For True CX Success, Executives Must Distinguish Service From Experience

While the distinction between customer service and customer experience may sound like semantics, that single point of confusion is what prevents CX from becoming the powerful, cross-functional discipline it is meant to be.

This distinction is central to the work of Valerie Choniuk,* a nationally recognized healthcare executive and the National Director of Patient & Member Experience at a leading value-based care organization. As a Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP) with over two decades of experience, she has led enterprise-wide strategies collaborating with thousands of physicians and advanced practice professionals to improve care for more than two million patients. For her, understanding the fundamental difference between service and experience is the first step toward building organizations that deliver scalable and sustainable value.

"Customer service is what happens when the experience itself fails," she says. "When something breaks in the intended journey, you need an intervention outside the norm—that's service recovery. And when it’s done well, it can create the 'service recovery paradox,' where a successfully-resolved issue leaves people thinking more highly of your organization over time than if nothing had gone wrong in the first place."

• Facts vs. feelings: According to Choniuk, one source of the confusion is a failure to grasp the core definitions. She frames customer service as a reactive function, which stands apart from the proactive, intentionally designed journey that constitutes a true experience. "Service is reactive, while experience is proactive and intentionally designed. Experience is objective, as it is the consistent delivery of the journey. On the other hand, satisfaction is subjective. It's how a person feels about that same journey based on their expectations," she explains.

• Rowing vs. optimizing: That kind of definitional blur can create organizational dysfunction. Leaders of individual departments, like those managing the website, the billing, or the patient portal, often develop a myopic view focused on their specific function. Such a focus encourages departments to practice teamwork in isolation, which hinders their ability to achieve the true collaboration needed for a unified experience. Choniuk draws a sharp line: "People often conflate teamwork and collaboration, but they are two very different things. Teamwork means we're all rowing in the same direction, but we're not giving each other input on how to make those rows stronger, more effective, or last longer. Whereas collaboration means providing constant feedback to each other on how to optimize the entire process that we oversee," she outlines.

That internal failure to collaborate can ultimately damage customer loyalty and revenue. Choniuk notes that executives often struggle to connect the "ambiguity" of experience to a hard financial return, which can cause them to overlook the cumulative damage of seemingly minor service issues. "Even if customers love your brand, they can still have micro-moments in service that fail to meet expectations. When enough of those small service failures accumulate, the overall experience is ruined, and that customer is gone for good," she cautions.

Choniuk notes that this distinction carries real consequences in value-based care ecosystems, where population health, digital tools, analytics, clinical teams, and social health services must operate as a single system. When those groups row without collaborating, small disconnects become high-cost failures. She points to the "micro-moments" that compound risk: preventive care reminders that don’t match between platforms, screening instructions that differ across portals, or siloed transportation notes that derail specialist appointments. Studies show these breakdowns fuel avoidable emergency visits and missed screenings, which damage clinical quality and patient trust over time. For Choniuk, each scenario reflects the heart of the issue: they're experience design failures, not service failures.

To play the long game of experience and prevent customer loss, organizations must scale internal bright spots. This involves identifying successful practices in one area and systematically replicating them across other channels to foster true collaboration. Choniuk asks: "If the contact center can be doing something really well, but the portal team is not, we have to ask: How do we replicate that success? If customers like the experience happening in one area, how do we bring it over to the parts that are struggling?"

• Like it or not: In the digital age, a mature CX discipline requires a robust data strategy. Choniuk emphasizes that experience happens no matter what, making intentional management through data crucial. "Experience happens whether you focus on it or not, so you must make it intentional. The best way to do that is by focusing on the data, because customer sentiment is what drives memory, word-of-mouth, and ultimately, your business," she says.

• Data, data everywhere: However, merely collecting data isn't enough. The true challenge lies in transforming raw information into actionable understanding. "The problem is that we often have so much data and no insight. Organizations are either overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, or they lack the dedicated resources to analyze it and turn it into a real strategy," she observes. Choniuk points to simple fixes that can change outcomes. In one pilot, care coordinators closed visits by asking patients if anything in the care plan was still confusing. Medication mix-ups fell within weeks, several avoidable ED visits were prevented, and the approach later improved care gap closure and CAHPS scores once shared across teams.

The role of AI, Choniuk proposes, is to enhance the employee experience on the back end, empowering them to deliver a better customer experience. This is especially critical in high-emotion fields, where her principle is clear: "The more emotional the business, the more you need a human. My rule is simple: high emotion equals a human. A patient who is scared, nervous, and doesn't know how to navigate a complex system does not need a chatbot. They need a human being. When they call, they don't want an IVR or a robot; they want a person."

Ultimately, all these elements—data, AI, and process design—aim to build a seamless, proactive journey. This system should be so well-designed that its opposite, service recovery, is rarely needed, reinforcing the foundational premise of intentional experience.

Evidence shows that coordinated, human-centered care lowers avoidable hospital use and strengthens value-based outcomes. As Choniuk puts it, "When experience works as intended, service recovery becomes the exception," and the organizations that treat CX as a proactive, data-driven discipline will lead the next decade of healthcare.

*The views and opinions expressed are those of Valerie Choniuk and do not represent the official policy or position of any organization.