What’s the difference between support, service, and experience—how do they inform one another, and what can you do to improve each? Our Director of Marketing Chen Barnea sat down with two CX luminaries to get their perspective on how to define customer experience, the best ways to understand and deliver it, and why companies should move towards an experience-first mindset.
Nate Brown is the Director of Customer Experience at UL EHSS, as well as the Founder of CX Accelerator. Jeremy Watkin is the Director of CX at FCR, and has more than 17 years of experience in the space. Together, they had an insightful discussion about the relationship between support and experience that you can listen to yourself above. While their chat with Chen covered a lot of ground, but we’ve picked some of the highlights for you below:
What is the difference between customer support and customer experience?
Nate shared a great quote to help explain the fundamental difference between these two concepts:
“Customer service starts where customer experience fails.”
So you can view customer service a the reactive response to a point in the journey reaches out to resolve an issue.
Therefore customer experience is more of a designed element that’s meant to prevent that service interaction in the first place.
Jeremy noted that some of the confusion around the distinction comes from a recent trend. “A lot of companies have started calling their service teams CX teams, which is a little clichéd—there are so many other pieces at work in the customer experience. I appreciate the sentiment that support teams need to have a role in the customer experience, but they aren’t the entire experience itself.”
Why is the customer experience mindset becoming more prominent?
According to Jeremy, the reason is simple: good CX is good business. “Customers love having their issues solved, but they’d love it even more if the issue they had never happened in the first place. I think that’s ultimately what’s driving the transition.”
Customers are fed up, and are finally asking for the experiences they’ve always deserved, as Nate describes: “This transition is fueled by customer frustration. People are waking up and realizing that they don’t need to spend three hours on the phone with customer service to get the experience they should have had from the beginning.”
Combined with new companies that are changing the game and raising the bar by reimagining the customer experience, every business has to look to deliver a more holistic, impactful experience instead of baseline support.
How can CX leaders help bring about these changes in their organizations?
As with so many other initiatives, change has to start from within: “The only way is by starting with the employee experience.” Said Nate, “Employees mirror that experience they have internally with the customer. Improve the internal culture, and the external experience will improve as well, as agents will naturally bring that experience and excitement and project it outwards.”
Jeremy agreed, highlighting Voice of the Customer initiatives as an example. “I think it has a snowball effect too. When it comes to VoC, frontline agents have a channel to share frustrations. As companies start to listen to that and put it into practice, you naturally see employees become more engaged and excited about improving CX.”
What technologies are the most important for improving your experience?
There is no shortage of technologies meant to help improve CX, but the right one will accomplish the right goals. As Nate described, “If your agents have bad tools and no visibility into the journey because it’s all divided between different toolsets, it leads to frustration, and that will come through to the customer. Conversely, If you have good tools that enable the employee to do their job well, then that positive experience will be passed on to them instead.”
How do you measure agents as you make this shift?
Every CX metric can help give you an idea of the effectiveness of your experience, but simply measuring is not enough. “What about Average Handle Time?” Asked Jeremy, “Sometimes you actually want your AHT to go up because you’re trying to deliver a more personal experience. For metrics, the important thing is WHY it’s going up or down.”
This is just a taste of the wide-ranging discussion on the podcast, so if this sounds relevant to your needs, be sure to have a listen. If you’re looking to expand your horizon beyond your organization and broaden your perspective on CX, definitely consider signing up for CX Accelerator as well.
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