Any successful business should understand the importance of treating their customers right. Both customer service and customer experience are vital parts of a company strategy, but the line between the two can often get muddled. It’s important, however, to make the distinction so that you can properly address your customers’ needs.
Let’s take a deeper look at customer service vs. customer experience, what they are, and how you can improve each practice.
What is customer service?
Between the two, the term customer service is likely the most familiar. When someone starts talking about customer service, they’re usually referring to the advice and assistance that you provide to your customers. It’s initiated by the customer whenever an issue or problem arises. Providing good customer service, then, means that you’re handling your customers’ problems quickly and efficiently.
Why good customer service matters
When something goes wrong, your customers are naturally going to become frustrated. They paid for your services, and they expect those services to be nearly flawless. When flaws do arise, you want to keep your customers on your good side by correcting it as soon as possible. This will increase your customer retention rates by proving your reliability.
How to achieve good customer service
Good customer service depends on your employees. They need to have the proper tools and training in order to address your customer’s needs, including:
- Call monitoring to properly train your staff how to handle frustrated customers
- Call reporting to find problem areas that your employees need to work on
- Speech analytics to provide data on past customer interactions and how best to improve future ones
- Voicemail to email transcription to stay on top of customer complaints even while you’re out of the office
- Software integrations to provide you with the customer information you need, right at your fingertips
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is the sum of all of the interactions you have with a customer. In that respect, customer experience is an umbrella that customer service is a part of. However, while customer service only focuses on problems that the customer is having, customer experience includes every other interaction that you may have with them both in person, on the phone, and online.
Why good customer experience matters
Because of the increasing demands of customers, customer experience is now the new battleground for companies of every industry. Having excellent customer experience will not only help you retain customers, but it will also attract new customers as well. A well-organized website, for instance, will impress potential customers who are looking for your services.
How to achieve good customer experience
Customer experience can be achieved in three ways: good customer service (see above), an effective product, and strong business practices. A VoIP phone system can help enhance both your customer service and your business practices. Here are a few features that can help:
- Auto attendant to properly manage an influx of incoming calls
- Call queueing system to distribute inbound calls and keep your customers aware of where they are in the queue
- Music on hold to keep your customers occupied while waiting
- Call conferencing to allow all of the necessary people to join in on a phone call
- Unlimited toll free to let your customers call you with no cost to them
Here at Vaspian, we want to help you provide excellent customer service and customer experience. For more information about how our VoIP phone systems can help your business, give us a call today at 1-855-827-7426.
