Customer Success vs. Customer Experience: The Key Differences

Today’s business owners are facing a hard reality: Having a great product or service isn’t enough on its own to secure customer loyalty and retention.

Research shows that 80% of consumers switched brands because of a poor customer experience (CX), with 43% of respondents saying they were at least somewhat likely to switch brands following a single negative support interaction.

As a result, both customer experience and customer success programs can be essential to improving the user experience, increasing retention, and decreasing customer churn rates. Let’s discuss the key differences between customer success (CS) and customer experience programs, why you need both, and how to implement them successfully.

Customer Success vs. Customer Experience

Customer success and customer experience initiatives both seek to deliver a stronger user experience and promote long-term relationships with a company’s customer base. Let’s look at the key components of each.

What is customer success?

Customer success teams take a proactive approach that’s designed to help customers achieve their desired outcomes with your products or services. This may involve account management, onboarding, training, and ongoing support. CS considers your customers’ needs before a potential issue arises.

If your company sells complex SaaS software with many customizable features, for example, that may be overwhelming to the end user. Providing dedicated onboarding assistance to help team leaders customize available features, workflows, and access management can help them hit the ground running, speed up implementation, and get more value out of the product sooner.

Customer success programs ensure long-term value and growth for both the company and the customer, focusing on a win-win relationship. Your success is measured by the client’s success.

Source: Superoffice

What is customer experience?

Customer experience management (CXM) encompasses the whole experience that clients have with your brand, starting with their first interaction and going all the way through to post-purchase support. It includes every touchpoint through the customer journey, including online and in-store customer support interactions.

The customer experience is the total emotional connection your customers feel with your brand. These programs seek to create meaningful, memorable, and overwhelmingly positive experiences that leave a great lasting impression.

CX initiatives may include the following:

• Offering live chat support with AI chatbots to provide round-the-clock assistance for basic inquiries.
• Ensuring seamless checkout processes on mobile and desktop sites.
• Sending personalized campaigns with product suggestions, order updates, and thank you emails.

The Key Differences Between Customer Success and Customer Experience

While customer success teams and customer experience teams both seek to promote long-term relationships to improve client retention, they leverage different tools, strategies, and priorities to accomplish that end goal.

Focus

CS programs ensure that your customer base achieves specific business goals and value realization through the use of your product or service. The priority is to give the customer what they need to see the full value of what you offer. Most initiatives focus on post-purchase touchpoints and customer needs.

CX programs are concerned with the overall journey, considering the emotional engagement that customers have with your brand. They focus on satisfaction, ease, and enjoyment. CX includes everything from ensuring that your customers have a streamlined checkout experience to knowing they’ll receive great support if they call in about an order that went missing.

Proactive vs. reactive

CS programs are highly proactive. The goal is to work closely with customers to guide them to success and avoid potential issues before they arise. If you anticipate that customers will struggle to care for a product properly, for example, you might proactively deliver a care guide with the product.

CX programs can be both proactive and reactive. Proactive efforts include enhancing touchpoints based on current CXM best practices or existing customer feedback. Reactive efforts focus on resolving pain points during the journey. If customers are repeatedly complaining about slow follow-up times, for example, that’s something the CXM team would address.

Impact on revenue

CS programs are directly tied to customer retention, upselling, and long-term revenue and business growth. Account management and ongoing customer satisfaction are key components used to drive increased revenue.

CX programs, meanwhile, impact revenue by improving brand perception, customer satisfaction, and word-of-mouth referrals. The goal is to influence both acquisition and retention through all stages of the customer journey.

Relationship vs. touchpoint

CS programs focus on building stronger customer relationships, typically through an account manager who is responsible for helping customers realize the full value of the product or service.

CX programs manage touchpoints across the entire customer journey and through multiple departments, including marketing, sales, and support. The goal is to create a consistent and positive experience throughout.

Why Customer Success Matters

Customer success can be essential to creating stronger customer relationships and retaining clients long term, which offers the following benefits.

Helps maximize customer lifetime value

By ensuring customers meet their goals — and understand how to get the most out of the product or service — CS teams improve retention rates and increase the likelihood of upselling and cross-selling. As your customers retain longer and spend more, the customer lifetime value (CLTV) increases.

Proactively prevents problems

CS teams work to prevent customer issues before they happen, creating a positive experience free from potential obstacles — or at least reducing the number of significant obstacles in the customer’s path. This can help reduce churn and improve the overall health of the customer relationship.

Drives measurable outcomes for B2B companies

Many B2B and SaaS companies offer complex services, and customer success is critical when that’s the case. Customer success strategies will guide users through the onboarding and value realization process with customized setups, team training, and educational tutorials to ensure that customers fully utilize the product’s capabilities.

Why Customer Experience Matters

Customer experience, like customer success, can improve long-term retention and even promote new customer acquisition. Let’s look at the key benefits CXM can offer.

Improves brand loyalty and perception

Positive user experiences can lead to higher customer satisfaction and stronger brand loyalty. When you can effectively create great customer experiences, people are more likely to retain, leave positive reviews, and even spend more in the long term.

Touches every aspect of the businesses

CXM spans multiple departments, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer support, with CX teams bridging the gap between them. By facilitating cross-department collaboration, you can ensure consistency at every customer touchpoint. It provides a holistic view of how customers interact with your brand.

Drives word-of-mouth referrals and new business

A strong CX strategy leads to higher customer advocacy, increasing the chances of referrals and positive reviews, which drives new customer acquisition. Referred customers are more likely to retain and have higher LTVs than other customers, making them particularly valuable.

Do You Need Customer Success, Customer Experience, or Both?

If you’re trying to choose between customer success and customer experience, how do you know which you need? Let’s consider when you may benefit from one over the other — and when you may really need both.

