How Confusing Support & Success Costs You Money
Customer Support. Customer Success.
They sound similar, and they both have CS as an abbreviation. But they serve very different purposes for your customers and in your organization. By not understanding the difference, you are not only leaving money on the table, you are also increasing your churn rates.
Maybe you’re thinking: Wow. Really? Oh c’mon. Is it such a big deal?
Here’s a common scenario: A customer calls or sends an email and asks the Customer Success Manager for help with something simple, like resetting a password. You’ve received that email before, right?
And to be nice, we go ahead and help them with it. And then they have another problem– this just takes a quick email over to an Engineer. And I know just who to ask. The Engineer needs more information, so you go back to the customer. Then back to the Engineer. Then back to the customer… And so it goes.
Customers– and companies– confuse Customer Support and Customer Success all the time. Why is that? And how does it cost you?
These questions are simple. The answer isn’t as obvious. But after I share it with you, it will seem obvious.
First, let’s briefly look at the definitions of Customer Support and Success, and how they are often developed at startups. You might see yourself in it. Then I’ll share what you can do to prevent falling into this trap, best practices so you can stop leaving money on the table and increase your retention rates.
Defining Customer Support vs Customer Success:
Customer Support provides help to customers who have trouble with a company’s products or services.
Customer Success ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. The by-product of the customer achieving their business outcomes is that the company reduces customer churn and increases expansion opportunities and renewals.
The difference in writing is clear. So, how does it get confused in practice?
How the confusion starts:
Customer Support is needed early on in a startup. As soon as customers purchase your product, they need technical help. Often, this hire will help with onboarding and answer technical and product questions whenever the customer asks. This first hire reacts to customers and works closely with Engineering and Product to get answers and share customer feedback. Sometimes this role is called Customer Support, and sometimes it’s called Customer Success because they are doing more than just support, and customers feel more special if they’re being helped by a CSM, right?
As the startup and customer base grows, companies introduce specialized roles, first separating Customer Success and Customer Support. Later, Customer Success and Onboarding are usually separated. Often, team members have started in a general “catch-all” role, then focus on a specialized role. So it’s not surprising that customers will go to the professional that they already have a relationship with, or that a professional who came from a “catch-all” role will continue to fill in “to be nice.”
Another reason for the confusion:
The Customer Success profession is relatively new in the business landscape. It’s only been around ~25 years. With the introduction of cloud-based subscription models, SaaS companies soon realized that they would go out of business unless the customer renewed and expanded services.
But then the cost of money went down to ZIRP levels, and investors could afford to throw money in to achieve growth at any cost. Understandably, startups’ focus drew away from expansion to acquisition growth in the name of achieving “Unicorn” status. The cost of Customer Success as a “catch-all” team wasn’t so apparent when money was cheap.
No more.
Now that interest rates have been raised, venture capital has turned its eye to profitability and growth. As funding became more scarce, we saw 1500+ startups close down in 2023 alone. With fewer tech companies out there, churn rates increased. And the remaining companies consolidated tools in an effort to do “more with less”, further increasing churn.
So what has this got to do with Customer Support and Customer Success? And what’s the harm if the roles get confused?
Let’s imagine if the customer called the CEO every time they wanted to reset a password. That sounds ridiculous, right? The CEO would never get any work done. Similarly, every time a CSM stops to do a Customer Support activity it takes away time from strategically helping the customer meet their business objectives.
Further, when the CSM takes the work away from the Customer Support team, it prevents the Support team from correctly tracking the issues and questions that customers have so that they can build more effective Support tools and provide the usability insights to Product that they need. This creates customer friction that leads to churn.
When the CSM is not spending their time on strategic activities, it’s stealing time from renewal and expansion activities. It increases the risk of customers not achieving their business goals and makes them more likely to churn.
Oh. Maybe it’s not so harmless after all.
Let’s do something about it:
Now that we’ve established that there’s confusion between Customer Success and Customer Support, and it’s not constructive to let the confusion continue, let’s do something about it.
But first, let me address one more misconception. Many leaders who understand there’s a difference between Customer Support and Success will define it this way:
Customer Support = Reactive
Customer Success = Proactive
I don’t love that definition so much.
