Customer Service vs. Customer Success: What's the Difference

What’s the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Success?

Nathan Steele, Head of Customer Success for Owler, dives into how customer success touches many parts of your business and is integral to your growth, and is entirely separate from customer service.

Customer success results from a good customer experience, and the customer experience starts honestly in marketing. It starts significantly before you reach out to the prospect before talking to a customer.

Nathan Steele, Head of Customer Success, Owler

What is the difference between customer service and customer success?

There's a unique connection between the two, but many companies believe they're the same. That's a big issue impacting SaaS, but honestly, businesses in general for years. Customer success results from a good customer experience, and the customer experience starts honestly in marketing. It starts significantly before you reach out to the prospect before talking to a customer. It's how we, as a company, uniquely work with people to drive an entire experience around getting value out of our tool, making sure that their needs are filled by what we can provide. 

From initial conversation to the sales reps reaching out and prospecting and how they engage, communicate, talk and learn about the prospect they're talking to, to a deal close for an actual customer. That's the experience that the customer walks through. That entire experience then rolls into whether or not the customer is successful with your product, and it starts with setting the right expectations and building the correct value. Connecting those dots to make sure they get the value that turns into an actual customer success story. Customer experience is the journey, and customer success is the result. 

So the question is, what does your customer success department do if it's a result? The honest answer to that is our job is to help the customers along that journey. So we help define, we help build, we help outline what the customer experience journey is. Then our job as a customer success representative or customer success member is to help that customer along the journey to provide the value they need to be successful with our tools. So we're not customer support, although that's another branch of this whole CX world. Customer support is your technical stuff and making sure that your customers are getting logged in; they're getting the value they expected based on the technical part of the product. 

The relationship between sales and customer success. Is that tie-in hugely important?

It's not only important, but it's also critical to the business's success, and again, that flows back to the customer experience. If you believe as a company that customer experience starts the second somebody signs an order form, you've already missed the boat. The salesperson has a unique opportunity to sell this beautiful painting, they can paint this picture of perfection, and it's always going to work. But the reality is we know that that's not true on the customer success side. The product is going to break. It may not meet your expectations. We may not have the data you thought we did - whatever it is, depending on the company you work in. It's imperative that the teams have both sales, the painters, and customer success, the people that have to make that painting a reality. If they work together collectively and you have an excellent top-down approach from leadership that's pushing a culture of customer-for-life customer success. Then salespeople go out with the painting being an actual painting, not this beautiful imaginary thing that is a fantasy. 

Customer success wants sales to work with the customer to understand their true needs and set all the correct upfront expectations when they get the product. You have to work collectively and eliminate those silos between the marketing, sales, and customer success departments to ensure that that customer has a complete picture.

How much does personalization play into customer success? You have to know the customer.

It's everything. The problematic aspect that many companies run into is it's tough to automate customer success. It's easy to automate customer experience because it's a journey. We can map out that journey to make sure that it's followed consistently. But, success is pulled out of that journey through personalization because, again, going back to the pre-sale flow of things, we need to understand your expectations and needs. That will be unique to every single company that you talk to you. You may sell data, for example, like Owler. Our customers want data, but how will you use that data? Is it going to plug into your sales platform? Is it going to plug into your marketing platform? Is it going to plug into a territory mapping? That data can be used in so many different ways. 

We need to listen to our prospects and customers and figure out; that you have a goal. You had a pain point or problem, and you need to solve it. So we worked with you to try and figure out how our solution could fit into that keyhole. The more significant struggle is that objective will change.

I tell many people this consistently; we sold you a solution last year, and we solved all of those problems. We live in a world where today you will have new issues. You may be looking at the solution today and have forgotten we solved ten issues for you. But because those ten problems are solved, we now have ten new issues. You're looking at our product thinking, well, it doesn't solve those problems. So why should we keep it? It's easy to forget. 

We did all this work to make sure you are successful. You know their expectations are shifting if you're listening and proactively engaging with customers. Let's be ready to listen to those new expectations and align that with our product again so that they walk away with a successful experience. 

I think personalization is everything because if you're not doing that, you will get a significant amount of churn. After all, customers will feel like their expectations aren't being met, even though they've changed from the original expectations they had a year ago. 

Customer success plays a lot into product development because you have your finger on the pulse of the people using the product. Have you been able to inform product development?

Without a doubt. I think it's critical. I've never once met somebody that doesn't think building a product that customers are asking for isn't the right thing to do. The challenge is collecting that feedback and doing it so that you can analyze it both qualitatively and quantitatively and put that into either trial and error or testing. 

Because we're listening and trying to personalize our experience for each of them, it's challenging to have one solution to fix everybody's problems. Everybody has unique features and unique things they want. The best way to do it is to collect every suggestion, break down the silo, and align the customer success and customer feedback with your product and sales teams. I can go back to the sales team and say, ‘Hey, guys, the expectations you're setting aren't the right ones because we're getting this feedback, and it's not aligning with how you sold it’. So we can help coach them to sell better and sell more effectively based on the actual expectations of the product. 

We can work with the customers and take their feedback directly to our product team and say, ‘Hey, we are getting a significant amount of feedback from our customers around this dataset or around this critical feature that everybody wants. Then our goal is to work with the product team to understand, okay, what's the ROI impact of that? If it's another nice to have and it's not something critical to the product, our product team can't take time away from what they're doing to do that. 

In terms of Owler, the difficult part for us is that we have millions of free users who use our product every day or every month. We have thousands of paying customers and hundreds of teams, and we also have a unique API group of enterprise customers. Each of them has different needs because it's a personalized experience for all of them. So our goal is to collect as much feedback as we can, catalog it, categorize it, and then send it to our product team and say, ‘hey guys, here's the top priority from a customer success side. Here's the top priority from a sales side which can increase their ability to sell’. The critical part is to link all of that back to the customers to say; we heard your feedback. Being able to share that it's going to increase your retention, and will increase your buy-in from customers and customer adoption. It's also going to just be successful for your relationship because they now hear that not only did I listen, but I took action on it. I delivered that to my product team, and we're going to deliver it to you in the product.

I've jokingly said this for years, but I still think it's a very true statement: My job in renewals and customer success is to resell the same product to a company that doesn't like it for more money. It's a complicated thing to achieve. 

My goal is to make sure you're successful. If you're not, we need to solve that, and if we can't solve it, no problem, understand, let's part ways. I'm sorry that happened. 

The reality is, most of the time, if you're willing to sit and listen, your customers will trust you, and they will be willing to give you a chance to try to make things right.