Principle #1
Customer success is a league apart from a business’ traditional customer outlet, customer support. While these two fields do co-exist, it’s the proactive rather than reactive ethos of customer success that distinguishes it in terms of customer experience. By nature, customer success actively seeks to help your customers get the most from you, the Customer Success Manager (CSM), to help them achieve their ultimate goal with your product.
Customer success uses tools and metrics to anticipate the health and overall status of the customer.
These tools and metrics are implemented to gauge:
Yet both factions of the customer experience are integral to the other’s fruition.
Don’t believe us? Read what the experts have to say:
“There is a huge amount of insight that support can provide success and vice versa, so it’s crucial that both success and support have regular interactions. However, by design, support is reactive while customer success is (or should be) proactive, so it’s really important that clients understand the difference between the two and who to contact when.”
- Rebecca Fenlon, Head of Customer Success at Cognassist
“Success and support need to be within the same department. Both of those teams are critical to each other's success. Without success, support wouldn't have the critical information they need about clients, and without support, customer success would be stuck answering questions and troubleshooting issues instead of focusing on the bigger picture.”
- Chad Horenfeldt, Director of Customer Success at Kustomer
‘I think both customer support and customer success should report up to the same leaders. This is crucial to make sure there’s a unified experience. When these split off as I’ve seen in a few companies, this can create an experience that is fractured as internal goals may not align.’
- Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly, Inc.