and customer service for effective leadership.
- 🛍️ Customer service involves addressing issues when customers seek help, whereas CX is about creating a positive journey from the first interaction to becoming a lifelong customer.
- 💡 CX management involves being proactive to reduce service costs and enhance the overall customer perception, which can lead to higher retention and referrals.
- 📈 A strong business case for CX should include its impact on growth, customer lifetime value, and reducing service-related expenses.
- 🚀 Disruption in industries often comes from focusing on CX, making it a strategic advantage for businesses to stay ahead of competitors.
- 🤝 Cross-functional leadership is crucial for a holistic approach to CX, ensuring all parts of an organization contribute to a positive customer journey.
- 📊 Leaders should be educated on the business impact of CX, including potential cost savings and revenue growth opportunities.
- 💬 Including emotional customer stories can be powerful in convincing leaders of the importance of CX, alongside data and logical arguments.
- 🛠️ Tools like customer journey mapping can help leaders understand and engage with the concept of CX, facilitating strategic planning.
- 👥 Training and developing employees to understand and contribute to CX is essential for its success across the organization.
- 🔗 Creating a cross-functional CX team with a clear charter and regular check-ins can drive the organization towards a customer-centric culture.
Q & A
What is the main difference between customer service and customer experience according to Jeannie Walters?
-Customer service is reactive, dealing with issues when customers need help or have problems. Customer experience, on the other hand, is proactive and intentional, focusing on shaping the overall journey customers have with a brand from the first interaction to becoming a lifelong customer or advocate.
Why is it important for business leaders to care about both customer service and customer experience?
-Both are essential for a well-rounded approach to customer relations. Customer service addresses immediate issues, while customer experience shapes the overall perception and satisfaction of customers, which can drive business value and long-term loyalty.
How does a proactive approach to customer experience potentially reduce service costs for a business?
-By anticipating and addressing potential issues before they occur, a proactive customer experience approach can minimize the need for reactive customer service, thus reducing the costs associated with handling complaints and resolving problems.
What is the role of cross-functional leadership in delivering a positive customer experience?
-Cross-functional leadership is crucial for creating a cohesive customer experience strategy. It involves collaboration across different departments to ensure that every touchpoint with the customer is optimized and aligned with the brand's vision for customer experience.
How can leaders make a strong business case for investing in customer experience?
-Leaders can make a business case by demonstrating the potential for increased customer retention, higher referrals, and extended customer lifetime value. They can also highlight the cost savings from reduced service issues and the potential for revenue growth through a better customer experience.
What is the significance of customer journey mapping in understanding and improving customer experience?
-Customer journey mapping is a tool that visually represents the customer's experience with a brand. It helps leaders understand the customer's perspective, identify pain points, and find opportunities for improvement, ultimately leading to a more optimized and satisfying customer experience.
How can organizations ensure that all employees, not just customer-facing ones, contribute to a positive customer experience?
-By training and educating all employees about the importance of customer experience and how their roles impact it. This fosters a culture where everyone is responsible for contributing to a positive customer journey.
What is the relationship between customer experience and business growth?
-A positive customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer lifetime value, and more referrals, all of which contribute to business growth. Moreover, focusing on customer experience can also open up new market opportunities and competitive advantages.
Why is it crucial for leaders to not only look at data but also understand the human impact behind it?
-While data provides quantitative insights, understanding the human impact gives leaders a qualitative perspective on how their organization affects individual customers. This emotional connection can be powerful in driving leaders to prioritize and invest in customer experience.
How can storytelling and emotional connections help in advocating for customer experience improvements?
-Storytelling and emotional connections humanize data, making it more relatable and compelling for leaders. Real customer stories can illustrate the impact of a positive or negative experience, motivating leaders to take action and prioritize customer experience initiatives.
What steps can leaders take to foster a culture of proactive and intentional customer experience within their organization?
-Leaders can develop a customer experience charter, establish cross-functional teams, ensure regular check-ins and feedback loops, and use tools like customer journey mapping to engage the leadership team and drive a culture focused on proactive and intentional customer experiences.
Outlines
📣 Introduction and Listener's Question
Jeannie Walters introduces herself and the topic of customer and employee experience. She listens to a question from Cara Silletto about differentiating customer experience from customer service.
🔍 Understanding Customer Service vs. Customer Experience
Jeannie explains the difference between customer service and customer experience. Customer service is reactive and involves assisting customers when they need help. Customer experience, on the other hand, is proactive and encompasses the entire journey of the customer with the brand, from the first interaction to becoming a loyal advocate.
💡 Importance of a Proactive Customer Experience
Jeannie highlights the importance of being proactive and intentional about customer experience. A well-managed customer experience reduces service costs, prevents issues, and enhances customer satisfaction. This involves listening to customers, gathering feedback, and anticipating their needs.
