SUCCESS VS SUPPORT

I've worked in and led customer success and customer support teams over the course of my career, and people in the industry use both terms -- sometimes interchangeably. Sometimes they draw sharp divisions between these two business functions.

The two are linked but different disciplines -- and they require different mindsets and playbooks to win.

In this blog post, I'll review customer success vs. customer support -- what's the difference between the two terms, how to measure success in the two disciplines, and how to grow and structure these two teams in your organization.

1. - Customer support is reactive, whereas customer success is proactive.
2. - Customer support is transactional, but customer success has no endpoint.
3. - Customer support metrics measure the quality and speed of the help customers receive, and customer success metrics focus on the downstream business impact of retaining customers.
4. - Customer support is a more established discipline than customer success, and we don't have a definitive method for how to do customer success right across industries yet.
5. - The primary functions of customer support roles are well-understood, and customer success requires a variety of skills across different disciplines.
6. - Customer support is understood as a necessary cost of doing business, while customer success often has to prove its ROI among business leaders.
7. - Companies are more successful when they group customer support and customer success teams together, instead of as functions or operations or sales teams.

Ideally, your organization should group these two functions together -- because they're both about providing service to the customer and helping them derive value from your team, your company, and your product. But there are a few key areas where these functions differ -- let's review them:

Focus

Customer support is about the reactive fulfillment of customer needs -- a customer needs something, so the goal of customer support is to give them that. Customer success focuses on the proactive guidance of customer goals -- a customer has goals, and we're going to, arm in arm, get there, together.

Duration

Customer support interactions are transactional -- they have a beginning and an end. Customer success also can have transactional interactions, but it has no terminal point -- the relationship continues as long as the customer is a customer.

Metrics

Customer support metrics aim to measure the quality and speed of the support interaction itself (via measurement of the SLA, CES, NPS, CSAT). These support metrics don't usually measure what comes before or after the customer interaction. Customer success metrics are all aboutdownstream business impact -- on customer retention, repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value, or other critical long-term business metrics.

Maturity

Customer support is a 25+ years-old field, and there is a mountain of knowledge on how to do it right. Customer success is, at best, a little over a 10-year-old field, and we don't yet have a definitive, convergent view on how to do customer success right for every business.

Hiring

Because customer support is a more mature field, the job function is well-understood, and customer service skills are a category unto themselves. Customer success is a newer, more diverse field, and the required skills range from customer service, to subject matter expertise, to sales.

ROI

Customer support can be viewed as an operational cost of doing business or a key experience function -- but either way, support is a necessary cost, is obvious when it breaks, and generally well-understood by finance organizations. Customer success is more controversial among the C-suite, pushing leaders to always try to prove its ROI ... usually by modeling what would happen if the whole success organization were to vanish: increased customer churn, decreased customer lifetime value, and potentially decreased revenue.

Organization

At scale, customer support can get lumped into engineering or operations teams and operate purely as a cost center. Now, this isn't so bad as to be non-functional, but it can really limit how big an impact support can have on the business. Companies get more out of customer support teams when they organize them with customer success and other more revenue-centric, as opposed to operations-centric, functions.

Customer success teams often get grouped under sales, which is fine when they're first starting out, but companies can get more out of customer success teams when treating them as their own discipline and group them with other customer experience-centric teams like support. this enables a focus on end-to-end experience which leads to a better-tuned operation over time.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribe to my platforms or via email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).