Should Customer Support be Part of Customer Success?

Jeff Gardner have said, “The faster you can help customers understand and extract value from your product that is in line with their business goals the stickier and more successful they’ll be.”

Be it customer support or customer success, in the end it’s about the well being of the consumers.  While customer support resolves around product-related issues and educating the customer about how the product works, customer success means proactively working with customers to understand their business goals and help them find success with the product, thus, increasing the lifetime value of the customer. In fact, investing in new customers is between five and 25 times more expensive than retaining new ones according to Forbes. So, in the end both has the same aim of helping and delivering services to the customers.

The customer support team of a company empower customers to find answers, and they report on customers’ challenges to the product team whereas a customer success team uses data science analysis to dig deep into how new and existing customers use the product and to jump in when they need help. Both customer support and success play a major role in the customer’s journey. Therefore, customer support should be a part of customer success, when both works together, it supports your customers in their journey to success and you can foster their trust and from the first point of contact to the most recent customer conversation.

Here’s why customer support should be a part of customer success.

• Customer support receives and responds, while customer success proactively discusses and strategizes. Therefore, both go well hand in hand. As a company one must first communicate to the consumers to know their concerns and needs, it’s only then that they can discuss and make strategy for the betterment of consumers in the whole run. According to Forrester Research, over 72% of the businesses say that improving customer success would be their number one priority. Through customer support they will first make the customers feel like they are being listen to, then through customer success they can paint a bigger picture of customer experience.
• Customer support is integral to running a business because customer questions always need to be answered, while customer success is often a value-added business function, driving revenue and expansion. Therefore, customer support is a must and immediate need of any business while customer success in a value addition service. If customer support isn’t good and included in customer success then it is of no use. In fact, Only 4% of unhappy customers actually bother to take up customer feedback surveys, which is why customer support should be a part of customer success as many won’t bother to go beyond.
• Customer support metrics measure quality of the service provided, and overall customer satisfaction, on the other hand, customer success focuses on metrics related to business impact like customer retention, expansion, and overall lifetime value. So, customer support metrics are important in customer success metrics. If businesses don’t know about customer satisfaction level, how will they be able to assess the retention or expansion of the consumers? In fact, 99firms study shows 30% of SaaS Companies reported their churn rates have increased in the past year which is why customer support should be included in customer success.

Customer support and customer success are complementary to each other. With an established customer support and customer success team, your business can only thrive if both these entities work in harmony. The customer support team has to adopt a reactive approach to handle transactions, resolve customer issues and improve the customer experience and this will be followed up by customer success teams that can proactively connect with those clients, empower them along their entire customer journey and build customer relationships. In fact, according to emplifi, 56% of consumers feel that the quality of the customer service they receive has a higher impact on how positively they view a brand than any other criteria. Gartner also suggests that customer support drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, which represents more than brand and price combined.

Therefore, customer support should definitely be a part of customer success as uniting customer support and customer success, your customers feel everyone is on the same team.