Customer service is an important component of customer experience

I am among the numerous followers of Forrester's Bruce Temkin who recently blogged with the title: Don’t Confuse Customer Service With Customer Experience.


According to Temkin it comes down to this picture:

"Customer service is an organizational function, like marketing and sales, that manages a subset of interactions with customers. Customer experience, on the other hand, is the connection that companies make with their customers across all functions and touchpoints. Here's a definition for customer experience: "The perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization".

For most companies, customer service deals with some key “moments of truth” for customers. So that function is an important participant in most efforts to improve customer experience. But firms can’t just focus on customer service interactions or offload responsibility for customer experience to the customer service organization. That’s why the 3rd principle of Experience-Based Differentiation is: Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.

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The bottom line: Customer service is an important component of customer experience.