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“All the things I thought I figured out,
I have to learn again
I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter.”
Don Henley
We’re living in a time where a lot of things we took for granted aren’t turning out to work so well. Conventional wisdom told us that if we just offered up a good product or service at a fair price, the world would happily beat a pathway to our door.
Wrong.
It turns out that the universe threw a curveball to everyone in modern business. Words seem to have lost their meaning. Here’s an example.
I was leading a customer experience workshop for the top marketing executives of a well-known national telecom company. About an hour in, a hand went up. A recently appointed young executive said, “I’m really confused. We all seem to use the terms customer service and customer experience interchangeably. Help me understand the real difference.”
Who could blame her for this confusion? Never content with language everyone can agree on, marketers are always modifying our jargon with new acronyms or new combinations of terms. Here’s a simple way to define these terms.
Customer service is assistance your company provides a customer during a specific interaction.
Customer experience is how customers perceive their interactions with your company.
Let’s break this down a bit more.
Customer service is:
Customer experience is:
Yes, this overlap is confusing. That’s because customers still call all of this “customer service.” We’ve trained them to ask for customer service, call customer service lines, and fill out customer service surveys.
But our own customer insight research clearly shows is that customer perception of the entire customer experience (let’s call this “the heart of the matter”) improves retention, increases satisfaction, and grows revenue.
I propose a new way to view this concept. I call this Purposeful Customer Experience. What’s that?
When delivered by a purpose-driven team, a purposeful customer experience results in increased customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and long-term profitability.
It’s both a philosophy and a practice. Every customer is on a journey with your company. It might be short or long. The journey could be positive, negative, or a combination of both. But it should never be left to chance. It must be on purpose. At its core of purpose is a DNA that must flow through your company from top to bottom. This attitude must start at the top to reach its full potential. To be effective this requires leadership and culture working together.
Purposeful DNA includes:
These elements feed into a strategy of delivering purposeful solutions. This requires products, services, policies, and processes designed to solve those problems as they arise from hour to hour.
This is the Heart of The Matter. Maybe you should symbolize the outcome of Purposeful Customer Experience with a heart, like Southwest Airlines did. A heart symbolizes the fulfillment of both sides of this equation. It reflects a deep satisfaction on the part of the employee delivering the experience and the customer receiving it. The late Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest put it this way. “The essential difference in service is not machines or ‘things. The essential difference is minds, hearts, spirits, and souls.”
Wisdom to Fuel Your Business Growth
Here’s what Purposeful Customer Experience looks like in the real world.
The difference between customer service and customer experience is immense. Does the experience you deliver have heart?
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