Are retailers confusing customer service with the customer experience?
There is a difference between customer experience and customer service...and one more distinction worth throwing into the mix. My latest Retail Wire weigh-in:
If you ask Jeff Bezos, customer service is something you have to deploy when customer experience fails. Perhaps he was the inspiration for the book “Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy and the Art of Customer Delight.” Many companies don’t draw a distinction between customer service and customer experience and certainly not to the point of categorizing customer service as an undesirable back-up system. Mr. Bezos has a point though and I would throw in user experience as yet another spin-off that warrants attention. When user and customer experience are on target, customer service can stay in the quiver.
