Customer Experience vs Customer Success
Customer Success
This helps customers get the most out of your product. Customer success is a long-term strategy that focuses on enhancing deeper relationships with customers by helping them achieve their desired goals for using a platform or application. Aligning your goals with those of your customers will help your customers gain greater value and mutual growth.
That can cover a lot of different tactics and activities. The main goal of your product is to solve a problem. Customer success is all about helping customers to use your product with ease and solve that problem for themselves or their business.
Customer success is proactive. It is mainly focused on continuously delivering new ways for the customer to derive value from the product.
Bonus Tip: What is Customer Success? What is the role of Customer Success?
Customer Experience
Customer experience is the process of creating a positive association of your brand with the customers.
It is often defined by how your customer stakeholders are feeling or thinking after an interaction with a vendor. Every customer interaction, whether it’s a conversation with marketing about a case study or a negotiation with a customer success manager, has a direct influence on customer experience.
The ultimate goal is to make sure that customers are satisfied every time they interact with your company. Not just right after-sales, but at every brand touchpoint post-sales.
Customer experience is interactive. It is mainly focuses on delivering a comfortable and easily accessible product that smoothly integrates into a customer’s daily workflows.
This difference – customer experience vs customer success- can be demonstrated by examining each phase of the customer journey.
Customer Focus Across the Customer Journey
When you put the two groups together, you have a collection of skills, expertise, and knowledge. This helps your company become customer-centric. Each stage in the customer’s journey represents how your customers are understanding and using your product.
Onboarding
Customer Onboarding’ is an umbrella term used to describe the entire process that customers go through when they start their journey of using your service or product. The onboarding experience of the customer will define the ongoing and future relationship you have with your customer
Customer Success – Aims at acquiring first value from your product. Anticipate and remove potential bottlenecks; maintain a strong connection between onboarding materials and business goals; ensure exposure to key product features.
Customer Experience – Focus on establishing a single and clear communication; ensure customers understand and progress through onboarding materials; develop easy-to-operate onboarding interfaces.
Bonus Tip: Designing a Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS
Adoption
Adoption is the phase where customers get to know your product, integrate it into their workflow, and learn ways to use it that maximize their benefit. Customers only adopt a product if it helps them achieve their goals.
Customer Success – Monitor your Customer behavior to accurately measure product use and benefit. Also, create and acknowledge customer goals and milestones.
Customer Experience – Aims to ensure access is easy and the customers actually use your product in their daily workflows. Provide the customer with materials that help them drive success from your product, which are educational and promotional.
Escalation
Customers will have problems while using your service. So, the Customer Success Team should support them to remove obstacles and escalate in their journey.
Customer Success – Identify problems that your customers are facing; share information across the enterprise to avoid/solve problems; rollout solutions across customer segments; take customer feedback and reassess practices.
Customer Experience – Provide a clear space for complaints and feedback; personalize all messaging around problem acknowledgment and time to solution. Keep customer conversation flowing.
Renewal
SaaS renewal rate refers to the percentage of customers who choose to renew their subscription at the end of each subscription period. Playbooks help explain the process and the steps to renewal well, which is why they are vital to orchestrating the customer lifecycle.
Customer Success – To achieve high renewal rates, focus on certain goals. Monitor your renewals closely from time to time. The same goes for the cost of renewals at risk and renewal customers by status (for example, renewed, no risk, and risk), and try to achieve a 90% renewal opportunity in good health.
Customer Experience – For better customer experience, personalize renewal messaging with reference to customer goals and achievements and future growth opportunities. Also, it is important to allow the customer to have a clear avenue to provide feedback.
Read, Renewal Playbook- What magic can it do?
How can Customer Experience and Customer Success Work Together in SaaS?
Customer Success and Customer Experience will merge in an attempt to “[define] and [deepen] customer outcomes.
Sue Duris shares an opinion on M4 Communications’ blog.
Although there are differences in customer success vs customer experience, the two are inevitably connected. The customer is at the heart of both disciplines—and each shares the objective of helping organizations understand customers better.
Take customer onboarding, for instance. CX initiatives that make onboarding intuitive and logical, including messaging that recognizes personalized goals and milestones. But this could be part of a larger CS effort to familiarize users with certain features in the platform so they can integrate them into their daily workflow faster. The sooner they begin using the product, the sooner they will see its value.
At the end, when Customer Experience and Customer Success efforts are combined, they deliver stronger results.
Takeaway
It’s easy to get confused by the difference between customer success and customer experience. If you’re in a large company, the two groups might even step on each others’ toes. Customer Success and Customer Experience both aim at delivering the best outcomes for the customer. And that’s what matters.
