Customer experience vs customer service: What’s the difference?

Do customer service and customer experience mean the same thing? The terms might sound interchangeable, but they refer to different aspects of how companies interact with customers.

Customer service focuses on helping customers when they have questions or issues. It’s the support a business provides in critical moments.

Customer experience (CX), on the other hand, is a broader concept. It covers every customer interaction with a brand, from the first contact to the last.

While customer service is reactive, addressing problems as they arise, customer experience is proactive, aiming to create positive and seamless interactions every time. Think of it this way: Customer service is what a brand provides, and customer experience is what customers remember.

This article explains the difference between customer service and customer experience and why focusing on CX can give businesses a competitive edge.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the sum of all customer interactions with a brand during their journey. It includes everything from the sales process to the product or service itself, to customer service interactions. Customer experience refers to the overall relationship between a brand and its customers, which can significantly impact a company’s bottom line.

Three key factors shape customer experience:

1. Products and services. Products must meet customer needs. Continually improving based on research and feedback is essential for success.

2. Employees. Employees are at the forefront of any business. Customers want to speak with friendly and approachable staff, whether they are sales representatives or support agents. Keeping agents motivated and engaged ensures they deliver better service.

3. Processes. To ensure seamless operation from the moment of discovery to the post-sale experience, companies must streamline their processes, uncover inefficiencies, and adopt a holistic customer service approach.

The customer experience spans many channels, including store, website, social media, and phone. Customers should have the same positive experience regardless of how they interact with the brand. For that, an omnichannel engagement strategy is fundamental.

There’s always room to improve customer experience. For example, WaFd Bank transformed its century-old institution by increasing its customers’ ability to reach and talk to agents by 90%.

How should companies implement a customer experience strategy?

Creating a great CX strategy is all about understanding and improving how customers interact with a brand. It’s not a one-time task but a continuous effort to keep up with customer needs and expectations.

Here are some quick tips on how to get started:

Leverage customer data.

A strong CX strategy starts with understanding customer behavior. By analyzing call durations, response rates, and customer feedback companies can identify what’s working and where there are opportunities for improvement. Real-time insights help fix issues quickly and enhance the customer experience.

Collecting, and analyzing, customer data is easiest with AI for customer experience analytics. The right tool can help turn real-time customer data into great customer service, with custom dashboards that tell contact center agents, and managers, everything they need to know about their performance.

Here are a few KPIs that customer experience analytics tools can track:

• Customer service level: The percentage of calls, emails, or messages answered within a predetermined time frame, indicating how responsive a contact center is to customer outreach.

• Average wait time: The average amount of time a customer spends waiting in the queue before being connected to an agent.

• First contact resolution rate: The percentage of customer issues resolved during the initial interaction without requiring follow-up.

• Average handle time: The total time spent handling a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time, and any after-call work.

• Occupancy rate: The percentage of time agents spend handling calls, messages, or other customer communication, or doing related tasks, compared to their total available time.

• Average abandonment rate: The percentage of customers who disconnect before reaching an agent, typically due to long wait times.

Tracking the right customer experience metrics, and having easy access to that data, helps a contact center continually improve performance.

Provide multichannel communication.

Customers have different communication preferences. Some prefer online chats, while others use phone calls, social media, or messaging apps. Offering a variety of channels, with integrated workflows and visibility for agents, helps ensure a consistent, seamless experience for customers.

Artificial intelligence provides a major lift in offering customers the communication channels they want. AI for omnichannel engagement allows customers to connect with brands across their channel of choice. Importantly, it also preserves conversation details from one contact to the next. If a customer first connects with a brand through a customer service chatbot, then calls that same brand, the agent is already aware of that customer’s previous chatbot interactions. This helps improve first response rate and prevents the customer from having to repeat their issue multiple times.

Offer self-service options.

Many customers appreciate the ability to find answers on their own. Providing self-service tools like FAQs, knowledge bases, and AI-powered chatbots allows customers to get help whenever needed while freeing support agents to focus on more complex inquiries.

When most customers envision a self-service experience, they picture stale conversations with an online robot. In reality, customer service chatbots powered by AI can do so much more than answer questions.