When to prioritize customer success

B2B and SaaS businesses — or those offering more complex products and services that come with a steep learning curve — may need CS programs to ensure that customers are achieving their desired outcomes.

Similarly, businesses focused on retention, upselling, and long-term account management will benefit greatly from a CS team.

Finally, businesses working with large contracts — which may include high dollar value and large teams — should consider CS programs to help clients adopt and implement the new product or service to get consistent results.

When to prioritize customer experience

If your business relies heavily on brand perception, word-of-mouth marketing, or individual customer satisfaction, then CXM should be a priority.

A solid CX strategy is vital for companies that want to optimize every customer touchpoint, promote positive self-service experiences, and foster positive emotional connections. Creating streamlined, reliable, and excellent customer experiences is a great goal to have and can benefit both large and small businesses.

When businesses should consider both

Many businesses may benefit from both CS and CXM, especially considering they’re both complementary. A great experience supports the success of the customer, and likewise, ensuring customer success deepens their connection with your brand.

When implementing both CX and CS programs, make sure that customer success managers (CSMs) and directors of CX collaborate. This will ensure that clients achieve their goals and also benefit from a frictionless journey throughout their customer lifecycle.

How to Roll Out a Customer Success Operation

When you’re ready to build a customer success process, these are the steps that you need to follow.

Define customer goals and metrics

Start by defining what success means for your customers. This includes asking yourself:

• What are your customers’ key goals?
• How can your product or service help them achieve these goals?
• What key metrics would customers be tracking?
• What potential obstacles could prevent them from achieving their goals?

Once you understand what success means for your customers, you can create your own goals for the customer experience, with trackable key performance indicators. These key metrics may include:

• Time to value (TTV)
• Contract renewal rates
• Customer health scores

Build a dedicated CS team

A dedicated CS team can help you develop and implement new customer success strategies to create the end result you want.

Hire customer success managers who will act as customer advocates and guides, ensuring that they have the resources and support they need to succeed. By having a dedicated team to manage customer-centric strategies, these strategies are more likely to be implemented fully and enthusiastically.

Develop a proactive engagement strategy

Create a strategy to engage customers proactively. This may include regular check-ins from account managers, onboarding support with dedicated CS managers, and ongoing training for interested customers when you release new features, make platform updates, or help clients with a new use case.

Strong onboarding support may include:

• Kickoff call and introduction with the client’s CSM or general account manager
• Tech review of the customer’s current tech stack
• Customized walkthrough of the new product, potentially including product set-up with features, workflow recommendations, and integrations

Leverage technology for customer success

Use a CRM or customer experience platform like Nextiva to track customer activity, flag potential issues, and identify growth opportunities. By using real-time data, you can spot potential obstacles or customer needs before they start driving up your churn rate.

4 Steps to Rolling Out a Customer Experience Operation

CXM programs can be complex since they involve all touchpoints throughout the full customer journey. Fortunately, having the right tools and strategies can help you get results. Let’s discuss how to implement CX initiatives.

Map the customer journey

Map out every touchpoint that customers can have with your brand throughout the full digital sales funnel. This includes initial awareness through a Facebook Ad or Google search, all the way through to post-purchase support when they update an address or manage a subscription.

By mapping out your customer journey and identifying all critical pain points, you can prioritize high-impact changes that can quickly improve CX across the board. You might find some inspiration in this list of customer service tips.

Gather and analyze feedback

Customer feedback will be vital to your initial CX strategies and ongoing CXM programs.

Use surveys, reviews, and social media monitoring to gather feedback on how customers experience your brand and where there may be friction points. Use this information to shape everything from your customers’ website experience to your customer service strategy.

Create cross-departmental collaboration

CXM isn’t owned by one department; even organizations with dedicated CX teams require cross-department cooperation.

Make sure that your sales, marketing, support, and product teams are working together to create a consistent and positive customer experience.

If CX initiatives are new to your brand and your teams work independently of each other, you may face some initial resistance. However, a company culture shift can encourage collaboration and help each department reach its own goals more efficiently.

Measure CX impact with the right metrics

While tracking the impact of your CX efforts is a critical part of any customer experience program, the reality is that most businesses struggle to do so accurately.

In Nextiva’s State of Customer Experience report, we found that fewer than 2 in 5 respondents were “very confident” their company could measure ROI on CX initiatives, and 24% said their company doesn’t track key metrics like first contact resolution rates. In many cases, this may be due to a lack of knowledge or tools that can help automate this.

The right CX platform should have advanced analytics to help you identify potential areas of improvement and track progress from program initiatives. These key metrics may include:

• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
• Customer effort score (CES)

You can use CX platforms like Nextiva to gain real-time insights into customer interaction and touchpoints across multiple channels. This can help you more effectively track and measure the customer experience.

CS vs. CX: Which Should You Focus On?

Both CS and CX can have an enormous impact on your customer relationships and retention rates. Which you should focus on depends entirely on your business, your customers, and your most significant customer needs.

Customer success is essential for long-term customer retention, growth, and proactive problem-solving, especially in B2B and SaaS industries.

Customer experience management, meanwhile, focuses on creating memorable and meaningful experiences across all touchpoints. This is critical for brand perception and customer loyalty in B2C and B2B contexts.

Most businesses benefit from implementing both. CS programs ensure that customers achieve their goals, while CX strategies ensure they enjoy the (ideally frictionless) journey.

Either way, having the right tools in place can help you implement and track new strategies to improve your customers’ experiences.

Nextiva provides the customer journey tools you need to help your team understand its customers on a deeper level and offer better, more proactive service.

Discover potential customer pain points in real time so you can address them quickly. You can also implement new customer service strategies across multiple digital channels and track their impact to determine whether you’re on the right path.

Ready to get started? Learn more about Nextiva’s unified CX platform today.