Does customer experience (CX) mean the same thing to you as it does to someone else?
I was suspicious that it doesn’t.
Furthermore, I’d come to believe that a sizable population of business professionals define the term customer experience and related terms like customer service and customer success differently.
Dare I even say inaccurately.
This belief reached its apex recently as I sat in a Clubhouse room discussing the topic of customer experience.
I listened to a few dozen professionals discuss their jobs and views on CX and two things became clear to me.
1. It’s common to have a customer experience career epiphany.
In other words, people who one day realize that the job they’d been doing for years is not as unique or unclassified as they’d originally believed. That there were networking groups, associations, events, and certifications for people just like them. Or that their function had an organized and accepted title like customer success, client enablement, or even customer champion.
In any case, accidentally discovering an industry is a strange phenomenon that I’d not seen in many other professions. People don’t wake up and realize that they’ve been a surgeon for the last 10 years. (At least, I hope not.) It’s my hypothesis that these unconventional CX career paths further contribute to the confusion around terms like customer experience.
2. People are not aligned on what counts as customer experience.
This confused and surprised me.
It shouldn’t.
I’ve observed this disconnect for years but I’d never tested my theories on the words people would actually use to describe CX. I was curious as to how they’d differentiate customer experience from other terms that I’d heard it confused with or used interchangeably like customer service and customer success.
Were we speaking completely different languages? Or were there just subtle yet important details that need to be further socialized and aligned upon?
My curiosity got the best of me and I needed original data to validate my suspicions.
A CX Poll For The People
This is what I sought out when I went to social media to poll my network on the words they’d use to describe customer experience, customer service, and customer success.
I wasn’t looking for a new definition of these terms.
I believe that there are some really great organizations and resources that laid the groundwork there. (More on those shortly) It was my goal to better understand where we’re aligned, where we’re not, and to provide clarity in the gap if and where one existed.
The response exceeded my expectations. The original LinkedIn post alone ranked in the top 1% for engagement on the platform. People shared the posts, sent private messages, recorded video responses, and provided thoughtful responses to my short study. I’d clearly struck a nerve.
But what did people have to say? Let’s start by understanding who these people were.
Customer Experience Definitions: The Audience
The majority of participants were senior-level leaders with a few decades of experience under their belts. I’m talking about directors, vice presidents, and C-level executives with an almost even spread of representation from titles that included the words customer experience, customer service, and customer success. Over a third of these professionals have greater than 16 years of experience in their current line of work, and another third have between 8 and 15 years.
To be candid, I would have loved more insight from those brand new to their line of work. A deeper look at how those new to these jobs explained the terms compared and contrasted to the veterans.
I’m still curious. It’s something I’ll likely explore in the future.
For now, a comparison of roughly 13% of participants with less than 3 years of experience would indicate that the disparity of definitions is slightly greater in that group. It makes sense to me but I don’t have the confidence level to make any sweeping assertions. That said, this survey took an intriguing turn for me as I looked at how such an experienced group defined terms that they likely use on a daily basis.
What Counts As Customer Experience?
When it comes to understanding the term customer experience, I look to my friend and colleague Annette Franz. As the Immediate Past Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), she’s played an instrumental role in shaping the certification program for CX professionals and advancing the principles of customer experience excellence.
Annette defines customer experience as follows:
“The sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand and how the customer feels about those interactions.”
This definition indicates that customer experience is an outcome.
More importantly, an outcome that’s affected by a tremendously wide scope of variables that are both within and outside of a brand’s control.
Customer experience is not defined by a singular interaction with a contact center advisor or a front desk employee. It’s not solely determined by a marketing campaign or message board comment. Customer experience is an aggregate of those things and more.
Here’s a look at the words my survey participants used to describe CX.
You can see that commonly used words associated with customer experience included brand, interactions, sum, and journey. These comments mostly aligned with Annette’s definition. In some instances, the definition was exclusively focused on a customer’s feelings or perceptions of a brand. For others, it was about how a brand designs its customer journey or business strategy. Almost every person captured the general essence of CX but I particularly appreciated the one participant who wrote this definition for customer experience, “It’s not as easy as it seems.“
Preach. It.
But why isn’t CX as easy as it seems?
I think the answer is alluded to in the definition of customer experience and validated in the words used by the business leaders who participated in my study.
For a moment, let’s agree that customer experience equals all moments a customer spends with a brand or its representatives plus the customer’s memories of and feelings about those moments. If that is true, then being a customer experience leader would mean having influence and authority to lead change across those things.
How many people do you know who are defined customer experience leaders with the influence and authority over all moments a customer spends with a brand or its representatives?
