Customer Experience…
I see those two words together often and, frequently, I want to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “I do not think it means what you think it means”.…
Customer Experience does not equal customer service. Someone much smarter than me, but I don’t know who, said “Customer service is what happens when your customer experience fails”.
This might be a slight over-simplification because some experiences (wedding dress shopping comes to mind, not because I’m looking) benefit from high-touch, human-in-loop approaches from the get-go. But for the most part, our experiences and most importantly, our memory of those experiences, benefit from effortless, frictionless, easy interactions, that don’t require a human in the loop – an interaction path that gives a feeling of control, self-determination and emotional connection. Customer service usually comes into play when something goes wrong in that experience, that we can’t resolve on our own, in the channel of choice.
The discipline of Customer Experience encompasses any touchpoint with a prospect (because you’re setting a customer’s expectations) and a customer, whether digital or with a human. It’s a broad field, but in its simplest terms the discipline of customer experience aims to be the organic growth engine of a company by creating such great experiences in every touch point in the organization that customers not only repeat purchase/interact, but that they endorse and evangelize the organization to friends, family and total strangers.
Therefore Customer Service is an important element of Customer Experience, but it’s just that – one of the many elements of that make up the Customer Experience (just like sedans are an automobile, but not all automobiles are sedans).
So please, if you’re posting a role for a contact center leader, don’t call it customer experience unless that role has a lot more under its purview. Call it what it is, Customer Service. You’ll look smarter and find a better suited candidate.
Michelle Martinez is a CCNG colleague, experienced leader with a strategic and logical approach, emphasizing servant-led leadership and fostering collaboration. Michelle brings her extensive background in B2B/B2C/D2C organizations, including ownership of customer experience, client success and contact center operations among other to share with the CCNG community as a whole.
