Many businesses use the words customer service and customer experience as if they mean the same thing.

They don’t.

Customer service is only one part of the customer experience.

Customer service is what happens when a customer needs help.

Customer experience is everything the customer goes through with your business.

From the first time they hear about you to the point where they decide whether to come back.

Think about the entire journey

A customer may first see your business online.

They look for information.

They make an enquiry.

They decide to buy.

They make payment.

They wait for their order.

They receive what they paid for.

They may need help afterwards.

Every one of these moments contributes to their experience.

And most of them may have nothing to do with your customer service team.

If it is difficult to get information, that is part of the experience.

If customers have to keep following up to get an order, that is part of the experience.

If they are given different information by different people, that is part of the experience.

If everything works smoothly and the customer gets exactly what they expected, that is also part of the experience.

Good customer service cannot fix everything

Imagine a customer has been waiting for an order for three days longer than promised.

They finally call.

The person who answers is polite, apologises and does their best to help.

That is good customer service.

But the customer has still had a poor experience.

The problem was not how the customer was spoken to.

The problem was that the process behind the service did not work as it should.

This is why improving customer experience sometimes requires looking beyond the customer service team.

You may need to look at how orders are handled, how information moves, how promises are made, how complaints are resolved and where customers are experiencing unnecessary delays.

Look at the business from the customer’s side

One useful question is:

“What does it feel like to do business with us?”

Not what you intended.

Not what your staff were told to do.

Not what your process document says should happen.

What actually happens to the customer?

Because customers experience the business as one company.

They do not separate your processes into departments.

If something goes wrong somewhere along the journey, they simply experience it as your business.

That is why customer experience is bigger than customer service.

Customer service handles the interaction. Customer experience looks at the entire journey.

And if you want to improve the customer experience, you have to look at the whole journey not just the person answering the customer’s complaint.