Customer Support vs. Customer Success is a confusing yet fascinating subject matter of discussion. We can understand from the two concepts itself that for customer success, we need customer support. They are so intricately intertwined, yet they are two completely different topics.
For a business, there are different approaches to customer service, and two of the most common ones are customer support and customer success.
In this blog, we’ll explore the differences between customer support and customer success, as well as the similarities necessary to hold an organization together.
Key Takeaway :
Customer support and customer success are two intertwined yet distinct concepts essential for a business’s customer service. Customer support involves providing a wide range of services to assist customers in using a product, while customer success focuses on proactive engagement to help customers achieve their desired outcomes. Both are crucial for customer retention and require strong communication and problem-solving skills.
What is Customer Support?
Customer support to a wide range of services provided to assist them in correctly any product or service.
Function:
It includes effective and regular assistance to the customers of an organisation in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintaining, upgrading, and disposal of a product.
Customer support is a subset of customer service but is narrower, a transactional process, and is initiated and ended by the customers themselves.
Email-based and text-based communications like in social media platforms have advantages such as being low-cost, non-intrusive in nature, and having anywhere-anytime access.
Metrics:
Companies track the metrics for customer support success rate with the help of First Contact Resolution, CSAT score, Average Response Time, Total Wait Time, and Resolution Time.
Related Article:How to measure the Customer Service Performance?
What is Customer Success?
Customer success is an ambitious and foolproof method of working with customers to achieve success using the business’s product or service.
Function :
It mainly focuses on relationship management and bases itself on proactive engagement with customers to help them achieve their desired needs. They further aim to ensure 100% customer satisfaction.
Customer success is all about ensuring buyers reach their goals in the quality of the product they sell because consistency in quality is the best way to boost customer happiness.
The customer success manager is responsible for Customer retention.
According to data by Customer Success Box, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can improve a company’s profits by up to 75%.
Metrics:
The success of customer success is usually measured by the following metrics – customer retention rate, upsell/cross-sell revenue, customer satisfaction scores, and many others.
Related Article:7 Customer Success Software Tools to Encourage Growth
Customer Support vs Customer Success: Key Differences
Customer Support and Customer Success are intertwined concepts, and both of them are necessary to support the other.
The Approach:
The customer support team is responsible for receiving queries, dealing with customer interaction, and responding effectively to them. The customer success team is responsible for discussing, solving, and strategizing the query scenarios.
The Motto:
Customer support focuses on resolving difficult customer issues and directing the avoidance of such issues in the future, whereas Customer success focuses on achieving desired business outcomes by providing the ultimate customer satisfaction.
The Metrics:
Metrics such as First Contact Resolution Rate, Average Response Time, and CSAT scores are used to measure Customer Support.
For the customer success team, Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Retention Rates, Net Promoter Score, Customer Health Score, and Customer Effort Score are the metrics necessary to measure their value.
Also Read:The Key Distinctions Between Customer Support vs Customer Service
Customer Support And Customer Success Always Go Together
Even though customer support and customer success teams are different in their work, they innately have the same purpose – customer retention.
Each of these two roles requires you to possess great communication skills and focus on thorough customer satisfaction.
The agents for both have to have a strong grasp of the company’s products and services and have the ability to troubleshoot the various issues and provide instant solutions.
Last but not least, as agents, commitment to serving the well-being of the customers in an organisation, and dedication, and diligence to serve people are very required skills for both of the teams.
With the help of both, a company has set off to provide the customer experience of a lifetime.
