This week we feature an article by Ashwini Dave, a digital marketing expert at Acquire. She explains the difference between customer service and customer experience and shares how implementing both into your business creates success. Customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably and are the buzzwords for businesses in the age of instant […]
This week we feature an article by Ashwini Dave, a digital marketing expert at Acquire. She explains the difference between customer service and customer experience and shares how implementing both into your business creates success.
Customer experience and customer service are often used interchangeably and are the buzzwords for businesses in the age of instant gratuity. While they are not the same thing, they do happen to be related.
According to a recent study, it was found that as much as 86% of buyers were willing to pay more for better customer experience. Not to mention that companies excelling at customer experience generate revenues to the order of 4-8% higher than their competitors. But, in the meantime, what happens to customer service? And how do you differentiate between the two?
Customer service takes precedence. But so does customer experience. So, how do companies decide which one to focus on?
“You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be too easily duplicated. But a strong customer service culture cannot be copied.”
– Jerry Fritz, Director of Management Institute, University of Wisconsin
Good customer service can be aiding a customer with product queries during their buying journey, troubleshooting their issues, and making sure they had a stellar buying experience.
Customer experience, on the other hand, means the overall customer journey across various touchpoints and involves every interaction the customer has with the business.
It involves all the different ways that you, as a brand, interact with the customer and constitutes of three main components:
Here, we will look at four ways to combine the two disparate yet interconnected concepts of customer service and customer experience to help you get started.
Co-browsing helps unlock a higher degree of information by combining real-time experience and human relationships to provide a personalized customer experience. In fact, co-browsing-aided support conversations are so successful that satisfaction ratings from a recent Forbes report reflected a high of 89.3%!
Let’s take Acquire, for example. Acquire’s co-browsing feature helps you show the customer how to use your product instead of telling them. By controlling the tab on which the user is asking for help, you can bring in more interactivity and humanize customer relationships. Indeed, it results in higher customer satisfaction, as 78% of customers said they were better served through co-browsing as opposed to 47% for self-service support.
Not only that, but co-browsing is also a fantastic way to spot issues with your UX. It is a great growth hacking tool for companies with continually evolving standards as it merges CX and customer service to help the customer understand your novel offerings, all the while increasing upselling opportunities and shortening the sales cycle.
After unlocking and gathering information, it’s time to make use of the insight you have gained to automate regular queries. Automating routine questions and deploying this information through a chatbot can not only enable personalization but also answer up to 80% of routine questions, ultimately helping businesses save 30% in customer support costs.
Amtrak, a passenger railroad service, realized how they could use chatbots to hack growth and provide a better customer experience to customers as a result. A huge organization, Amtrak’s website, was getting almost 375,000 visitors each day, and managing customer interactions was getting difficult.
Using an advanced AI chat platform, Amtrak created ‘Ask Julie,’ a chatbot to provide customer service by helping visitors find answers without having to call the support team. However, Julie goes one step further as it combines effective CX with customer service to help travelers book their rail travel and assist them by pre-filling forms. As Julie’s usage grew by 50%, Amtrak saved $1 million in customer service costs and realized an 800% ROI.
Live chat can take personalization one notch higher by enabling your support team to interact with customers in real-time during the purchase process. Prospects love it too, with 75% of them preferring to chat in real-time as it helps them get the answers they need quickly.
A fantastic example of using live chat as a growth hacking technique to provide better customer service is the VPN provider, PureVPN. They were facing the challenge of increasing sales and improving overall customer satisfaction on their website.
Wanting to efficiently assist their expanding customer base, PureVPN struck gold when they decided to introduce live chat as a solution by making it one of their main communication channels. This helped them use pre-made answers to routine questions and consequently provide improved customer service.
Their users delighted in having a 24/7 live chat option that boosted their product experience and also encouraged them to chat courtesy of automatic and personal greetings. This helped PureVPN increase overall sales by 15-20% through live chat interactions and boosted customer satisfaction by a further 34% as the overall customer satisfaction recorded a high of 94%.
As the standard of retail customer care has become more homogeneous, the C-SAT score isn’t as relevant with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) assuming the all-important role today. A person’s willingness to promote a product or a service forms the basis of NPS. According to Nielsen, 83% of customers trust suggestions from people they know, while 66% of them would trust opinions from other consumers online.
InVision, the world’s foremost CX designer, can vouch for this as it used NPS surveys to keep a pulse on customer sentiment and pinpoint the areas where they could improve their platform. The Manager of User Research operations at InVision, Lindsey Redinger, said that:
“The most important piece of capturing NPS is the ability to solicit that qualitative feedback from those people who complete the survey.”
The NPS data-enabled InVision’s team to keep tabs on customer perception in addition to helping them find out the changes they had to introduce to improve the product experience for customers. This helped them provide better customer service and enhance the overall CX by enabling better sales conversations.
Customer service and customer experience aren’t interchangeable, but they are ultimately all about customer satisfaction and are equally important devices of doing so. The key difference between both of them is that customer experience makes up the entirety of the customer journey, along with customer service.
Both are crucial to an organization’s success, yet the line that separates them is almost diaphanous.
Ashwini Dave is passionate about business, entrepreneurship, e-commerce, emerging technology and digital marketing. She is working with Acquire as a digital marketing expert. She is a free soul and adventurous scholar who spends her free time with herself, loved once, music, as well as watching & playing sports.
For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.
Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Now More Than Ever, Customers Want To Trust Companies They Do Business With
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