📊 Making the Business Case for Customer Experience
Jeannie emphasizes the need to make a strong business case for customer experience to gain leadership support. This includes defining the business impact, such as increased referrals, higher customer lifetime value, and cost savings from reduced service issues. She also suggests using emotional stories and customer testimonials to convey the importance of customer experience.
🚀 Innovating Through Customer Experience
Jeannie discusses how innovation in customer experience can disrupt industries and create significant value. Companies like Amazon and Uber have succeeded by focusing on making the customer experience more effortless and delightful. She advises leaders to take a holistic approach and involve cross-functional teams in enhancing customer experience.
🛠️ Practical Steps for Implementing Customer Experience Initiatives
Jeannie provides practical steps for leaders to improve customer experience, such as training employees, forming cross-functional CX teams, and using customer journey mapping. She encourages leaders to think strategically and develop clear definitions of success for customer experience initiatives.
📞 Closing Remarks and Call to Action
Jeannie concludes by inviting listeners to ask more questions and check out resources on her website. She underscores the importance of taking action to improve customer experience and promises to address more questions in future sessions.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Customer Experience
💡Customer Service
💡Proactive
💡Reactive
💡Employee Retention
💡Cross-functional Leadership
💡Business Value
💡Strategic Advantage
💡Customer Journey
💡Customer Feedback
💡Disruption
💡Cost of Doing Business
Highlights
Jeannie Walters emphasizes the distinction between customer service and customer experience, highlighting the importance of understanding both for business success.
Customer service is described as reactive, addressing issues as they arise, while customer experience is proactive, shaping the overall journey a customer has with a brand.
Walters suggests that leaders should care about both customer service and customer experience to deliver a positive outcome for customers and the business.
She explains that customer experience starts from the first interaction with a brand and extends through every touchpoint, influencing customer loyalty and advocacy.
Walters argues that a proactive approach to customer experience can reduce service costs by preventing issues before they occur.
She advocates for cross-functional leadership to create a cohesive customer experience strategy within an organization.
Walters provides actionable advice on how to make a business case for investing in customer experience, linking it to increased revenue and reduced expenses.
She discusses the importance of customer feedback and how it should be integrated into the customer experience strategy to predict and meet customer needs.
Walters warns of the risk of disruption by competitors who prioritize customer experience, urging leaders to innovate in this area to stay ahead.
She emphasizes the value of storytelling and emotional connection in conveying the impact of customer experience to business leaders.
Walters suggests using customer journey mapping as a tool for leaders to understand and improve the customer experience.
She encourages the development of a cross-functional CX team to lead customer experience efforts within an organization.
Walters provides a call to action for leaders to train and educate employees throughout the organization on the importance of customer experience.
She offers resources and tools, such as the Customer Experience Strategy Success Statement, to help leaders define success in customer experience.
Walters concludes by inviting listeners to engage with her for further questions and support in solving experience problems.
Transcripts
It's Experience Action. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm here to answer your
questions about customer experience or employee experience or whatever else you
have to throw at me. So let's go ahead and listen into our question this week.
[Listener Question] Hey, Jeannie, it's Cara Silletto from Magnet Culture. I'd
love to know how to get my leaders to understand that customer experience is
not the same thing as customer service. Can you help me out?
[Jeannie Walters] Thanks, Cara, it's good to hear your voice and for those of you
who don't know Cara Silletto, I encourage you to check out Magnet Culture. That is,
her organization focused on employee retention strategies. So check that out.
Now, this is a great question, because a lot of times when I introduce myself or when I
am speaking somewhere, I talk about customer experience, I use the phrase customer experience,
and still people walk up to me and they say I'm so glad you're talking about customer service.
And so we've been kind of trained to think about these as interchangeable ideas, and what I want to
share today is really why it's so important to have both represented in your organizations in
powerful ways, and why every single business leader should absolutely care about customer
service, but also they should care about customer experience as well. And so, as we are exploring
this idea, I encourage you to think about you know where are the places in your organization where
this might apply and who are the leaders that you can really reach out to in your organization to
bridge the gap, to create that cross-functional leadership that we need in order to deliver on a
positive customer experience. So let's back up a little bit. When we talk about customer service
versus customer experience, what are we talking about? Well, here's the way I think about it.
Customer service is reactive by nature. Customer service is what happens when people need us. When
the customer, maybe, is wandering around in a store and they can't find something,
they need to go find somebody to help them find that. Or maybe they use their app to
way find in a store. That is them seeking information, seeking help.
