Customer Success and Customer Experience: How to Work Together?

Customer success and customer experience are 2 vital parts of every company. They both play an important role in achieving customer satisfaction. However, not every merchant can fully understand the definitions of these 2 terms.

Customer success and customer experience are not the same. There are still some differences between the objectives, the metrics, and the work of each team.

In this article, we will help you fully understand the definition and the differences between customer success and customer experience. Besides, we will show you how customer success and customer experience can benefit your customer journey. Let’s dive in immediately! 

What is customer success?

Customer success is the act of helping your customers get the best value from the products they bought. It helps your business to generate more revenue, increase customer advocacy and reduce the customer churn rate. Also, customer success (Customer success) powers you to build a long-term relationship with your customer and win their loyalty.

Customer success is affected by many factors such as onboarding and training, customer fit, product usage, and return on investment. Customer success teams use data and feedback given back by customers to suggest further product developments.                                                                                                                                                                                    

What is customer experience?

The customer experience (Customer experience) is the process of caring for customers from their first interaction with the brand, even before they know they’ve entered your customer journey. Customer experience teams focus on improving every customer experience on their journey to improve their relationships with the brand.

The most important objective of the Customer Experience team is to win customer satisfaction at every touchpoint that they interact with the brand. Besides, the customer experience team needs to have a deep understanding of customer feelings and thinking in order to boost or restore customer relationships.

What is the difference between customer success and customer experience?

Customer success and customer experience teams are important to your business. Both teams aim to win customer satisfaction and customer retention. However, there are still some differences between them that are worth pointing out.

Vision

• Customer experience starts at the first time a customer interacts with a brand’s touchpoint and keeps running till the end of the customer lifecycle.

• Customer success is only one part of the customer experience. The Customer Success team works with customers after the purchasing phase to help them get the most value out of the products or services.

Metrics

Each team uses different metrics to measure:

• The Customer Experience team uses customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer acquisition rate, and conversion rate.

• The Customer Success team uses Customer lifetime value (CLV), Customer retention rate (CRR), customer churn rate, customer effort score, and repeat purchase rate.

Industries

You can find a Customer Experience team in every business across all industries.

However, Customer success teams are more likely to work in Business-to-Business or SaaS companies. Since these companies use a subscription-based model, their growth relies on repeat customers and purchases. The Customer Success team focuses on helping the customer to gain as much value as possible so that the client will keep using their service

How do customer success and customer experience work together?

Although Customer success and Customer experience teams play different roles, they still need to be aligned to work together. The customers are at the heart of this alignment, and each team shares the same aim to help the company understand customers better.

When Customer Success and Customer Experience are aligned, they can deliver more benefits for both customers and internal operations. For example, when there is a SaaS product update. The Customer Experience team works to make sure the new features of the update are intuitive, logical, and easy for customers to use. Soon after they finish their work, the Customer experience team needs to inform the user guide of the new update to the Customer success team. Then, the Customer Success team’s job is to make customers understand and get used to new features so that they can apply them to their work faster. 

For better alignment between 2 teams, you need to use customer support software. That’s where NestDesk can help you. NestDesk has many features to improve the work rate of your teams such as internal notes, automation rules, conversation tags, etc. With internal notes, your teams can leave private messages to inform others about customer desires and insight to make the internal operation perform better. Automation rules help you create frequently asked questions to quickly answer customers’ simple questions to save more working time. You can use conversation tags to segment customers and identify them by activities, hobbies, etc. 

How do customer success and customer experience benefit the customer journey?

Onboarding

This is the process of getting a new customer installed and start using your products. The faster your customers can make value from your product, the sooner you start generating sales and gaining customer trust.

• Customer experience: Provide related information to create how-to-use documents and FAQs. Share customer insight with the customer success team. By sharing this, the Customer Success team can gain a deeper understanding to solve customers’ problems. 
• Custom success: Offer customers direct contact to personalize the onboarding process. They maintain customer relationships with brands and make sure customers understand the key benefit of the products. Provide a clear avenue for complaints and feedback; personalize all messaging around problem acknowledgment and time to solution; remain calm and keep customer conversation flowing.

Adoption

Customers spend most of their time at this stage. This is where your customers begin to generate sales, return on investment and achieve their business goals.

• Customer experience: Make sure that the products fit their workflow. Provide customers with more additional information such as blogs, webinars, etc. to share valuable content related to their business.
• Customer success:  Follow up with customers to find their behaviors to measure the value customers received from your products, and forecast their future needs and products and services. 

Escalation

Customers always have problems and issues on their journey. Thus, the objective of Customer Experience and Customer Success teams is to identify their problems and support them to solve them. By doing that, the Customer Experience and Customer Success team will help improve customer retention rates and scale customer business.

• Customer experience: Provide customers with room to leave their complaints and feedback. Keep a positive attitude toward customer messages.
• Customer Success: Attempt to help customers solve problems by using account segment data. Share details of problems to help customers avoid or solve them themselves. Gather customer reviews and feedback for further product and service development.

Renewal

This stage happens when customers want to rebuy or resubscribe your product. Customers tend to do this at the end of their journey. Their decision to renew relies on the value they’ve gained, and their satisfaction with the products.

• Customer experience: Sending renewal messages with reference to customer goals. Speaking about the future growth opportunities that customers can have by using your products. Allowing customers to have a clear avenue to provide feedback.
• Customer Success: This team focused on achieving higher renewal rates and the metrics used to measure it. They need to forecast the cost of churn until the end of the quarter and the cost of churn per quarter of the year before.

Great customer success and customer experience help your business grow

Customer success and customer experience are the most important teams of your company. Understanding their job and aligning them together means your business is growing. By using NestDesk, we will help you to provide great customer success and customer experience. 

With many great features such as integrating all channels, private notes, automation rules, and easy-to-access customer information, you can be able to support customers whatever and whenever they need. Moreover, you can improve your internal operation to help businesses grow faster.