CX vs CS What is customer experience?
- Simone Fonteneau
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
This month our founder shares what leaders are actually asking about CX and tech, then answers those questions so you can spend less time searching and more time taking action.
This week she’s answering one of the top searched questions: CX vs CS. What is customer experience?
Over the years, the act of speaking with and assisting customers has changed significantly. When I first started in customer service more than 20 years ago, there was no mainstream concept of "customer success." Helping customers was reactive. The proactive portion of the work was, at best, asking "Is there anything else I can help you with?" right before they got off the line, hopefully under the 5-minute AHT goal.
As the years went on and proactivity started gaining importance, call centers also began taking on a more sales-driven lean. It was no longer enough to help customers with their concerns. There were selling opportunities to capture, too. In all honesty, in some of those places the services being offered were actually useful solutions. But pitching more things to buy while customers were already having a hard time caused satisfaction scores and sentiment to drop fast.
Then came Customer Success, with its focus on proactive setup and long-term management of customer relationships with both the product and the company.
While the term "customer experience" had been around longer than customer success roles, some people treat them as the same thing. That is an easy mistake to make. New terms and acronyms get thrown around constantly. But customer experience is the blanket term for all of those "customer-something" departments. It is the overall strategy a business uses for the total experience they want their clients to have. Customer experience is the playbook for offense and defense before the team ever hits the court and the fans ever buy a ticket.
Customer experience is the ultimate proactive action.
Next week I will walk you through examples of customer experience strategies you can use, or recognize, in your business. For now, let me explain how each "customer-something" department contributes to the overall customer experience so you can identify them clearly.
Some may argue this point, but customer service and customer support are in fact two separate things, even though the terms are used interchangeably and the roles are often merged.
Customer service handles superficial relationship management and routing. Think: billing and returns.
Customer support handles system-level resolution. Think: technical support.
A real example shows how they work together and where they differ.
Customer: "Why is my bill so high this month? And my phone keeps power cycling. I need help!"
Customer Service: "I can help you review your bill and walk you through how to read it going forward." (After explanation) "Let me connect you with our Support team for the phone issue." (Cue post-transfer CSAT survey.)
Customer Support: "Hi, let's fix that power cycling problem." (After resolution, cue NPS survey.)
Where Customer Success fits in
In most startups and SMBs, the "customer-something" structure usually stops there. Occasionally, though, I come across one that has integrated a customer success function. Customer success is not typically a sales team, though it sometimes gets housed in that department. It is still directly and deeply part of the customer experience.
The success team is the group that can make or break the rest of the customer's experience and their perception of the company. They are your second person-to-person impression, with sales being the first, but they are the first impression of what a customer can expect their ongoing treatment to look like. Customer success lays the groundwork for a smooth onboarding and a durable long-term relationship. Service and support back that up and reinforce your company's impression in the customer's mind.
CX bridges every place the customer is impacted.
Now that you have a clearer picture of CX vs CS and how these "customer-something" groups differ from each other, you can see why customer experience requires a global view of your operation and every place where the customer's experience is shaped. Your tech stack should be analyzed through that lens. Your customer journey should be mapped through it. Your service and support model should be planned around it.
Every conversation. Every step your customers and employees take. It all adds up.
If you want to understand what your current support operation actually looks like beneath the surface, including where volume goes, how it is handled, and where the structural gaps are, the SK Frameworks Tech Readiness Engineering Consult is designed to give you that picture clearly.
Simone Fonteneau is the founder of SK Frameworks, where she helps businesses improve customer experience through smarter systems, stronger support operations, and clearer intake processes. Based in Houston, Texas, they focus on practical CX and tech transformation, tech readiness, and operational clarity for growing teams.
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