This also shows up in contact centers. You know, if we have an issue, we have to call
and figure out what's going on. That's up to us as customers. We have to reach out and figure out
how do we solve this problem. Maybe we didn't get the right order, or maybe the bill is incorrect,
or maybe we're just missing a piece of information that we need. There are people, and now we have
apps and AI and all these other tools that are there to respond to those inquiries, to respond
to those needs. So when things go not quite right or when the customer is missing either information
or a product or service, customer service is there to help. It's an important and critical role in
your organization. Now, customer experience is really a proactive and intentional idea.
Now, one thing I like to say is don't forget you don't have to talk about customer experience. Your
customers are still having an experience. Customer experience, by definition, is the
experience that your customers have. This is true from when they first interact with your brand,
all the way through every touchpoint, every interaction, to when they actually either
leave you or become a lifelong customer and advocate for your brand. That's a long journey.
That's something that we have to really think about. If we don't think about that journey,
what happens is the customer is still having an experience, but they are not moving through the
journey in the most optimized way, in the way that makes them feel the best about your brand.
They might have to, you know, figure things out to get to the next step. They might not
feel reassured and confident when they make a purchase because they're not getting that
reassurance. Because if we're not looking at things from the customer's perspective,
we are missing an opportunity to develop a proactive and intentional customer experience.
This is where it comes into the idea of when we add all those interactions up,
when we are looking at the end-to-end journey. However the customer feels about that, their
perception is really what makes the experience for them. So, yes, they might make a purchase,
but they might walk out and think I'm never going back to that store. I couldn't find anything,
it was a mess, things were dusty. When I actually went up there, I didn't feel good about giving my
credit card, whatever it is. We have to look at those interaction points as the customer
and think about how can we make it as effortless as possible, how can we make it as delightful as
possible, how can we help the customer take the next step that they want to take? And so if we're
proactive and intentional about our customer experience, that means a few things happen.
Well, you may have heard about customer service being kind of the cost of doing
business. Sometimes in large organizations we literally refer to it as a cost center,
meaning that we're investing there even though there's not a direct line to return on that
investment. However, if we can be proactive and intentional about our customer experience,
that does a few things for our bottom line. Number one: it actually reduces service cost.
If we don't create problems to begin with, we don't have the service issues at the end.
Now, the other thing that happens is if we are working together hand in hand with the idea of
customer service and customer experience, we're going to listen to what customers are saying,
we're going to ask them about their opinions, their feedback, and once we
gather that we can again go back and be intentional about the experience,
we can start predicting what they need so that they don't have an issue to react to,
they don't have a need to call in, they don't have to search around and find things,
because we've thought about that for them as part of our customer experience efforts inside
the organization. So inside the organization, what we're really doing is customer experience
management or customer experience leadership. This is where we are putting in the right
efforts around the customer experience to get the results that we and our customers want. So
that is really the difference between the ideas of customer service and customer experience.
Now the question is about how do we get our leaders all to care about this. You know,
I have heard customer experience described in so many ways that sometimes I have to just stop
somebody because I hear it described as fluffy or soft skills or a cost center or all of these
different things. And if you are listening to this podcast for more than the first time,
if you followed me on LinkedIn, if you have paid attention to the articles and different things
that we have out there, you know how I feel about this. I really believe that customer experience
drives business value. It is a winning business strategy, but we have to treat it strategically
just like any other part of business. Can you imagine talking about sales as if it's just going
to happen? Right, we say, wow, it's really weird. We are just waiting here for sales to happen.
We've told everybody on our organization that sales is important. We have said that. We put
up a poster and it said sales, they are important, our number one priority. But if we don't actually
give people the communication, the tools, the processes, the technology to get things done
around sales, then it is magical thinking. And yet we do that with customer experience all the time.
So what I would do if I were a leader trying to get others to really understand why this
is important is I would start by defining the business impact. I would literally sit down and
figure out what is the strategic advantage if we can drive a better customer experience. Now
Cara asked this question and she added that, yes, this is part of it. We can get higher retention,
we can get higher referrals. All of that is really important. What I want you to do is
make a strong business case for that. Figure out what would a few more referrals look like for
your bottom line. What would a higher customer lifetime value mean? What would it mean if we
could extend the relationship with a customer so that they actually made more purchases with us?
Or flip that and think about the service issues that you actually have today. What if you could
prevent those things? What if you had fewer people making returns on your products or trying to get
refunds or retribution because things went wrong? There are so many great case studies out there,
but really, when you look at the cost savings, the savings of expenses there,
that's going to make your chief financial officer happy If you are
looking at ways to increase revenue in this tight market we have right now. Look for ways to really
optimize the customer relationships you already have, but make your case.
