Customer Success and Customer Support: A Team Relationship- Not a Task Master

Customer Support and Customer Success have a crucial relationship to ensuring a customer’s success. The relationship between the two teams in pivotal.

One common way for this relationship to become strained is when the customer reaches out to the customer success manager about a pending issue in support. Of course the customer success manager is trying to maintain the customer relationship, so the natural inclination is to contact support and have an issue escalate or to put some “heat” on it.

There’s a few problems with this.

One, customer support doesn’t answer to customer success, and the customer should never feel like that is the case. Two, a competent customer support team is efficient- they respond thoroughly and quickly to customer requests, so they don’t need someone to tell them how to do their job. Three, customer support is customer facing as well, so they can engage to understand the priority of an issue. They don’t need customer success stepping in to prioritize.

If the customer success team feels like they need to police tickets and issues, then that should be escalated within the company to make adjustments to enable the support team to be self-sufficient.

Keep the relationship strong between customer success and customer support by setting everyone free to do their jobs. Nobody likes a nag.

There is a situation where it is appropriate for a customer success manager to be the liaison to the customer for a technical issue. I’ll discuss that in my next post.

How do you build the relationship between Customer Success and Customer Support? What have you found helpful in dealing with situations like this? Leave me a comment below :)

Thanks for reading.