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8 | August 2024
Slippery Rock Gazette
Training & EducaTion
Know the difference and build and nurture long-lasting relation-
ships with your cus- tomers to drive growth for your business.
Training & Education
Customer Service Versus Customer Experience
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 met- rics through all interactions and support teams you can identify which experiences are seamless and which ones cause fric- tion 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 innova- tor and will differentiate your brand, ele- vating 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 custom- ers 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 cus- tomers 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 hap- pier 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.
Customer service or customer expe- rience... 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 cus- tomer experience are different concepts, they work hand-in-hand when it comes to building brand loyalty. Customer ser- vice 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.
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
Darlene Compagna
Direct Opinions
the touchpoints that a customer has with a company. This begins with awareness of the company by marketing efforts, to inter- action with various support teams through project completion and post-purchase. The goal of customer experience is to pro- vide 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 imme- diate needs and concerns and resolving customer issues.
Customer experience involves maintain- ing a long-term relationship with the cus- tomer, prioritizing their needs and ensuring customer loyalty. It involves understanding and anticipating customer needs and pro- viding 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 signif- icance of these differences...
Customer Service
Customer service is primarily the respon- sibility of a customer support team. These frontline employees are often responsible for answering customer queries, helping with products and services, and resolv- ing 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 respon- sibility 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 sat- isfaction, 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
Stone Forensics Announces 2025 Stone and Tile Troubleshooting Workshop in Las Vegas
Stone Forensics has announced that it will be conducting its popular Stone and Tile Troubleshooting training in
January 2025, in Las Vegas. The program is designed to teach the basics of stone and tile installation failures. According to Fred Hueston, who will be conduct- ing the training, “The amount of failures, poor installations and other issues with stone and tile flooring are on the rise. This seminar is perfect for restoration and installation contractors as well as archi- tects, building engineers and maintenance
staff who have to deal with stone and tile installation and restoration.
Training will be held January 27-31, 2025. For those who wish to be certified inspec- tors this course will also offer certification.
The Stone and Tile Trouble- shooting Workshop is a full 4 days of train- ing with the certification test on the last day. There is a fifth-day option to go on a quarry tour to Vegas Rock. Class size is limited. The cost of the class is $2,500 per person.
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