Editorial
The Gist
-
Wider CX scope. Customer experience is shaped by every brand interaction, not just customer service encounters.
-
One task, many teams. A single customer journey often spans multiple departments, exposing weak links across channels.
-
Friction by design. Some customer struggles are intentional and necessary, but they still require thoughtful handling.
As any customer experience (CX) leader knows, a singular definition of “customer experience” can be elusive. Customers have many touchpoints in their journey with a specific organization. Whether those touchpoints are digital, in-person, a combination of both or something else entirely, customers’ holistic experience is influenced by multiple factors and functions.
Yet many organizations still view their customer service function as the place where CX lives (or, in some cases, dies).
What can a chief customer officer do to help organizations, their bosses and their stakeholders understand the key differences between customer experience and customer service? First, it’s important to align on a few key concepts. A good place to start is with something more straightforward, like customer touchpoints.
As part of their experience with your brand, a customer may receive an email or a direct mail. They may visit your website and begin to engage with your products and services. They may walk into your store and speak with a cashier or salesperson (or just look around without engaging anyone). Or they may call your contact center and speak to an agent or front-line employee.
These are all examples of customer touchpoints. However, billboards are also touchpoints. So are ads, surveys, online reviews, chatbots, auto-responses and news stories. In fact, any interaction with your company or brand is a touchpoint for a customer, and each touchpoint contributes to creating a perception of your brand for that customer. That perception, over time, is foundational to an organization’s customer experience, either intentionally or accidentally.
Table of Contents
- Defining CX Starts With Broadening the Lens
- What Happens When Customer Touchpoints Don’t Connect
- When Friction Is Designed In on Purpose
- No Team Can Navigate CX Alone Anymore
Defining CX Starts With Broadening the Lens
Customer experience is the cumulative impact of every touchpoint and interaction a consumer has with a brand. It creates a perception of that brand that drives business impacts such as awareness, growth, retention and repeat/recurring behaviors.
Too often, the team interacting directly with the customer (i.e., the contact center, front-line representatives or salespeople) is seen as the sole owner of customer experience within the organization. Of course, it’s not a leap to say that those teams may have a decidedly outsized impact on how customers view your brand.
However, understanding customer experience in broader terms helps put the role of the contact center or front-line teams into clearer perspective. It shows how they fit within the larger experience ecosystem.
What Happens When Customer Touchpoints Don’t Connect
Here’s an example to help illustrate this point. Bob is traveling tomorrow and wants to alert his bank that he will be using his debit card out of the country. He goes to the bank’s servicing website and spends 15 minutes trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to add a travel alert.
Frustrated now and noticing that there is no chat option, he decides to call the bank and then quickly learns that the call center hours are over for the day.
Next, he sends an email and receives an automatic response that his email request will take 48 hours, which is not helpful given that he is leaving in less than 12 hours.
Finally, the following day, a very frustrated Bob goes to his local branch and encounters Mary, a customer service representative. He tells Mary what he needs to do, and she is quickly able to note on his account that he will be traveling. She wishes him safe travels, asks if he needs anything else and sends him on his way.
Customer Touchpoint Summary: Bob’s Experience
This table breaks down the two categories of interactions Bob had with his bank, highlighting the contrasting experiences across channels.
| Channel Type | Specific Touchpoints | Customer Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Channels | Self-serve portal, chat (unavailable), email | High friction, frustration |
| In-person | Branch staff interaction | Positive, quick, friendly, efficient |
A CX retro, likely sparked by data showing this experience was frustrating frequent travelers, would identify where the process broke down. It would also involve collaboration across digital, UX, tech, marketing, compliance and communications teams.
Bob’s in-person experience highlights the ability of customer service to improve a bad experience and ultimately solve a problem. And while in Bob’s case, Mary delivered exceptional service and a solution, that interaction represented only a part of Bob’s experience with his travel alert. The totality of his interactions likely crossed over four to six different internal teams including digital, technology, data, marketing, branch operations and contact center.
Related Article: Customer Journey Chaos: Why We’re Still Making Customers Suffer
When Friction Is Designed In on Purpose
Customer service is the assistance and resources that an organization provides to its customers to help complete tasks that cannot be executed independently or solve problems that are created by a flawed or broken customer experience.
The premise here is not that needing customer service means that there’s a deficiency in an organization. On the contrary, well-designed customer service usually goes hand-in-hand with a well-defined customer experience. When an organization is thoughtful about how they want to deliver on their brand promise and mission statement, a customer experience framework becomes the main mechanism for delivering on those promises. Each touchpoint now has a way to design, deploy and ultimately measure their success through a common language.
There are many reasons why an organization will deliberately introduce friction into a process and require a customer to take extra steps. It’s in those moments where customer service truly shines as a critical piece of the holistic customer experience. For example, fraud detection in financial services or theft prevention in retail environments are two places where friction may need to be added. Customer service can guide a customer through this. Carefully designed experiences take those moments into account. They reduce the impact of necessary friction by offering customers more clarity and ease.
Webinar
Oct
16
Agentic AI Playbook: Real-World Customer Service Use Cases You Can Deploy Now
Boost self-service by 30% and slash call volume by 63% with agentic AI.
Register
Webinar
Oct
22
Beyond Storage: Smarter Content, Bigger Impact with DAM + AI
Discover how the DAM + AI duo makes content smarter, stronger and more accessible.
Register
Webinar
Nov
6
Fix the Content Bottleneck: Build a Better WebOps Strategy
Content stalled? Dev overloaded? You’re not the only one. Learn how streamlined WebOps bridges the publishing gap.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Related Article: Customer Experience Strategies: (Good) Friction Is Great for CX
No Team Can Navigate CX Alone Anymore
In the age of innovation in contact center technology, any clear delineations are likely going to be upended with innovative solutions that need to be navigated quickly.
Chief customer officers will need to work side by side with their peers in all areas of the organization to make sure that customer touchpoints are mapped, understood and used to pave the way for a customer experience that drives customer satisfaction and customer growth.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
