What is Customer Success? What it is and how it can help your business.
You’ve probably heard of Customer Success before.
Is it related to Customer Service? How can it affect your business? Customer success is top of mind for many businesses, with 72% reporting that improved customer success is a priority.
Should you have a Customer Success strategy? We are Moment, and today, we will define customer success and how it can play an important role in your business.
What is Customer Success
Customer Success refers to a set of practices and procedures that seek to help your customers achieve success. Said success might or might not be related to your product.
This is done to guarantee the growth of your business relationship with your customer as they become more successful.
For example, take a company like Shopify. As an ecommerce platform, they benefit from the success of their customers, which in this case are the merchants on their platform.
As a result, they will engage in Customer Success strategies that seek to help their merchants expand and grow their store.
For example, they might offer social media marketing courses to their customers so they can promote their stores effectively, even though Shopify is not a social media marketing company.
Another example is how a bank might publish blog posts about personal finance advice in order to guarantee the financial success of their customers.
In the case of large customers, they might be assigned with their own customer success representative or given special guidance.
Customer Success vs Customer Service
Customer Success and Customer Service are terms that are often confused with each other.
At this point, you might be able to tell the difference between the two, but let’s quickly review it.
Customer Service refers to a set of practices and procedures that seek to improve and optimize the interactions between the customer and business. Ideally making these interactions as pleasant and convenient as possible.
Customer Service practices will often apply to all of your customers. After all, why wouldn’t you want to please all your customers to a certain standard?
The confusion between Customer Success and Customer Service comes from the fact that Customer Success teams will need to implement Customer Service skills into their strategy.
Customer Success is one of the many columns that make up your overall Customer Service strategy.
But what about customer support? How is that different? Read our guide on Customer Success vs Customer Support and their differences.
Do I need a Customer Success strategy?
You now might be wondering if you should implement a Customer Success strategy in your business.
The answer is that it depends. Mostly on two factors.
- Does your business benefit from the success of your customers? For example, a corner store or fashion retailer might not be impacted significantly my the success of their customers. On the other hand, B2B companies, SaaS companies, banks, gyms, and others can drastically benefit from empowering their customers to grow and succeed.
- Would a Customer Success strategy be a significant differentiator for your business? This one is key, after all a Customer Success strategy might be what differentiates your business from competitors and wins over the heart of your customers. Also helping you boost customer retention. Assess your competition and try to see if offering such services would be a significant differentiator to your business.
Closing Thoughts
Customer Success can be a strong pillar of your overall customer strategy at your company.
In some cases, it might be the whole reason why your customers decide to stick around at all.
After all, your customer’s success is your success.
How will you be implementing your customer success strategies in your business?