Customer Success By Any Other Name… Is Misleading

I usually shudder when I hear someone correcting someone’s grammar.

In person or online. It’s annoying. Gets under my skin.

Not that I don’t think of correcting grammar now and then. Of course I do. I mean, ‘use’ is a verb — not a plural form of the second-person pronoun. 😳

But I, like any good Canadian, just politely smile through the dangling modifiers and split infinitives. That glaze forms over my eyes. I try to pay attention to what you’re saying. But I can’t help correcting you in my head.

Importantly, I don’t actually correct you in person.

(Holding my tongue takes real energy.)

After using the English language for about 39 years now — I spoke exceptionally early 😉 — I’ve learned not to get bent outta shape when people chew said language to shreds. So why, after less than a year in my new role, would I feel compelled to call out an apparent do-gooder about word choice?

Here’s what happened.

I recently read an article where the author used the terms ‘customer support’ and ‘customer success’ interchangeably. And I was all:

I can’t push this one down. I can’t quietly sit by and watch the terms ‘customer support’ and ‘customer success’ get muddled.

Customer Support and Customer Success are not the same thing.

First things first: what is customer success?

I’ve been reading a lot about customer/user success lately. I’ve read blogs. I’ve read ebooks. And I’ve read bound books — you know, the papery kind. The one thing that keeps cropping up in these expertly written pieces is this:

Customer success is about creating healthy users that advocate for your brand.

The philosophy for customer success goes something like this: if you create a positive experience for the user — from onboarding to emails to in-app interactions — and if you help the user find increasing value in your product, not only will they stick around but they’ll also be happy to promote (and help grow) your company.

That’s customer success. It’s turning customers into successful customers.

Those specializing in customer support may argue that support does the same thing. But I wouldn’t and can’t agree. Customer support isn’t the same as success. It’s close enough that you can see how someone would fail to see the distinction, of course. Here’s what customer support and customer success have most obviously in common:

• They’re both customer-facing
• They both require thorough knowledge of the product
• They both often start at the point of purchase or immediately following it

But customer support enters the room when the shit hits the fan

The customer support chat bubble is only available during a business’s operating hours.

That, to me, says everything.

Customer support is reactive.

Customer success is proactive and far-sighted. It takes time and nurturing to develop. It employs health indices to predict users’ susceptibility to product/service failure. And, if done correctly, it avoids the shit ever getting close to the fan.

Because the ultimate measure of user success in a subscription business like SaaS is a customer who increasingly receives value from the service, in customer success, when the user is successful, everyone in the relationship wins. Is the same true for support?

Customer success contributes to the overall positive experience of healthy users — customer support hopes the user is feeling healthy

Approached from a proactive and holistic approach, customer success keep a watchful eye over all the measures of a successful user — not just whether the customer is reaching out to register a complaint.

While both customer support and customer success hone in on user retention, customer success goes further than retention and, with the assistance of customer data, takes retention to the next level. How? By creating loyal users who are happy to promote your company.

Why the distinction matters

As the VP for User Success at Airstory, I’m invested in clarifying the difference between support and success.

(Point of clarification: It’s not just the user success leads that need to actively discern between these two often-confused terms. Customer success — what it is and what it isn’t — should be central to every member of a team that has monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at its core. As Lincoln Murphy holds, customer success is an organizational approach to growth. And what member of a lean startup wouldn’t want to learn how to improve growth?)

Perhaps I’ve given you the impression that customer success is more important than customer support. My bad. I really don’t believe the two are, or should be, mutually exclusive. They’re different. But complementary.

Customer success can hardly be successful without customer support. Reactive support is necessary because, well, stuff happens.

Similarly, a business strong in customer support but lacking customer success won’t require support for long.

As pedantic as it might appear, not correcting individuals (even passively) who should know better feeds the belief that customer success is a branch, a perk, of stellar customer support. It is not. Customer success is an approach — a growth philosophy — all its own.