Customer service reacts to incoming questions. Customer experience proactively analyzes feedback from every department to build lasting trust with customers.
Video and audio in German
In this episode, Anne-Marie Vissers explains why customer service and customer experience are not the same thing - and why that distinction matters commercially for B2B companies that want to stop competing on price alone.
Customer service is a dedicated team that handles incoming contacts: delivery questions, product information, complaints, orders. The key word is incoming. The customer takes the initiative. Your team responds. That makes it inherently reactive - a small fire brigade that puts out fires as they arrive.
A customer experience function - what Anne-Marie calls a Kundenbegeisterungsabteilung, a customer enthusiasm department - works proactively. It collects signals from every department: sales, logistics, accounting, warehouse, and customer service. Then it maps where trust breaks down along the customer journey and finds structural solutions before customers have to ask.
Customer service talks about the customer. Customer experience talks with the customer. One is a response mechanism. The other is a trust-building system designed to turn customers into long-term buyers - and eventually into advocates for your business.
Anne-Marie uses the 3-Phase Method from Kunden-Erlebnis: Nullmessung (baseline measurement) - Verbessern und Steuern (improve and steer) - Verankerung (anchor with an internal CX owner). That internal owner is the Borger: the person who keeps the system running after the external engagement ends.
Customer service is a reactive department that handles incoming questions and complaints. Customer experience is a proactive function that collects signals from every department, identifies recurring friction points in the customer journey, and builds structural solutions - so customers need to ask less and trust more.
Not necessarily a full department, but they do need someone owning the CX function proactively. Without that, companies stay permanently reactive - answering the same questions indefinitely without fixing what causes them. Even one internal CX owner can shift this dynamic significantly.
By identifying and fixing the root cause of recurring questions. If ten customers call about the same product information, a CX function adds that information to the webshop. The calls stop. Customer service gains capacity. The fix is structural, not individual.
It means collecting direct customer input - through NPS campaigns, interviews, and follow-up calls - rather than only discussing customer behavior internally. The difference is between assumption and evidence. Customer experience is built on what customers actually say, not on what departments think they need.
Through the 3-Phase Method: a baseline measurement using NPS and interviews, followed by targeted process improvements and coaching, ending with a Borger - an internal CX owner who sustains the system independently. The goal is structural change, not a one-time project.
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