Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Service – what’s the difference?
Customer Experience or CX refers to the complete journey a customer takes with your brand, from how they become aware of your brand, all the way through to post-purchase communication. Customer Service, on the other hand, is one aspect of the CX journey – the direct and usually issues-based interactions between brand and customer, either in person or now also increasingly via AI.
There’s a not-so-often stated difference, however, that explains why CX has overtaken “Customer Service” in a brand’s lexicon, and why CX is such an important part of achieving business success today… and it’s this:
Customer Service is almost always reactive or reflexive. A customer has a problem, now the brand must fix it, and great customer service will see it happen. But, Customer Experience, contrastingly, is proactive. It’s a system a brand builds to better understand their customers and target their specific and individual needs. Great CX may even ward off that problem from happening in the first place or at the very least surface information and analysis that can be acted upon.
Recent data (published in July 2022) reflects that businesses that prioritise CX grow their revenue 1.7 times faster than businesses that don’t. Data also qualifies that they more than double customer lifetime value – an important metric because it costs less to keep customers than it does to acquire new ones. And, considering 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience, business leaders in 2022 list investing in CX as their top strategic objective.
Almost 90% of customers are willing to pay more for improved customer experience
The reputed market research company Forrester found that “superior CX drives superior revenue growth in industries where customers are free to switch business, and competitors deliver a differentiated customer experience”. But what exactly is a differentiated customer experience?
At TSA, where delivering superior CX is our business, our short answer lies in switching from a reactive customer service offering to a proactive CX solution. Unhappy customers cost more to serve because they require more time and resources to build goodwill. It’s not to say that we can’t and don’t help brands solve tricky customer issues – we absolutely do. But, instead of only spending to recover from bad experiences, we help our partners “flip the script” to a proactive model of building and reinforcing relationships with customers. It inevitably creates better value for all.
You only need to look to brands like Apple and Amazon to see the sorts of results possible – we’re not talking about business size here, but brand loyalty. Both companies are leaders in CX; both continue to win customers and keep them. At TSA we say that loyal customers are a business’s best asset.
What does a TSA CX solution look like?
Customer contact centres play a huge role in CX progressive companies, and, in fact, any brand looking to offer their customers the best CX, use contact centre outsourcing partners, like us.
Our promise is to become an extension of your team – with an understanding of your brand and its values – and take on customer contact for you. Whether you require complete customer service outsourcing, or an increase in support for your current team, we believe the difference we can make to your CX offering is great.
CX is our passion and that’s fuelled the development of sophisticated omni-channel technology, delivered by our expert team who’re dedicated to and trained in customer care. Businesses prefer us because we offer a hybrid solution to (onshore and offshore) contact centre outsourcing, and the flexibility to scale up and down quickly according to need. It means no lag in response time or the quality of service provided, even when demand is at its highest.
We recognise that it can feel like a risk to outsource part of, or all, your CX to an external business partner. We’re, however, confident in our ability to meet and exceed expectations that we created what we call a “Challenger Model”. By setting up a challenger team to work in parallel with your business’s own internal customer contact team, we identify inefficiencies and drive performance. It means that rather than telling you about the benefits of partnering with a dedicated CX company, we’ll show you. Ultimately, we firmly believe that all contact centre operations would be better supported via TSA’s capability in their tool kit.
Customer Experience is the number one brand differentiator. At TSA, we believe our expertise can transform how any brand or business approaches CX and global studies confirm that companies that implement CX strategies achieve higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn, and better ROI. And, from working with our partners we know that businesses who get customer care right grow and flourish.
TSA are Australia’s market leading specialists in CX Consultancy and Contact Centre Services. We are passionate about revolutionising the way brands connect with Australians. How? By combining our local expertise with the most sophisticated customer experience technology on earth, and delivering with an expert team of customer service consultants who know exactly how to help brands care for their customers.