What is customer experience?
Customer experience, usually shortened to CX, is the sum of everything a customer perceives in dealing with an organisation: finding it, buying from it, using what they bought, getting help when it goes wrong, and leaving. It includes every step where no member of staff is present, which is most of them.
The journey is the unit, not the interaction
The practical difference between customer service and customer experience is what you hold in view. Customer service asks whether this call went well. Customer experience asks why the call was necessary.
A bank whose agents are unfailingly courteous about a form that half of applicants fill in wrongly has good customer service and a customer experience problem. The courtesy is real and it is being spent absorbing a defect upstream. CX work finds the form.
What customer experience management actually involves
CX management is mostly four activities done repeatedly. Mapping the journey as customers actually take it rather than as the org chart implies. Instrumenting it, so that the points where people give up or call for help are visible as numbers rather than anecdotes. Choosing which of those points to fix, which is a prioritisation problem and not a technical one. Then changing something and measuring whether the number moved.
The fourth step is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that separates a CX function from a reporting function. An improvement that was never measured is an opinion.
Measuring customer experience honestly
Satisfaction scores are useful and easy to abuse. A score collected by the person who just served the customer, or collected only from customers who completed the journey, measures something other than the experience. So does a score with no denominator: ninety per cent satisfaction among the eleven per cent who answered is not ninety per cent satisfaction.
The professional standard is to state how a measure was collected whenever the measure is quoted. ISE assesses this directly at professional level, where a candidate must show evidence of a service or CX improvement they actually made and can substantiate.
Customer experience in Rwandan organisations
CX work in Rwanda most often sits in banking, telecommunications, hospitality and public service delivery, where volumes are high enough that a small per-interaction defect is a large aggregate cost. The constraint is usually not analytics tooling but whether anybody is accountable for the journey end to end, since the journey almost always crosses departments that each meet their own targets.
Certifications in this area
Certified Service Excellence Professional (CSEP)
Service quality, CX improvement and professional practice
Certified Service Excellence Manager (CSEM)
Leadership, strategy and service excellence transformation
Study this at ISE
Each certification has a taught course behind it: self-paced, online, and assessed against a standard you can read before you enrol.
Common questions
What is customer experience in simple terms?
It is everything a customer notices when dealing with an organisation, from first contact to after they have left, including the parts where they never speak to anyone.
What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?
Customer service is the interaction itself. Customer experience is the whole journey around it, including steps with no staff involved. Good customer service can exist inside a poor customer experience.
What does a customer experience manager do?
They map the customer journey, instrument it so problems show up as data, decide which problems to fix, then change something and measure whether it improved. The accountability usually spans several departments.
Is there a customer experience certification in Rwanda?
Yes. ISE certifies customer experience practitioners at CSEP level and those accountable for service performance at CSEM level, assessed against the published Trusted Rw Service Excellence Standard.