Customer Service and Customer Experience: What’s the Difference?

Most dealers and customers talk about both customer service and customer experience. These are two confusing concepts for many.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is the process of assisting customers before, during, and after buying a vehicle and servicing it. If you own a car dealership and a customer wants to book an appointment for a periodic vehicle service and reaches out to you, then assisting the customer to book one is customer service.

Good customer service leads to customer satisfaction and long-term customer relationships, driving customer loyalty and improved sales.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the way customers perceive their quality of interaction with your dealership. The interaction and experience are not restricted to any single medium but the overall experience across various platforms and cycles.

Always try to provide the best customer experience throughout your customer’s journey with the dealership. Many dealers do make the mistake of focusing only on a particular stage, forgetting the others. For instance, if your customer has a wonderful experience during the vehicle buying cycle, but not while servicing the vehicle, then it leads to a less than desirable overall customer experience.

What are the differences between customer service and customer experience?

• Customer service is one aspect of a customer journey whereas, the customer experience is the overall experience of the customer with the dealership.  
• Customer service is instant or reactive whereas, customer experience is responsive or proactive. Being reactive fixes the problem for the time being, but it may or may not fix the problem in the future. Whereas, being proactive can permanently fix the problem since the concerns and solutions are previously thought of and analyzed and there is no room for error.
• There are specific teams assigned to deliver good customer service, whereas specific teams alone cannot assure a good customer experience. Only a customer-centric dealership culture can assure it.
• Customer service can be provided for specific issues raised by customers. On the other hand, customer experience needs to be shaped from the lessons learnt from previous customer issues.
• Providing good customer service is relatively easy but delivering good customer experiences is challenging and requires a lot of research, processes and dedicated employees.