Sure, we agree that Customer Success needs to be proactive and strategic to ensure that the customer reaches their success outcomes. But I would argue that a Customer Support team that follows best practices is also proactive and strategic.
Customer Support best practices:
A Customer Support team following best practices regularly analyzes not just their response and resolution times, but the types of issues, when they occur, and where. The team proactively creates guides, videos, and articles to share in-app, via chat, and email to meet the needs of their customers as the issue or question occurs. The customer should feel like their needs were anticipated and they can find the answers easily on their own.
This also frees up the Customer Support team to handle more complex customer issues and troubleshoot with Product & Engineering to resolve and prevent these complex issues from reoccurring. A chart analyzing Customer Support team metrics would ideally show average response times going down, and resolution times going up and down.
You may ask “Why wouldn’t both charts show a downward trend?”
If the Support team has proactively created tools to answer simple questions, and it’s primarily complex customer issues that are handled by the Support team, ideally those are new and different complex issues that come up over time. For each complex issue, the Support team works with the Product and Engineering teams to address not just the single issue/ event, but the Support team also investigates underlying issues proactively so that future customers do not bring up the same complex issue again and again.
Alternatively, if the complex issue is not going to be resolved, the Customer Support team identifies when the issue arises and for which part of the customer base, and then can proactively build education tools and guides in-app or to have ready for customers when they reach out. Either way, the resolution time is decreased for the complex customer issue while new complex issues pop up as product development and new releases create new issues.
While the Customer Support team ensures that customer needs are proactively addressed, the Customer Success team that is following best practices is working with entirely different customer objectives.
Customer Success best practices:
The Customer Success team is responsible for the Customer achieving their desired outcomes while using your product or services. To do that, the Success team needs to understand their customer base and identify the Segments that have similar goals. The key is that since these Customer Segments have different goals, they have distinct Customer Journeys. These distinct Customer Journeys will have different metrics for successful behaviors, and the Segment’s Customer Health score reflects these different behaviors and metrics.
The Customer Success team that follows best practices utilizes data to analyze customer behavior along with automated scalable products to manage the customer relationship and ensure their success. For high touch teams, these tools inform the CSM how to prioritize accounts, proactive adoption and optimization activities, as well as renewal activities and expansion opportunities. For lower touch teams, these tools help the CS team to plan 1:many webinars, office hour topics, and renewal and expansion campaigns that meet the needs of their customer segments.
Customer Support vs Customer Success
Now, reading these descriptions, side-by-side, do you think you’ll confuse Customer Support and Customer Success in the future? Can you see the cost when you don’t develop both approaches to meet your customers’ needs?
You may be thinking: But my customers are already confused. What do I do now?
It’s time to retrain your teams and your customers.
Re/training your team:
Give them the why.
Explain to your team the harm that they are causing and the benefits that your customers and your company are missing out on.
Give them the how. Whether your team has specialized or not, they should still make it clear when they are doing onboarding, support, and strategic activities.
Track how long customers take to onboard and when they launch. Let customers know when they’ve launched and celebrate it with them.
Use a ticketing system for support issues so you can track issues and resolution and share it with the company and the customers.
Identify when the strategic advisory hat is on and spend time in discovery meetings with customers to learn about their business objectives.
Re/training your customers:
Give them the why. Let the customer know that there are different phases and ways to work with you and how it helps them achieve their business goals.
Explain how you are tracking onboarding, ticketing, and strategic activities, and how it will help them succeed.
Give them the how. Make it easy for the customer to get their support needs met when they go through proper channels. Reinforce the proper channels.
If customers go to a CSM for a support issue, it should take longer for a reply, and then the response should be to put in a ticket to support with the customer cc’d.
Then make sure your CS team works with the customer to help them realize their business goals either through 1:1 or 1:many activities (or both).
Customers will soon realize the value that Customer Success brings them, that it’s faster to reach out to Support when they need technical help, and the difference between the teams.
Customer Support and Customer Success are each unique teams serving the customer. Together, they help your customer in different but absolutely necessary and complimentary ways. With some small, reinforced changes, you will increase internal efficiencies, your customers will be more likely to achieve their business goals, and you will in turn decrease customer churn and increase your revenue.