Customer Support vs Customer Success: The Verdict is Out
Customer support vs customer success – two terms that have been seen as the same function in some companies, while also operating as completely separate groups within others. While customer support is key to solving customer problems and producing great experiences, customer success is responsible for empowering customers, keeping them happy on your platform/ through your services, and bringing them back for more.
In this article, we’ll detail the differences between these two functions and how they work together to help you grow your business and improve customer satisfaction.
What does customer support mean?
Customer support is the act of resolving customer issues, and providing help and guidance to your customers while they are using your service or product. Your customer support team helps you to manage customer interactions across channels, ensure a seamless customer journey and deliver great customer experiences.
What does customer success mean?
Customer success is a data-driven business strategy that helps empower customers to make the most of a product or service. Customer success teams analyse customer lifecycles to nurture customer relationships and increase your customer lifetime value.
Customer support and success are inseparable terms but there are significant differences that separate them from each other.
Customer Support vs Customer Success: The Difference
Think of customer support as instant satisfaction and customer success as lifetime value. While customer support teams can adopt either a reactive or proactive approach, customer success teams mainly use a proactive approach. But that’s not the only way to differentiate between the two –
- Goals:
Customer support focuses on winning every one-on-one transaction with your customers by helping customers in need when they have issues with their account, the software, or any function that involves your business. The first interaction with customer support will be a critical determining factor in their propensity to continue doing business with you. Not only will a single bad experience cause people to jump ship and test other brands, products, and services, but it often also seals your fate- losing the customer for good.
On the other hand, customer success is focused on investing in the long-term, promoting customer retention by facilitating consistent support and high customer satisfaction. Customer success teams are focused more on empowering customers to succeed with your product or service in the long term, rather than solving issues in the short term. In essence, customer success teams help customers achieve greater value and are genuinely seeking to improve their business.
- Roles and Responsibilities:
A customer support agent generally needs to be good at empathizing with customers, have effective conflict resolution skills and their responsibilities include responding to customer queries and guiding them to the right solution. It should also be noted that customer support teams are set up to solve customer problems across channels and geographies. They may be at different levels in the organization, based on the complexity of issues they resolve.
However, a customer success team comprises account based managers/ customer relationship managers who are individually mapped to a certain number of accounts/customers. A customer success manager focuses on preventing conflict from happening, offering timely performance reports, giving customers the power to improve their business, and developing systems that help customers to find continual success.
- Success metrics:
Customer support metrics are measured by factors like number of tickets resolved, resolution time, response time and CSAT score. Net Promoter Score is one of the metrics that ties customer support and customer success together and helps you dive deeper into your customer goals and optimize processes to deliver improved customer experiences.
Customer success, as we discussed, is heavily focused on long-term impact: helping customers grow their own business for years to come. In turn, that directly impacts the company bottom line by producing clients with higher customer lifetime value. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer success reps revolves around growth and is directly tied to revenue. Common KPIs of customer success teams are customer lifetime value, upsell and cross sell rate, customer churn, Net Promoter Score, and more.
While the key differences have been underlined for both the teams, let’s look at how these teams work together in harmony from customer acquisition to nurturing long-term customer relationships.
Customer Success Team + Customer Support Team: The Collaboration
Both teams are built on a genuine desire to see customers grow and achieve their business goals. Working directly with each other allows both teams to reach the common goal of improving the overall experience for customers. Here’s an example to further highlight the relationship between customer success and customer support using real-time transactions.
Appcues, a user engagement platform, accelerates growth for software companies by helping them create product experiences that are user-friendly and personalized. Shonak Patel, Director of Customer Experience at Appcues, shared-
I view it as our critical responsibility to become an extension of every customer’s team. Everything we do is in service to our customers.
Appcues has a dedicated Customer Success (CSM) team to address customer needs in a proactive and systematic way. However, they had a hard time creating a holistic view of customer health, without enough context or customer data that could help them take informed action. With the primary challenge of gaining complete control over their customer data hosted in different third-party systems, Appcues’ customer support team initiated the integration with Freshdesk.
Once Freshdesk helped Appcues complete their data integration, they were able to have enough context to resolve customer queries quickly and they further streamlined their processes by automating CSM account assignment and triggering tasks for onboarding new customers. By using data-driven insights from Freshdesk’s customized dashboards, they were able to track the status of managed accounts and even potential upgrade opportunities.
The Verdict
Both teams work hand-in-hand and play vital roles in delivering superior customer experience.
With an established customer support and customer success team, your business can only thrive if both these entities work in harmony. To make the processes easier, your customer support team can adopt a reactive approach to handle transactions, resolve customer issues and improve the customer experience. This can be followed up by customer success teams that can proactively connect with those clients, empower them along their entire customer journey and build customer relationships.
When both teams work like a well-oiled machine, it keeps customers happy and growing for years. Bridge the gap between your customer support and customer success teams with the Freshdesk- Freshsuccess integration, now!
Originally published on July 17, 2018. Updated on June 24, 2022.
