We are surrounded by Anglicisms and terms that are emerging, more and more quickly. Before we break down the differences, let's go into detail about the definition we could give to each of them.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer Experience is a business strategy that focuses on achieving an economic benefit by generating emotional ties between customers or consumers and brands.
Customer Experience as a strategy is based on the value chain, which explains the relationship between emotions and business.

Emotions, or what brands make our customers feel, are the main ingredient of memory.
Remembrance is important, because it determines our future behaviors and decisions.
These behaviors and future decisions are what have an impact on business results.

The value chain connects two concepts that are not as intuitive for organizations: emotions and business. Explain why Customer Experience is so important to focus on understanding and managing customer emotions, to have an impact on results.

What is Customer Service?

Customer Service is the support that each organization offers to its consumer in the form of support at all stages of the purchase process or in the event of a specific concern. We can say that this area is highly related to the quality of the experience.

This support can be seen as a mere service that the company has to solve the customer or as those aids it makes available to them to self-manage, we are talking about: forums, knowledge bases, frequently asked questions sections or chatbots with contextual answers.

At Izo we like to talk about Emotional Customer Service, where in addition to offering a service, we go one step further by including the emotional level that we can offer to the customer. Let's not forget that we are people offering support to other people, empathy, assertiveness, listening, are super important to achieve an attention of 10.

What differences can we see?

Strategy vs Service

This would be the first and most notable difference between the two, and that is that customer experience is a business strategy that puts the customer at its center and encompasses Customer Service at certain times.

Therefore, we can talk about the fact that customer experience has a transversal vision towards the company, since it is part of the organizational culture, while Customer Service is a part of the company or a department specialized in providing customer support.

Durability

Customer Experience is present throughout the consumer's life cycle, even starting at such early stages as discovery, that is, before becoming a customer. Currently, there are already some companies that are including in their Journeys the first steps that customers take after ending the relationship with them and going with another company

On the other hand, Customer Service tends to be more limited in time, because as we mentioned before, it is about helping the customer to resolve a concern or request at a specific time.

Results in the experience offered

We could talk about the fact that a transactional measurement can be applied to Customer Service, given that it is about a specific interaction and that the Customer Experience is more of a relational type. However, let's not forget that the customer experience should be embedded throughout the organization and throughout the customer lifecycle.

In short, we are talking about two different concepts applied within an organization. On the one hand, we have the customer-focused business strategy (Customer Experience) and on the other, the support we provide at specific moments (Customer Service).

‍