Customer Success vs. Customer Support: What's the Difference?

Keeping customers satisfied is an essential part of running any kind of business successfully. Most companies have specific teams and processes in place to ensure customer satisfaction remains a high priority. In general, these teams and processes influence your business’s customer experience. 

Customer experience is a broad term for the experience customers have in every different interaction with your business — however, customer experience is made up of many kinds of efforts. Two factors that are both essential parts of customer experience are customer success and customer support. 

Customer success and customer support sound like two very similar topics, and many people don’t even realize there’s a difference; however, they are not identical. The customer success vs. customer support question is a significant one to answer in order to understand customer experience best practices as a whole.

Customer success and customer support both share the same objective, which is to improve the customer experience. However, they approach this goal in different ways. Let’s define each of these essential terms and evaluate the differences between customer support vs. customer success in more detail.

What's Customer Success?

The customer success team is responsible for learning each customer’s definition of success with your products and services and helping them achieve it. This is usually accomplished through steps like excellent onboarding, ongoing customer education, and proactively sourcing customer feedback.

What's Customer Support?

Customer support representatives are responsible for helping customers solve specific problems with your products or services. Customer support examples include post-purchase support actions like fielding customer help tickets when customers’ products aren’t working correctly. Customer support and customer success complement each other, but they are not the same thing. 

Other related terms include customer experience and customer service. Customer service is very similar to customer support in that it focuses on solving customer problems, but it focuses on solving problems in general, while customer support specifically entails helping customers solve problems with products. Customer experience refers to the overall quality of interactions a customer has with your business. The issue is not so much a question of customer service vs. customer experience as it is a question of how the two interrelate.

Customer Success vs. Customer Service: What's the Difference?

Let’s dive a little deeper into customer success vs. customer service and explore some of the ways they’re similar but ultimately different.

1. Customer Success is Proactive

One of the clearest differences between customer success and customer support is that customer success is proactive, and customer experience is reactive. This means that customer support focuses on identifying ways to empower customers to get more value from their products now and in the future, while customer support helps customers efficiently resolve problems they’ve already experienced and reported.

For example, say the customer success team recognizes that customers are not using a particular new feature as often as other features. However, the customers who do utilize it are all thrilled with it. To proactively address the low feature adoption rate, the customer success team could create and publish additional customer education resources about the value of the new feature and how to use it effectively — they may even share those resources directly with customers who have not yet tried the new feature.

On the other hand, say a customer is attempting to use that same new feature, but they can’t figure out how to get it to function the way it’s supposed to. After failing to solve the issue on their own, they would probably submit a ticket to your business’s online help desk. Now, it’s a customer support issue. Your support team has been notified that a customer is experiencing a problem, and they react by investigating and helping the customer overcome the problem. 

An outstanding support experience can still save this customer’s impression of the brand and the product, but it would have been better if the success team had identified and proactively prevented the problem from occurring in the first place.

2. Customer Success Is More About Relationships

Customer support has a very specific purpose: to respond quickly and effectively when customers need help solving problems that are preventing them from getting the full intended value out of your products or services. This is a practical goal that ensures customers have a place to turn when something goes wrong.

Customer success plays a much less concrete but equally impactful role. Customer success is less about creating specific outcomes with products and more about nurturing positive relationships with customers. Customers usually appreciate businesses that take the time and effort to learn about their unique needs and preferences and actually factor those details into the customer experience.

While the customer success team partly functions to proactively equip customers to overcome well-known challenges, they may also solve problems customers haven’t even recognized yet themselves. By continuously striving to improve customers’ experiences (even when things are already going well), the customer success team drives customer satisfaction across the board and helps build lasting relationships.

3. There Are Different Metrics

Another major difference between customer success and customer support is the metrics they’re measured with. Since customer support teams focus on helping customers solve product issues that are preventing them from using the products effectively, they typically track metrics that reveal something about the quality of each customer support interaction. Some examples of these kinds of metrics include:

• Resolution rate - the ratio of support tickets resolved to support tickets received during a certain period of time.
• First contact resolution rate - the number of customer issues that are resolved the first time the customer contacts your support team.
• First response time -  the amount of time that elapses between a customer submitting a support ticket and a customer support team member responding.

Since customer success teams focus on improving the customer experience overall, they usually look at metrics that indicate the business’s general customer satisfaction levels (not just satisfaction levels within a single support interaction). For example:

• Net promoter score -  the likelihood of your customers recommending your products or services to other people.
• Customer satisfaction score - the overall level of satisfaction customers receive from your brand, calculated from a variety of qualitative and quantitative measurements (like net promoter score).
• Churn rate - the number of customers who leave your business over a certain period of time.

Customer Success and Customer Service: Different Definitions, Same Goal

At the end of the day, even though both customer success and customer support share the same overarching goal, they contribute toward that goal in different ways. Customer support helps customers overcome specific product issues as they arise; customer success seeks to proactively meet customers’ needs in order to create positive outcomes for them. Despite their different functions, customer success and customer support ultimately accomplish the same end result: amazing experiences for customers.

Both customer success teams and customer support teams rely on many different tools and techniques to benefit customers. One of the best strategies for improving customer experience, in general, is customer education. By investing in better customer education materials, the customer success team can equip customers with robust product knowledge — which can empower them to be more successful with your products and prevent them from needing to submit tickets to the customer support team as frequently as they otherwise would.

Customer support and customer success are two cornerstones of a great customer experience. Understanding how each is different and how the two can work together is integral to driving successful customer outcomes at every turn.