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Reactions to "customer service" column
Dec 12, 2005
Last week in this column I wrote that "customer service is not the same as customer experience." The column got an unusually large response, especially around this comment I made:
Customer service is the job of front-line workers, servicing customer requests for help - via an 800 number, e-mail, or a retail desk. It's important to invest in good customer service, but that's just the tiniest sliver of the customer experience.
Excerpted from the comment board, below are a few of the comments that stood out:
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David McQuillen from Credit Suisse (and a euroGel speaker) wrote in:
Customer service is certainly an extremely important part of customer experience.
In banking, our research shows that customer service accounts for nearly 40% of the customer's assessment of whether we deliver a positive experience. Hardly the 'tiniest sliver' as you suggest!
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On the other hand, Joe Ranft (a Geler who also works in financial
services) writes:
I go to a little pizza place in Brookline called the Upper Crust. Some say it's the best pizza in the country. Twice I've called in my order, and they lost it, or failed to write it down, and then still just put my make-up order in the back of the line with everybody else's. While this infuriates me, I will continue to go there because the pizza is so good.
My point is a business can have a great product or service and lousy customer experience and be successful, but great customer service and lousy product ultimately fails.
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Michael Reiff writes in from Austin:
I'd suggest that this really varies by channel. In a bricks and mortar retail setting (or in banking, as David mentions) customer service and store design play a huge role in creating the overall customer experience -- more so, in some cases, than the products sold do.
On the Web, however, live customer service may obviously be that "tiniest sliver" of overall experience that you mention, but that's because the site is essentially playing the same role that store design and customer service play in a traditional retail store. If my online experience is a great one, then I often have no need to interact with customer service, and it never becomes part of my experience.
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And finally, Leigh Duncan from livepath.net "partly disagrees":
Customer Service is not merely the job of front-line workers; it begins with the policies that govern the management of customer need.
While your problem wasn't a Customer Service environment or interfacing problem (accessing service within the phone channel, or talking to the rep), it was very much a Customer Service platform issue (related to people, process, technology and/or policy).
Customer Service is perhaps the most important aspect of Customer Experience. While the two are not the same, they are so strongly, perceptually bound in the minds of customers they can often be equated as such.
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I appreciate the feedback and hope these wise comments help fill in the gaps in my column.
Borrowing from my recent three strands column, I'll add that a good experience is useful, fun, or meaningful; or some combination of those factors. Customer service, a focus on fixing problems on the "useful" side, doesn't by itself seem to encompass the same scope as "customer experience." But maybe that's just a semantic issue.
Original column, Customer service is not customer experience