I’ll speak strictly to what I’ve observed through my time as a consultant and researcher.
Most people with Customer Experience in their title have a scope of authority that’s a fraction of the total customer experience. They’re in the call center, or marketing department, or UX research team. They lead functions that contribute to the customer’s experience but it often, and frustratingly, ends there.
We wonder why customer experience isn’t as easy as it seems? I believe it’s because we’re leading it in the wrong way. We have individuals who contribute to parts of the experience but they’re not reporting through a centralized executive who has the truest ability to be the CX leader. We give limited authority and scatter it in silos and then wonder why we struggle.
We do it to ourselves.
How do we prevent it from happening? A quick study of the brands known for creating exceptional customer experiences uncovers a common thread: A senior executive (often, but not necessarily, CEO or Founder) who thinks and leads with a CX mindset.
Customer experience is affected by individual stakeholders. It’s scaled by the CX-centric executive.
This isn’t to say that some variables, or moments, don’t influence a customer’s perceptions more than others. Research by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman on the psychology of moments indicates that the most notable parts of an experience are the most extreme moment, or peak, and its end. For that reason, it is fair to assume that certain people or functions are more likely than others to intersect with the peak or end moments. That does not mean, however, that we should forget the other contributors to CX or place the full authority of the customer experience on those individuals.
Each team member in an organization should be acutely aware of how their job can affect the customer experience. Everyone, from the manufacturing floor to the legal team, the developer group to the logistics coordinators, plays a role in customer experience. But that’s not how I heard people talking about it.
It seemed to me that people looked at those common intersections with the peak and end moments and designated those functions as being solely responsible for customer experience. It’s either that or they grew tired of the term customer service and opted to exchange it with the arguably sexier term customer experience.
My suspicion was only further reinforced as I interviewed people with titles like Director of Customer Experience about their responsibilities.
Any guesses on what I heard from most of them?
They led frontline teams with responsibility for customer service, technical support, or the like.
I would classify what they do as leading a function that strongly influenced customer experience, but they weren’t doing the CX leader work as I outlined above.
My belief is that we’re actually doing ourselves a disservice by mislabeling these roles within a business. It places an inequitable burden on the wrongly dubbed customer experience leader and overlooks the other contributors to CX.
We can’t get customer experience right if we don’t clearly understand what it is, who’s responsible for it, and how it’s both different and related to things like customer service.
Speaking of which, we should level set on the definition of customer service and what it actually means for a business.
What is Customer Service?
Another trusted friend and expert is Jeff Toister. Jeff is a globally recognized authority on customer service who’s developed an extensive curriculum on the topic for LinkedIn Learning, written several books including The Service Culture Handbook, and regularly speaks on how customer service teams can unlock their hidden potential. He was kind enough to weigh in on my poll and save me the work of looking up the definition of customer service. The dictionary (and Jeff) define it as the following:
“The assistance or advice provided by a company to customers who use or buy their products or services.”
The term customer service is action-oriented. It’s something that we do to contribute to an outcome. It’s both proactive and reactive. It’s about understanding customer wants, needs, and goals and helping them achieve those things.
Customer service is not something that’s only provided when there’s a problem, it’s not the end result of an interaction, and it’s not the exclusive responsibility of one department.
Did my survey respondents agree? Not exactly. Here’s a look at the language they used to define customer service.
As hoped, there was a shared belief that customer service has an element of support or assistance tied to it. But, what concerned me was the common appearance of words like issues and reactive.
Verbatim responses include, “It involves complaint or issue resolution”, “Customer service is transactional, reactive, and relies on customers bringing issues to an organization”, and “It’s helping a customer when things don’t go according to expectations.”
I’m all for solving problems, but do these senior business leaders actually think that reacting to issues is the primary goal of customer service? Or is that just a bias created by their exposure to negative customer interactions? Whichever is the case, it’s somewhat irrelevant. It’s time to expand the realm of possibilities when it comes to how businesses think about and deliver customer service.
Not sure where to get started? One of the best places to look for ideas on how to better advise and assist customers is by connecting with the people who do it every day – your frontline employees.
When I worked in the contact center at Hershey Entertainment & Resorts we utilized a voice of the agent program for this exact purpose.
Here’s a look at a document similar to what we shared with our employees.
Purpose of our Voice of the Agent Program:
- Reveal currently unknown opportunities to better serve and advise our customers.
- Validate our current beliefs, practices, and plans for serving customers.
What types of information should you provide?