Here are a few capabilities that separate the best self-service chatbots from the rest:

• Connect customers with new products: Chatbots can sift through a company’s inventory, with parameters like price and product type set by the customer, to send customers straight to the items they’re looking for.

• Scan inventory: Customers can request real-time inventory updates, and chatbots can search through available products to identify which items are in stock, which are currently sold out, and when sold out items might be back in stock.

• Confirm orders: Many chatbots can confirm orders once customers make a purchase. They can also provide reassuring details like order numbers, total cost, package tracking information, and estimated delivery timelines.

Of course, there are always situations when a customer might find their issue is too complex for a self-service chatbot to handle. If this happens, chatbots can route customers to a live human agent. AI-powered customer routing technology sends customers to the agent or team that is best qualified to handle their issues.

What is customer service?

Customer service is a component of the overall customer experience that refers to individual interactions where customers seek support, whether from self-service options or human agents. More than simply answering questions, customer service is about offering the best possible support.

A good customer service strategy offers:

Ease of resolution.

Customers want quick resolutions. Solving issues during the first contact increases their likelihood of staying with the company. Regardless of how they seek help, customers should feel that their problem is resolved.

Consistency.

Customers now expect to communicate with businesses using digital channels first and want to be able to switch the conversation to another channel if needed. The ability to transition to different channels while engaging with an agent is crucial. Customers also appreciate when conversation details are carried over from one interaction to the next, eliminating the need to repeat their concerns to the next agent.

Connection.

Customers are loyal when they feel a sense of connection. That means many pay close attention to companies’ positions and actions within a broader social context. As these factors increasingly influence buying decisions, agents must be able to serve as brand ambassadors and speak about the themes that matter to customers.

How do customer experience and customer service overlap?

While customer experience (CX) and customer service are distinct, they are closely intertwined—and both are essential for business success.

Customer service is the most direct and personal interaction a customer has with a brand. It typically occurs when a customer needs help or support. How a company handles these interactions can leave a lasting impression. A positive customer service experience can significantly shape how customers view a company, boosting their satisfaction and loyalty.

However, customer service alone isn’t enough. It addresses specific issues at the moment, while CX encompasses the entire customer journey—from the first touchpoint to post-purchase interactions. CX is proactive, creating seamless, positive experiences across all stages and channels, while customer service is reactive, solving immediate concerns.

For a company to thrive, it needs excellence in both customer experience and customer service. Customer service ensures customers feel supported when they encounter problems, while a strong CX strategy ensures that every interaction—from marketing to sales to support—creates value and fosters trust. Together, they build stronger relationships, enhance loyalty, and solidify a brand’s reputation.

How do customer experience and customer service differ?

Now that the relationship between customer experience and customer service is clear, it’s important to explore a few key differences between them.

They have different success metrics.

While Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) are good metrics to gauge how the brand CX is performing, other key performance indicators (KPIs) such as service level, first contact resolution, and average speed of answer will offer better insight into the customer service performance.

They have different owners.

While the customer support department is accountable for delivering customer service at high standards, the entire organization shares responsibility for customer experience. From the customer service team to the sales team, everyone is responsible for giving customers a seamless, pleasant experience at every touchpoint.

Make smarter CX decisions with Talkdesk.

Customer experience and customer service go hand in hand. The right tools can help both succeed.

For example, the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) improved customer care with  AI-powered CX solutions from Talkdesk. The company lowered its average handle time to 210.7 seconds and decreased abandonment rates by 12%. After a successful one-year trial period, they finalized their relationship with Talkdesk and found it easy to scale outreach to meet consumer needs.

Want to make smarter CX decisions? Explore how Talkdesk can help:

1. Start by reviewing the basics of customer service. Discover the five most important elements of customer service and understand how customer service impacts the overall brand experience.

2. Watch our webinar on how AI can transform CX. Explore the AI-powered platform firsthand to explore the best in flexible, adaptable customer experience management.

3. Deep dive into CX investment strategy. Check out the report “The global state of CX 2024” to get insights from CX practitioners in the CX Network community.

Make every customer experience great with Talkdesk. Explore our AI-powered CX Cloud solution.