Customer Support vs. Customer Experience vs. Customer Success

Recurrence is the driving force of the subscription business. Recurrence of needs. Recurrence of the usage. Recurrence of demand. Recurrence of supply. Recurrence of services. Recurrence in charging customers for services. Recurrence in making payments. And, recurrence in the streaming of revenue.

This recurrence has given the customer higher status in a subscription business than the traditional ways of considering the standing of a customer.

To keep a subscription business moving steadily on the path of success, it is inevitable to learn all about your customer. The more businesses focus on the engagement of the customer and facilitate them to express their needs and requirements, the better they can serve them.

The subscription studies suggest that customers who feel engaged and heard propel more value in a business. They become a thriving part of the subscription ecosystem. Over time, they do not only serve as a substantial source of recurring revenue, but they also tend to attract more business springs for the product or services with their loyalty and advocacy.

Taking the customers through the path that leads them to the destination of advocacy is customer success.

Also Read: What is Customer Success and why do You Need it for Your Subscription Business Model to Succeed?

Customer Success—The Way to Grow the SaaS and Subscription Business with Consistent Streaming of Recurring Revenue

Customer success, also known as account management, is enabling the customers to achieve beyond their desired outcomes through a combination of sales, marketing, support, dedicated services, and personalized solutions.

Offering a product or services is not enough. Subscription businesses cannot survive without a value-added services experience through interactive communications and incentives for customers.

Mastering customer success requires robust strategies, efficient resources, and innovative ideas to maintain sales and profits with consistent customer engagement. Customer success is directly proportional to the recurring usage of the product and services.

This article outlines what customer success management is, how it is different from customer support or customer experience, and how the art of customer success management aims the bigger goals such as customer retention, customer loyalty, satisfied services, interactive engagements, problem-solving approach, customer-centric product development driven by subscription market research align with the revenue streaming strategies, etc. for the inexorable business growth.

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Customer Support vs. Customer Experience vs. Customer Success

With the growth of the subscription economy, different new ideas of business management have entered into the stream of business and customer management. Some older concepts have evolved and are fostering the latest business realities.

Among multiple notions and emphasis on customer-focused activities, a lot of confusion has sprung up. Let settle it down to the growth of the spiral. Let’s see what actually customer success is and how it is different from the other customer-centric aspects of subscription business like customer support and customer experience.

Customer support is a pre-or post-sales service related to the usage of the product, understanding, errors, advice, suggestions, personalized solutions, etc. In the bigger frame of customer success, customer support plays a vital role to keep customers satisfied, engaged, and informed.

On the other hand, customer experience is the optimization and alignment of the product and services with all the business processes to support customers so that they make the most of your product and services to achieve their goals or outcomes.

However, customer success is the way that helps you lead throughout the process of customer support and a better and enhanced customer experience. Following the path of customer, success is customer success management, also called account management.

Also Read: 7 Secret Ingredients to Take Over the Market and Chase Stellar SaaS Customer Experience the Right Way

What is Customer Success Management?

Customer success management can be defined as the path that moves the company forward to the destination where customer can get business solutions beyond their expectations, and help the company to get their high-level growth and revenue goals.

Customer success management is now an emerging role in business management with the gap widening in different business processes like customer support, customer management, and customer experience development, etc. It becomes a need bigger than answering the calls, react to the concern or complaint of the customer, etc. instead it is a more proactive role that prevents issues in the first place.

Customer service tends to be reactive, answering phone calls or queries from customers experiencing trouble. Customer success management is proactive and directed to prevent issues in the first place.

In SaaS, IT, and other subscription-based services, customer success management has become more crucial than ever. The dedicated sources for customer success management are focused on purposes like investigating, analyzing, and mitigating the concerns like why the customer is not showing interest in continuing the service or why they are not using the product, how the better features in the product or service can serve the customer in more efficient ways, how a certain feature can amplify the success of the goals of customers, and what other personalized solutions can be offered to a customer to keep them connected with the product and forward the name and fame and gain referrals through customers.

Customer Success Management is Inevitable for Businesses with Recurring Billing Models

Customer success management can be a potential strategy to reduce the churn rate, maximize retention, and increase recurring revenue streaming. Following are a few of the concerns of the subscription or recurring billing businesses to invest the resources, wisely, in customer success management, and earn the benefits, effectively.