The other thing that you could look at is how to innovate around your customer experience. If you
look at many of the disruptions that have happened in the last decade plus they have
all been experience-based. When we talk about the Amazons and the Ubers and the Carvanas of
the world, we are talking about disruption through experience. The products they sell
are the same as others and have been for a long time. What they did was they disrupted
industries by focusing on how can we make the experience more effortless, more convenient,
more delightful for our customers. So if you are not focused on customer experience,
this is a great message for those leaders you want to convince.
If you are not focused on customer experience, somebody else in your industry is, and right now,
today, they are working on ways to disrupt your industry. So do not
be left behind on this. Focus on how you can be proactive and intentional and look at all
of those interactions and touch points in your customer's journey so that you can innovate and
stay ahead. This can be really something that develops a tremendous lot of value
for your organization. So you want to take this holistic approach and that means we have to get
cross-functional leadership involved. And that means that, as you make your business case,
as you say to your fellow leaders, we need to care about this, because we need to make a case in a
couple of different ways. We need to think about who those leaders are and what do they care about.
Now, if your CEO is all about growth, you want to talk about the growth potential of working
on customer experience. That's where you get into the referrals, the higher customer lifetime value,
more market share, more share of wallet, all of those things. Now your CFO is going to be looking
for higher revenues and lower expenses. In fact, if you need a winning formula,
this is the winning formula. Look for ways that you can increase revenue and
decrease expenses. One of the ways you can do that is by preventing service issues. So
if you have a lot of people going out to, for instance, repair your products, well,
that's a customer experience issue. You might want to look at that and say, okay,
what could we do to prevent those repairs and that expense for our organization. Use
that as part of your case as well. And then, of course, we want to include customers in this.
Sometimes and I've seen this again and again and again we think leaders want spreadsheets.
We think leaders want to know exactly logical steps for everything. Now that is important,
but they also need story. They need to understand what is this doing for the human behind the number
on that spreadsheet. This is where bringing in real quotes from your customers. This is
where recordings from your call center can be so powerful, or videos that customers
record and share for you. This can happen on social media. This can be maybe testimonials,
things like that. You want to bring that into your leadership. Because I have seen
very hardened business professionals who seem to only want to look at, you know, spreadsheets
and graphs and charts. And then you play one of those recordings where a customer is emotional
and they start hearing the impact that your organization has on individual people and
suddenly that becomes the priority. So use emotion to tell your customer's story. That can move
mountains with leaders, but you have to do this within the context of the broader business case.
So if you haven't already, I would encourage you to check out our Customer Experience Strategy
Success Statement tools on our site. It's in the Learning Center at experienceinvestigators.com.
That process can really help you think through what is the definition of success here and why
should we care about this as business leaders? If we're only talking about customer feedback,
our leaders are not going to pay attention. We need to translate
that into what does that actually mean for our organization. So there's a place
for customer service. There's a place for customer experience. But all of it fits
into this broader idea of what does success look like for our customers,
our employees and our organization? And it's up to us to really define that for our fellow leaders.
So if you want a few easy calls to action here for your fellow leaders, one is let's make sure
we are training and educating and developing our employees to think about customer experience in
this way. Not just the customer facing staff, not just the customer service folks, but everyone
throughout the organization. That's a great way to get some cross-functional engagement. And then,
if you don't already have a cross-functional CX team who is really leading the charge around this,
that is another great place to start. Sometimes these start very organically, but
I would encourage you to think about developing a charter, making sure you have regular check-ins,
making sure you have ways to close the loop with customers who give you that feedback,
as well as with leaders who have requests or ideas or things like that. So make sure you
have some sort of cross-functionality across your leadership team when it comes to customer
experience. And then customer journey mapping is another great tool that can really help leaders
understand what this really is and how you can move forward with it. So if you haven't
done that recently, it's a great way to get engagement with that leadership team as well.
I hope this helps. I love this question because really we have been trained in so
many different ways as business leaders, as entrepreneurs, as people who are focused on
different aspects of our organization and often we just haven't really been taught this stuff. So
there is no shame in the fact that your other leaders might not know exactly what this is,
but the fact that you want to advocate for it is a great step in the right direction.
So you will see the rewards of this. Think strategically, develop that definition of
success and engage cross-functionally with your leaders across the organization so that you can
really see the return on the investment around proactive, intentional customer experiences.
Thank you so much for this question and, as always, I am here for you. So if you are listening
to this, thinking, well, I have a follow-up question or I have another question? Hey,
that's why we're here. So go ahead and check out askjeannie.vip. That's where you can leave
me a recording, anonymously or with your name, and I'll give you a shout out. And we're here
to solve experience problems and to make sure that we are taking action around experience. So
I will talk to you again next week. Thank you for all you do and can't wait to hear
your next question. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out
free resources at experienceinvestigators.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter,
our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.
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