- Customers mentioning the impact of external factors on them/their perception of and relationship with the organization. (The economy, recent news, personal life choices, etc)
- Customers mentioning the impact of internal factors on them/their perception of and relationship with the organization. (Hours of operation, cost of services, product quality)
- Customers mentioning products or services that they wished we would provide, enhance, and/or stop providing.
- Any other comments, observations, or ideas that arise out of your interactions with our customers.
How we’ll use the information you provide us:
- Measure and evaluate trends on an ongoing basis to help inform future business decisions.
- Share insights across the organization, particularly the marketing department and executive
team, to ensure that decisions consider your customer insights. - Report back to all of you with how this information is being leveraged and utilized across the
organization.
What should your VOA emails look like?
To: ContactCenterDirector/CustomerAnalyst/Etc.
Subject: VOA 02/03/21
Body: Today I received 31 calls from customers wishing that our cancellation policy was longer than 14 days. When I asked them what they would like to see as a cancellation policy, all of them said, “at least 30 days.”
Your feedback may only be a few sentences on some days, or a few paragraphs some others. The important part is that you’re providing this type of feedback on a daily basis. We encourage you to start a draft email at the beginning of each day and add comments and ideas as they come to you. The more details that you’re able to provide regarding a particular customer’s comments, the better, so be sure to ask probing questions when the opportunity presents itself.
If you’re ever not sure if something belongs in your VOA email, don’t hesitate to ask your supervisor or any member of our leadership team. We’re all here to help you and want to be sure that you feel fully equipped to do your job. Thank you in advance for all of your help!
This type of activity should be encouraged and captured by anyone who works in a customer service capacity. It leads employees to think about proactive service, recognizes the unique value they can provide to an organization, and helps to overcome the belief that customer service is exclusively reactive and siloed to a single department. These simple steps can exponentially grow the strategic impact of customer service.
As noted in the definition of customer service, the focus is on providing assistance and advice. When you think about it in those terms, there are many different departments and functions that assist and advise customers. Some focus on responding to inbound customer needs, others specialize in predicting and reducing churn, and others focus on proactively enabling customers to gain maximum value from their products or services. They’re all different forms of customer service.
Some of these customer service functions have names that are relatively straight-forward and easy to understand. For example, you know to contact technical support for assistance on a device you own, or reservations when you have questions about travel arrangements. It was my observation that other customer service functions weren’t as clear to people. One of the biggest offenders was customer success.
Are Customer Service and Customer Success the Same?
By this point in the blog post, I’m going to believe that we’re on the same page that customer experience and customer service are not the same. But what about customer service and customer success? Well, let’s look at what my survey participants had to say first.
This proved to be a bit of a struggle and resulted in the greatest variety of responses. Here’s a peek at a bit of what I heard.
- “I think it’s a metric of (Experience+Evaluation) x Service x Revenue Metrics”
- “Guessing it is referring to whether the product or service meets customer needs”
- “A strategy for understanding buyers”
- “The team who ensures a customer has a successful experience with their product/service”
People weren’t clear on if it’s a metric, a philosophy, a feeling, or a function. Out of the three terms that I was evaluating, customer success was clearly the least understood. I wasn’t surprised.
Remember that Clubhouse conversation that sent me down this rabbit hole? It was the fuzzy language around customer success that put me over the edge. I couldn’t stand to hear one more person say that customer success was the same thing as customer experience. It’s not.
Let’s look at how customer success is defined and its place in relation to customer service and customer experience.
There are a few well-circulated definitions of customer success, but the one that I’ve aligned with comes from Gainsight.
“Customer success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service.”
This definition indicates that customer success has two sides to it.
- Customer success = a customers achievement of desired outcomes
- Customer success = the systems that enable customers to achieve their desired outcomes
When we think of customer success as the lens of, “how will this enable customers to accomplish their goals with the product/service”, we begin to see how it has applications in both self and assisted-customer service.
Customer success is only possible when we have an intimate awareness of a customer’s goals, the steps they should take to achieve them, and ways to overcome the barriers that could prevent them from getting there. For some customers, this could mean a personal relationship with a dedicated customer success manager, while for others it might be a well-designed self-service application.
If we put it all together, it looks something like this:
Customer success is a type of customer service that focuses on leading customers towards their desired outcomes in the hope of creating a positive customer experience.
Creating a Common Language Around Customer Experience
What ultimately matters is how you define customer experience, customer service, and the other functions within your own organization. A shared language, set of values, and focus on priorities is how you lay the groundwork for a CX program that can successfully scale.
If you’re looking for resources to help get you started, CX Effect can help. Click here to schedule an intro call with one of our advisors to share your story and explore the ways that we can partner together.