To Reduce Churn
To Proliferate Product Usage
To Increase Subscription Renewals
To Surge Upsells and Cross-sells
To Escalate the ARR—Annual Recurring Revenue
To Increase ARPU—Average Revenue Per User

Also Read: The Art of Improving Customer Loyalty with Upselling—Tips and Tricks to Boost Your Recurring Revenue Streaming

Diving Deep Into the Customer Success Management Science

The science of customer success management is based on the science of customer retention and loyalty. The business development cycle for the subscription enters into another loop of the cycle that begins after we on-board the customers. This is what customer success management do in every phase of customer maturity:

Acquisition

It is true that customer success management is the retention-management process. However, the role of customer success management begins with customer acquisition. The customer success management experience helps the customer acquisition teams to pursue the targets that have more affinity for retention. In this way, it also highlights the paths for marketing and sales.

Adoption

Adoption is the first literal phase of customer success management and it is critical for customer success.

The customer is on-board, now. What’s next?

Get it right, now it is the duty of the customer success managers or account managers to ensure the proper delivery of the services or assisting the customer to grasp the understanding of the product to find the benefits and make their process smooth. This includes all—implementation, user-onboarding, and training.

Get it right, your customer will be pleased to connect to you for a longer period. Get it wrong, they can cut the cords any time and you will lose your potential source of recurring revenue.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the continuity of adoption. Once the implementation, on-boarding, and training are done, it is time to become proactive to monitor and manage their usage and engagement. Monitoring includes helping customers implementing the solutions across their organization, tracking what are they doing with it and how, engage with them to learn about the bottlenecks like errors or problems with the product, misalignment of the process and the product, and helping them to make the most of the product beyond their desired results.

Retention

The monitoring helps in retaining customers. It helps the business to identify the logjams in the product, the inefficiency of a feature or a process, customer problems and the revenue opportunities them, the margin of personalized solutions, and more.

Addressing to all these concerns directly proportional to the growth of the customer base and the bottomline. Mitigating the problems before they popups, removing the frictions from the process times ahead, and formulating the personalized solutions at first fuels customer retention.

The retention phase success put an end to the customer churn.

Expansion

Customer retention leads the businesses to an avenue where they can expand across the directions. Expand their customer base, product, services, partners, market, revenue, business size, teams, their role, and all. It is the first stage of a company’s growth and a key stage for the subscription analytics monitoring and tracking to influence the right customers in the right directions.

It is a phase where customers can be persuaded for subscription renewals, upsells, cross-sells, etc.

Loyalty

Customers retain and opt to upgrade or renew the plan, only when they are satisfied and aligned with the product and services. Providing them with the same attention, value-added services, personalized solutions, incentives, etc. keep them loyal to the business. Customer success management ensures the company does not take the customer for granted and never lose sight of the requirements and needs of a dedicated and loyal customer so they would be encouraged for advocacy or referral.

Advocacy

The process of buying or purchasing is hugely influenced by the experience. People tend to buy for a product that has a more positive ranking, reviews, testimonials, referrals, etc. and more.

This is the ultimate aim of the customer success management to mature a customer as loyal and advocate that it becomes the source of referral that play role in attracting new customers and growing the revenue. Setting up the referral programs also boost sales, renewals, upsells, and cross-sells, strongly.

Also Read: Businesses Tightening the Reins on Post-COVID Measures for Customer Retention

Customer Success is a Road to Company Success—Strengthen the Customer Success Journey with SubscriptionFlow

Customer success is all about pleasing the customers and continue doing it. This road has no ends but the benefits are budding across the way. The science is simple, you displease the customer, the opportunity is lost.

An unsatisfied customer breaks the chain, whereas the satisfied customer leads the journey with the company success. It all can be started with insights that can help you understand your customers and their needs, demands, and potential.

Let SubscriptionFlow help you monitor and better manage all your concerns with intuitive subscription management services. From customer acquisition to customer retention and customer monitoring to customer advocacy, leverage the subscription analytics to engage more customer with data-driven sales, marketing, support, product development, implementation, on-boarding, training, monitoring, and management strategies for customer success.