Establishing a great customer experience is an integral part of marketing. Customer service and customer success play a huge role in enhancing customer experience and satisfaction.
People often get confused😖 about the terms customer success and customer service. Although both terms aim to help and assist reps in achieving desired outcomes and increasing customer satisfaction, they are different.
In this blog, we will look closely at customer service and customer success and help to find out the key differences between customer service vs customer success in terms of various factors, and also discuss how both these aspects can be used together to achieve better service delivery.
Let’s get started🚀.
🔑KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Customer service is a support that a company provides to its customers to resolve queries and issues immediately.
- Customer success is a strategy to ensure customers achieve optimized value from your product and services.
- Both customer service and customer success are customer-focused.
- The difference between customer service and customer success is how agents interact with customers to improve their experience.
What is Customer Service?
Customer service is the help and support offered by a company to its customers both before and after purchasing products or services. It helps to enhance the customer experience. It is provided to customers through online chat, phones, emails, and social media.
The key element of customer service consists of issue resolution, customer support, providing essential information and troubleshooting tips to customers to gain a positive experience.
Customer service determines customer retention and helps to build strong long-term relationships with potential customers. With better customer service, customers will likely retain your products and brand over time.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success is an ongoing business strategy or proactive approach that ensures customers get what they expect and get an optimized value from a product or service. It is responsible for long-term relations with customers, business growth, and improved trust and loyalty.
It includes components such as understanding customer goals, maximizing product usage and values, improving customer satisfaction, and continuous customer support.
It is an ongoing process of thinking about how to build strong customer relationships with existing customers and retain them for the long term. Customer success digs deeper and focuses on the customer’s value and goals.
Customer Service vs Customer Success
Customer service is support or help offered by businesses for their customers before and after buying or using products and services. In contrast, customer success is a process of understanding customer’s goals and helping them achieve them over a long time.
Customer service focuses on resolving customer’s issues and queries; on the other hand, customer success focuses on ensuring existing customer achieve their outcome.
Customer Service vs Customer Success- Key Differences
| Aspects | Customer Service | Customer Success |
| Nature | Reactive | Proactive |
| Approach | Supportive | Strategic |
| Objectives | Issues or queries resolution and customer satisfaction | Customer retention and expansion |
| Task | Troubleshooting and problem-solving | Whole customer journey and value delivery to customers |
| Time Frame | Short-term | Long-term |
| Metrics | Response time, quality service, resolution time, net promoter score (NPS), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) | Adoption rate, expansion, customer retention, and customer lifetime value |
| Ownership/ collaboration | Independent | Dependents |
| Value Proposition | Customer satisfaction | Customer value |
Let’s explain the key difference between customer success and customer service in more detail below:
1. Nature
When it comes to nature, customer service, on the one hand, is reactive, while on the other, customer success is based on proactivity. Moreover, customer service is all about responding to customer-initiated needs, issues, or problems and aims to solve them immediately. It is activated when customers have any issues or problems with products or services.
In contrast, customer success is the process of helping customers achieve their objectives with products or services. It is an ongoing process to increase customer satisfaction and continue with products and services for a long time.
2. Approach
Customer service is supportive, whereas customer success is an ongoing strategic approach. In addition, customer service offers a positive customer experience by solving customer’s queries and problems quickly. It interacts with customers to convince them to buy or use a product or service.
Unlike customer service, customer success helps satisfy customers and build long-term relationships. It involves planning and strategies to maintain continuous engagement with the company.
3. Objective
Customer service aims to solve problems and issues faced by customers at the same time customer success aims to satisfy customers and retain them for a long time. Besides that, customer service involves addressing and solving customers’ problems and improving satisfaction.
However, customer success involves understanding the customer’s entire journey, improving customer interaction, and retaining them for a long time to build trust and loyalty.
4. Task
Customer service is concerned with providing troubleshooting solutions to resolve specific issues or problems, while customer success is concerned with the full customer journey and building relationships with customers. It is activated in response to customer’s current issues.
In spite of solving current issues and providing guides, customer success focuses on understanding and providing products or services according to customer’s needs and demands. It is an ongoing process to develop products and services as customers demand to satisfy them.
5. Time Frame
Customer service is a short-term priority, but customer service has a long-term impact. It focuses on solving customers’ urgent issues within minimum time and clearing their current queries to improve customer experiences.
Furthermore, customer success team focuses on building long-lasting relationships. It ensures a higher level of satisfaction with products or services and turns them into brand loyalty. It brings long-term profits to the business.
6. Metrics
Customer service and customer success measure performances using various metrics. Customer services use metrics such as response time, quality service, resolution time, net promoter score (NPS), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to measure the effectiveness of customer support.
On the other hand, customer success team measures its performance using various metrics such as adoption rate, expansion, customer retention, and customer lifetime value to maintain and promote customer relationships.
7. Ownership/Collaboration
Customer service team belongs to the customer service or support departments of a company, whereas the customer success team belongs to multiple departments. Moreover, the customer service or support department manages customer interaction through various channels such as phone, social media, and email.
Customer success departments include sales, product, and marketing departments. These departments work together to deliver valued products and maintain customer relationships and long-term relations.
8. Value Proposition
Customer service provides value to the company by ensuring satisfaction, whereas customer success provides value to a company by increasing sales volume for the long term. Moreover, customer service addresses and resolves issues immediately to enhance customer experiences.
Customer success is simply about customers achieve their desired goals from products and services and build loyalty towards a brand.
How Customer Service and Customer Success Work Together?
Customer service is reactive, independent, and addresses immediate issues or queries to ensure satisfaction, whereas customer success is proactive, strategic, and dependent to help customers achieve customers goals to remain loyal to products and services.
Despite slight differences, both approaches aim to improve the customer experience and boost productivity. Both guide the customers to gain optimized value from products and services.
Customer services resolve the issues faced by customers and enhance the experience, which leads to long-term retention, while customer success is a strategy that is set to give customers what they want.
In short, customer service and success are about helping and guiding customers to achieve desired outcomes with different roles and responsibilities in different time frames.
Check out🧐: Best Customer Experience Marketing Strategies
Conclusion
Establishing a long-term relationship with a customer is key to business growth and stability. In order to build long-term relationships with customers you need to ensure that you can satisfy your customers with your product and services. Customer service and success assists customers to improve customer experience.
Both customer service and customer success are customer-oriented approaches. Although there are some similarities between customer success and customer service, there are different approaches to marketing strategy. Having a strategy with a combination of customer service and a successful approach can improve the customer experience and enhance satisfaction.
FAQ
What’s the difference between customer service and customer success?
Customer service is a reactive approach that addresses and resolves current issues of customers, whereas customer success is a proactive approach that maintains long-term customer satisfaction by assisting them in achieving their aims.
What is the difference between CSR and CSM?
A CSR(Customer service representative) assists or helps customers in resolving issues and queries, whereas a CSM(customer success manager) assists the customer in driving success and retaining them for a long time building a relationship.
What is considered customer success?
Considered customer success a creating positive customer experience, driving their success, and building loyalty toward the brand which turns business growth and profitability.
What is the difference between customer experience and success?
Customer experience means understanding customer’s needs and preferences and delivering personalized experiences to meet their expectation, whereas customer success means understanding and helping customers to obtain desired results from the product and services.
