In business, customer success and customer service are among the hottest buzzwords. Today, companies pour more resources into creating a solid customer-centered culture to boost a higher stock price. Given that growing trend, more companies take customer success and customer service seriously.
But what are the differences between customer service and customer success?
Although these teams have different functions within an organization, both are ultimately responsible for building and maintaining vital customer relationships. Therefore, understanding how these two perspectives can best complement and support each other is essential to promote revenue growth.
There are fundamental differences between customer service and customer success because each approach customer interactions differently. Customer service is reactive and focuses more on solving problems as they come. On the other hand, customer success is proactive and focuses on preventing issues from fostering long-term growth. Customer success drives value for customers to help them achieve their goals.
Customer service is reactive because it puts out fires as they happen. This approach addresses issues such as a technical problem. The goal is to provide customers with the most effective solution while providing the best customer experience possible.
Customer success, on the other hand, is proactive. It takes a preemptive and proactive approach to identify and address problems that prevent customers from achieving their goals, allowing real-time visibility into core issues and allocating resources to help customers overcome challenges. Customer success considers customer data insights and turns these into strategic actions. These actions help customers achieve their business goals, which, in turn, helps businesses achieve their goals. The emphasis is on optimizing the value customers get from investing in a company's products and services.
Given that customer service and customer success are two different approaches, each entails a unique set of key performance indicators (KPIs). Since customer support is a transactional service, the performance metrics for customer support teams center on speed and effectiveness in providing solutions to service requests. Typically, the KPIs of customer service are:
Customer success metrics tend to be long-term, so they can be challenging to define. However, its key metrics include:
Similar to customer service, NPS, CSAT, and CES can also measure customer success. The KPIs of both approaches mark indicators to help businesses uncover areas for more in-depth research to supercharge the overall customer experience.
Customer service and customer success play different roles in an organization. Therefore, each position comes with its own set of skills.
Customer service specialists understand the intricacies of a service or product, like how it works and common issues. That's why having technical and industry knowledge is critical to resolving problems as they arise. Also, since this approach is a service role, interpersonal skills, patience, and empathy for a customer's situation are essential.
In contrast, customer success teams focus on the customer and build relationships. A customer success team identifies what success will look like and develops a plan to help achieve that. Interpersonal skills coupled with marketing skills are essential traits for this role. Analytical skills are also necessary because customer success results from understanding the analytics reports of products and services, precisely where many customers go wrong.
Neither customer service nor customer success can operate effectively without the roles and help of the other. Both approaches should have clear and open communication when it comes to essential insights and data. If not, customer experience will take a big hit. Both teams should be on the same page handling the customer's individual needs and challenges.
Customer service and customer success are complementary. Each is responsible for each phase of the customer journey, and together they address it all. The key to accomplishing the goals of each approach is the same. There should be a streamlined process and an intuitively designed customer success platform that maximizes productivity, optimizes communication and reporting, and illuminates customer trends to address current issues and future challenges.
Businesses should equally implement them together to succeed, integrating them within your business processes for optimized growth and profitability.
Experience the ease of having a dedicated outsourced team to provide the best service for your business. At eFlexervices, our talented team members are adept at working with customers in various situations, whether it's through voice, text, chat, email, or social media. We are well-versed in offering a personalized experience and making each customer feel at ease every step of the way.
eFlexervices offers companies like Manscaped, Affinity, and Copper a partner-centric, machine-enabled customer experience solution that meets every customer's demands. We enable companies to maximize their customer service capacity and engage consumers with speed, empathy, and precision with a talented, flexible, scalable team, AI-based technology, and actionable intelligence. We are committed to consistently providing the value of your products and services for your partners.
We encourage you to contact us with any questions or comments you may have.