The Difference between CS and CX
As we usher in the month of October, I am enjoying the changing of the seasons, the fall colors, and the cooler weather. I also love this week as we are celebrating 2 of my passions – Customer Service and Customer Experience. This whole week (Oct 5 – 9) celebrates CS (Customer Service) Week and today (Oct 6), we celebrate CX (Customer Experience) Day. I have found that often CS and CX are used interchangeably. While there are some similarities between the two, they are different.
Happy Customer Service week to our Customer Service Heroes providing front-line support to drive better customer experiences!
What is CS?
This week, we are celebrating the customer service associates who spend their days with customers – resolving issues, answering questions, and helping customers with whatever inquiry or issue they may have experienced. They are an integral part of the overall customer experience, with customer service agents acting as “friction fixers” to improve the customer journey on their channel of choice – phone, chat, in-app messaging, email, text, social, etc.
Poor customer service results in customer churn and ultimately lost revenue – 96% of customers will leave for bad service.
But agents have complaints too. It’s hard for them to do their job when 88% say disjointed communications apps negatively impact workflow and job satisfaction and 89% say broken workflow and low employee job satisfaction impact customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
It is critical in the era where customer experience is seen as a competitive differentiator that we engage our customer service teams and ensure that we provide the best experience for them so that they can in turn provide quality support to customers. This includes a multi-pronged approach of providing the best tools as well as engaging the employees as part of the larger team.
What is CX?
Customer Experience (CX) is the entire customer journey/lifecycle from marketing to fulfillment. Consumers who have had a good CX are 54% more likely to buy from a company than consumers who have had a poor experiences. Companies that focus on customer experience as a key differentiator have formal Voice of the Customer programs, customer journey mapping and are focused on delivering the brand around the customer.
Customers want “frictionless” and easy experiences. They don’t want to have to call customer service. Customer Experience is a key differentiator – 80% of customers say the experience a business provides is just as important as their product or service. In fact, 37% of companies say they’re investing in customer experience because they’re losing business to their competitors.
Customer Experience Day is a day for companies to reflect on where they are on their customer centric journey.
Who are your customer champions – inside and outside customer service? Have you taken a walk in your customer’s shoes lately – looking at the marketing, ordering, service and fulfillment process? What could be improved? Are there steps that are manual that could be digitized? Is there proactive communication missing? Have you looked at your voice of the customer program – are you measuring the right things? Do you have all the data points needed to get a full view of the customer’s journey and sentiment?
Happy CX Day to all companies – use this day to celebrate your CX heroes and identify additional opportunities to enhance CX for your brand.
Technology supporting CS and CX
As we take a look at both Customer Service and Customer Experience, technology is an enabler to provide great service and experience. Customer Service is no longer call centers with ACD phone queues. With advances in technology, Customers expect more than ever:
- Personalization (know me regardless of channel I contact you on, know my history with the company),
- Be competent – resolve my issue the first time I contact you
- Provide me with choices on how to contact you
- Proactively contact me if there are issues with my order or you are unable to keep your promise
- Minimize my effort and value my time
- Provide self-service where it makes sense – 75% of customers under 40 expect businesses to have a chatbot option
Learn more about how RingCentral’s cloud-based contact center provides a great customer experience as well as enhance the employee experience for customer service representatives.
Originally published Oct 05, 2020, updated Jan 07, 2024
