Darlene Compagna

Direct Opinions

Customer service or customer experience…  It’s all the same, right?  Unfortunately, that’s what many companies think. Customer service and customer experience are terms that often get used interchangeably. However, they have very different meanings.  Learning the differences between customer service and customer experience can help you effectively drive customer acceleration® and growth for your company.

Although customer service and customer experience are different concepts, they work hand-in-hand when it comes to building brand loyalty. Customer service is just one part of the entire customer journey, while customer experience encompasses all the interactions between your company and a customer–good and bad. 

Know the difference and build and nurture long-lasting relationships with your customers to drive growth for your business.The #1 goal of customer service is to provide the customer with the essential support to make their experience with the company as smooth and positive as possible. It is the support provided to customers before, during and after they make a purchase, typically helping solve a problem.  

Customer experience is the sum of all the touchpoints that a customer has with a company. This begins with awareness of the company by marketing efforts, to interaction with various support teams through project completion and post-purchase.   The goal of customer experience is to provide a seamless, positive, and convenient experience for the customer, and ensuring overall customer success. 

Customer service is typically short term, with the primary goal of addressing immediate needs and concerns and resolving customer issues.  

Customer experience involves maintaining a long-term relationship with the customer, prioritizing their needs and ensuring customer loyalty. It involves understanding and anticipating customer needs and providing tailored solutions that meet those needs.

Customer service is reactive, meaning it responds to the customer’s needs or issues after they have arisen. On the other hand, customer experience is proactive, meaning it anticipates customer needs and provides solutions or improves processes before customers even have to ask.

Let’s look a bit more closely at the significance of these differences…


Customer Service

Customer service is primarily the responsibility of a customer support team. These frontline employees are often responsible for answering customer queries, helping with products and services, and resolving any issues or complaints. Other team members may speak with customers, but the support team is typically accountable for delivering the help customers need at that time and ensuring their satisfaction.  

Focusing solely on this siloed approach, however, can prevent organizations from delivering an overall seamless customer experience because it’s managed by one segment of the organization and may not effectively incorporate other important departments such as sales, installation or billing. 


Customer Experience

Customer experience, which is always ongoing, puts the customer at the center of the organization. It is a shared responsibility across the operation and is spread across many touchpoints. Everyone in the business—from marketing to sales to the installation team—is in charge of giving customers the best experience across all touchpoints.

While customer experience refers to the overall impression a customer has of a business based on their interactions with the brand, it can also be described as a feeling or emotion a customer has with a brand, based on their experiences. The manner in which you help customers when issues arise contributes to their level of satisfaction, and the faster you can help bring customers a resolution, the faster you can help them succeed and have a positive overall experience. 

In an effort to ensure your team is providing excellent customer service and delivering outstanding customer experiences, metrics can be used to track your teams’ progress and success. Effective customer service metrics, for example, show how quickly you help customers resolve their issues. Using metrics such as “average response or resolution time” or a “first contact resolution” rate will help improve efficiency in your operation and deliver timely support.  

For evaluation of the customer experience, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and/or Net Promoter Score® are popular experiential metrics to gauge overall sentiment and enable your team to focus on benchmarking and improvement.

By evaluating and tracking these metrics through all interactions and support teams you can identify which experiences are seamless and which ones cause friction or are high-effort interactions for your customers.  Having this feedback will enable you to take steps to make it easier for customers to do business with you. Furthermore, identifying and solving industry roadblocks or pain points that exist for both you and your competitors will establish your company as an innovator and will differentiate your brand, elevating your business in the market.

Delivering outstanding experiences is focused on ensuring all interactions and touchpoints with your business are easy, enjoyable, and seamless, leaving customers with a positive lasting impression of your brand. Remember, your company has complete control over the service it provides to its customers. Fragmented or disjointed customer experiences can be a major downfall for any organization.  

By knowing these differences, you can align your customer service team with your customer experience efforts and deliver seamless experiences across the customer journey to build and nurture long-lasting relationships with your customers that will drive growth for your business.  

Consider these Customer Acceleration® tips that will help you make more money from your customers and make them happier in the process!


If you’d like some help to get started, please reach out to Darlene Campagna at dcampagna@directopinions.com or call 216-867-1165.