The term “customer experience” seems to be thrown around a lot lately, and for good reason! Companies have begun to realize the importance of a customer’s entire experience with them, rather than just when they contact customer service.

Customer experience isn’t something brands should (or can afford to) take lightly. In the past year alone, 49% of people have said that they switched brands due to poor customer experience. 81% of companies also state that they are competing based on CX alone, which means that customer experience is the new brand.

Now more than ever, it’s important for every B2C company to understand that your company’s brand is more than colors and logos. Your brand still encompasses marketing, but customer experience is really the key factor in how potential and current customers feel about your company.

Which brings us to the common question: Is customer experience and customer service the same thing?

In short, no, they are not the same thing, but they do work together to ensure a satisfied customer that sticks around for the long-haul. So, let’s start out with defining each so we have a better understanding of how they are incorporated into a business strategy.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is the direct one-on-one interaction between your company and a customer both before and after they purchase from you. It supports your customers with questions before purchase to assisting with product questions after purchase and potentially (hopefully!), even repurchasing.

In fact, customer service is actually a piece of the customer experience puzzle! So, they work together to ensure customer satisfaction.

Related Post: 5 Ways for Giving Customer Support a Human Touch

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience, or CX, is known as your customer’s perception of your company/brand throughout their entire buying journey. CX encompasses all the ways your company interacts with its customers, but direct and indirect.

While customer service just focuses on solving a customer’s problem, CX goes a couple steps farther to encompass:

1. How your customer interacts/uses your product or service

2. Their interactions with customer service, including self-service, and how they directly interact with your team

3. How your customer views your branding and design—the general feelings they have about your company

   
   
   

How Customer Experience Adds Value

Yes, planning and incorporating a new strategy takes time and money. However, when you understand the value that a customer experience strategy has on your company’s growth, it’s a no-brainer that CX is a value-add rather than simply an additional expense.

CX Improves Customer Retention

Adobe found that engagement-driven businesses reported 1.6x to 1.9x higher YoY growth in customer retention, repurchase rates, average order values, and lifetime customer value over companies that don’t place an emphasis on CX.

And as we all know, retaining a customer is actually five times more expensive than acquiring a new customer, which means that we want to prevent customer churn as much as possible. So, if you’re focusing on customer experience and retention, increasing retention rates by just 5% could lead to profit increases of 25-95%. The math speaks for itself.

CX Improves Business Growth

When companies place customer experience on the forefront of their strategy, they ultimately see an increase in business growth. Companies that focus on customer engagement also report an average growth rate of 15%, compared to 11% for other companies that don’t place an emphasis on CX.

Customer Experience Incorporates Your Entire Organization

Unlike customer service, that’s just one part of your company to resolve customer issues, a successful customer experience strategy takes an entire organization. From employees with direct contact to your customers all the way up to the CEO, everyone needs to have the same vision of what your customer experience looks and feels like.

Customers these days don’t care what team they are talking to when trying to solve a problem and expect the same experience across teams, from customer service to tech support. This means that in order to improve customer satisfaction, keeping a consistent CX is essential.

Three Benefits to Outsourcing Customer Experience

Revenue Growth

Working with an outsourced partner, like Incept, means you'll have access to experts in the best tried and true CX strategies. You'll also have access to a larger pool of employees that potentially service times that your internal team doesn't support. Outsourcing your customer experience allows you to fully focus on your area of expertise, allowing you to increase your revenue.

Cost Reduction

Our conversational marketing solution means you don’t need to hire pricey consultants and wait for months to gain actionable insight into the customer experience. Outsourcing CX can help reduce cost because you're typically paying just for the utilization of the outsourced partner's resources. There's also an increased value in outsourcing because your outsourced partner can help in achieving higher up-sell ratios, quantifying data on why customers are churning, maybe getting a higher retention rate.

Competitive Advantage

We don’t settle for merely reaching your business goals. Our leadership, talent and culture are designed to deliver continuous improvement and business transformation. Our data and reports give you end-to-end visibility into the customer journey and enable us to design and deliver the optimal customer experience for your brand.

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When more and more customers are willing to switch to a different brand due to poor customer experience, it's more important than ever to ensure high-quality support.

This guide not only goes over CX best practices but also gives you direction on how to implement them!